Unofficial Conference Blog | Society of Environmental Journalists

Birds in Lubbock

Those birding SEJ members who aren't able to include the Muleshoe tour in their schedules, here's the bird list, http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/birds/chekbird/r2/muleshoe.htm. Eat your hearts out.

I've arranged to meet with Jon McRoberts, a Texas Tech researcher who is studying Ocellated turkeys of the Yucatan. I wrote about his work a couple of years ago and I'm delighted to have the chance to visit with him in person. Contact me if you would like to join us Thursday evening at 7.

The Case of the Climate-Challenged Hare

A report from the Thursday Wildlife Tour exploiting some nascent SEJ-inspired video skills ... (with apologies to Newsweek)

Peter Fairley
Independent Author, Journalist & Editor
First Vice President, Society of Environmental Journalists
+1 250 514 6248 / peter@fairley.ca / http://CarbonNation.info

Video: Clark Fork River Superfund Site

 

This video was filmed during Society of Environmental Journalists Conference tour of the Clark Fork River Superfund Site, on Oct.14, 2010, as well as during the walk with Prof. Erick Greene on Oct. 17.

I edited the film on iMovie during layovers on my way home to Asheville, North Carolina.

A special thanks to everyone involved with the conference, especially the video workshops. I also have my first attempt at a photo blog and will soon have an essay up from the tour on my new blog.

Tour: Preserving Wildlife in a Changing World

The morning sun warmed journalists and environmentalists as they set off at 8:30 am on Thursday to learn about "Preserving Wildlife in a Changing World." 

The group spent the day exploring the homes of the snowshoe hare, lynx, elk, wolf, and dozens of other species living on the edges of Montana's urban areas.

At the first stop, they visited a new housing development near Missoula, with views across urban elk habitat.

On Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribal land, game cameras monitoring wildlife corridors -- underpasses and overpasses -- caught footage of curious journalists instead.

As the tour rolled to the Seeley Lake area, experts discussed wolf management by way of hunting and non-lethal practices.

Upon arrival the group met a caged wild hare, whose ears and feet were beginning their seasonal change from earthen brown to snowy white. The animal was one of many being tracked by University of Montana researchers.

The group left the Flathead National Forest en route to the Rattlesnake Valley, ending the day's tour with a demonstration by Pepin, a canine employed by Working Dogs for Conservation. This obsessive shepherd is trained to memorize the scent of species scat, in order to locate that animal’s feces in the field to  determine population size.

Video: Preserving Wildlife in a Changing World

Conservation biologist Megan Parker trains dogs to find endangered and invasive species by sniffing out scat (bears, snow leopard) or even the creatures themselves (snails, noxious weeds). It's an inspired twist on the age-old practice of using the extraordinary canine sense of smell to find game, criminals, bombs, even cancer.

Parker gave us a demo with her Belgian shepherd Pepin in a field outside of Missoula, where she'd planted black bear scat.

 

I produced this video as part of the conference's great video training workshop: a day in the classroom at UMT on Wednesday, shooting video on the Thursday tours, and then back at the computer for a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon to make something out of what we'd shot.  

I shot this on a Flip Mino and (when the batteries ran out) a Canon SD1400 IS point-&-shoot, and produced it using Final Cut Pro, and later added the titles with iMovie.  Other than a single-edit iMovie video of my daughter, this is my first video!  

Thanks to the great instructors, Denise Dowling, Jeremy Lurgio, Anne Medley and Kagan Yochim of the UMT School of Journalism, SEJ stalwart Amy Gahran, Amol Pavangadkar of Michigan State's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, Michael Scott of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and SEJ member Sara Shipley Hiles, who went from student at last year's not-so-successful video workshop to instructor at this year's workshop.

Tour: Managing Indian Country

Members of the "Managing Indian Country" tour saw a herd of American bison at the Bison National Wildlife Refuge. The herd was just outside the tour bus but we were kept inside for safety reasons. There were young bison close to their mothers and big bulls wandering in their midst.

One of the most interesting sights was a lone bull bison sitting in the fog in a valley by himself. A refuge official said it's not uncommon for an old bull bison to decide he just wants to live alone from the herd. The refuge rangers on their horses can try to scare the bison into rejoin the herd but if he doesn't want to, there isn't much they can do about it.

 

 

 

Photo: Copyright © Bruce Ritchie

 

Video: Flathead Lake - The Pristine and the Alien

A grateful 20-20-20 fellowship recipient, I arrived early in Missoula to take the Wednesday video workshop. On Thursday, I headed out to Flathead Lake with my Nikon D90 (but, sorry, no tripod), and on Saturday afternoon, turned the footage into this, my very first video.

 

 

Tour: Clark Fork River Superfund Site

Stretching from the infamous Berkeley Pit at Butte to the former Milltown Dam site outside Missoula, the Clark Fork Superfund area is one of the largest in the country. An amalgamation of four different superfund sites, Butte/Silver Bow Creek, Montana Pole, the Anaconda Smelter, and the Milltown Reservoir, it runs along 140 contiguous miles of the Clark Fork River.

Leaving before sunrise, Thursday's Superfund Tour visited each of the major superfund sites along the river before ending back at Missoula later in the day. Each site offered a unique glimpse of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in action, working to remedy and restore lands degraded through the callous mineral extraction of copper kings.

 

 

Image: Anaconda Company smelter site. Credit: U.S. EPA

The Haiku Report from Glacier National Park

 

boost in wildfires, temps,
glacier melt; the West’s up a
creek, paddlelessly!

invasive species
so fruitful — no hills left for
natives to flee to

land snatched from tribes now
so spoiled by climate change no
one would want it back

coming water wars
will pit the haves against
the thirsty have-nots

three hours to Glacier
and three hours back — does this bus
make my butt look sore?

listen close and you
can hear inexorable
drip of glacier melt

 

Tour: Kootenai Creek Canyon's Trout Habitat

Roughly a dozen SEJ conference attendees ventured into the Montana wilderness braving the early morning chill, and a trail that could potentially lead them 19 miles into the Bitterroot Mountains.  They were at Kootenai Creek: a tour added at the last minute, thanks to high interest in hikes along trout habitat.

As I was the only volunteer who was familiar with the area, I was asked to lead the group and be van-driver to the Stevensville trail Thursday morning.

Although the group opted to hike only about two and a half miles in, the group reached the edge of a scorched landscape, where trees were reduced to ash and matchsticks along Kootenai Creek, which burned in a 4500-acre fire along the canyon last fall.

 They encountered snakes and wooly-bear caterpillars along the trail and saw trout swimming in pools along the river, camouflaged by multicolored rocks along the streambed.

 The two-hour hike gave the visiting journalists and scientists a slice of recreational wilderness in Montana. Kootenai Creek is often home to hikers, kayakers and rock climbers during the summer.