It’s been a busy few months for Day’s Edge Productions – we’ve been just about everywhere except our blog, it seems! Luckily, there’s a good reason for our blog silence: there are big things in the works! In the first half of 2013, we’ll be heading to Uganda to and document their fast-disappearing glaciers, and we’ll travel to the Solomon Islands to make a really exciting film about how new species arise! We’ll do our best to keep the blog up-to-date with news of our adventures. But aside from planning our upcoming expeditions, we have actually been doing some interesting things with tangible results!
In August and October, I spent a few days filming on Colorado’s Yampa River with a crew from National Geographic. We were covering a really interesting story – 2012 was an extremely dry year in the West, and several Colorado conservation groups came together with National Geographic to secure the water rights necessary to keep the Yampa River flowing at a healthy level. Most water leases are made in order to use water from the river; this one was made to keep water in the river. It’s an innovative conservation measure that just might have kept the Yampa River – and its inhabitants, like the native mountain whitefish healthy in a pretty bad draught year. Check out the video that resulted from this shoot, courtesy of the National Geographic Freshwater Initiative:
A male Anolis evermanni in Puerto Rico
Earlier in the year, Nate and I also sold some footage to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for their long-running nature series The Nature of Things with David Suzuki. They needed footage of Anolis evermanni for an episode on animal intelligence, “Mysteries of the Animal Mind,” and – wouldn’t you know it – we had captured some nice footage of this anole species during one of my research trips to Puerto Rico! Anyway, it amounted to a modest footage-licensing deal, but since this is our first broadcast credit, it’s still a bit of a milestone for us! Check out this short excerpt from the program, which features some of our footage in a segment about Dr. Manuel Leal’s research on anole intelligence (our footage was used in a couple of other places, but we couldn’t share the whole program!):
If you’re in Canada, you can probably watch the entire episode here, but if you’re in the United States you’ll have to settle for our excerpt!
Finally, we’ve been working hard on The Symbol, our book about the Ibiza Wall Lizard, and we’re making good progress. We’ve still got some work to do, but we can’t wait to share the fruits of our labor!
