Landmark Conservation Legislation in Canada

Canada has set an extraordinary example to the world. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty recently set aside 55 million acres of land – half the size of the province – as permanent conservation land.

I did not read about this in the U.S. media and, shockingly, could find nothing about it in the usual news sources. I first heard of it on the Massbird listserv on which a member quoted Scott Weidensaul’s report of it, which she saw on the carolinabirds listserv.

You can hear about it straight from the source by watching this video:

Scott Weidensaul kindly provided me with a link to his original account of the landmark legislation at his blog. It is a beautiful story. And if you haven't read any of Scott's books, check them out!

Meanwhile, U.S. President George Bush lifts the ban on offshore oil drilling, and the U.S. Department of the Interior opened up 2.6 million acres in Alaska for oil exploration. Although there is no hope for significant conservation measures under this current administration, one can dream that improvements will occur in the next.

For a treasure trove of wonderful information on birds of the boreal regions, with suggestions on how you can help, visit the Boreal Songbird Initiative website. The site also provides a link for writing a thank-you letter to Premier McGuinty. I wrote to him and hope you will too. Thanks to his vision, millions of avian voices will continue to ring out from the far North for years and years to come.

Visiting My Past.

Sometimes I have trouble getting myself out of the house. By now I should have learned that invariably I have a good time when I go out. But last Thursday instead of packing my suitcase and heading to New York for my high school reunion, I answered emails, did voice-over auditions, and generally dragged my heels before finally hitting the road - at just the right time for Manhattan rush hour – and I got a less-than-ideal parking spot as well. But once I was in the city, back at the family apartment and surrounded by familiar books and furnishings and all on my own, it was very relaxing to be away from the studio for the first time in months. The next morning I took the alumni tour of “Little Dalton” (the building that houses the preschool through third grade) and “Big Dalton” (4th through 12th grades) and had a blast. I sometimes dream about my old school and thought it was time to update the dream template since I had not seen most of it since I graduated (actually, I didn’t graduate, I dropped out after 11th grade and then went to college a year later - but I'm still considered a member of my graduating class). Joining me on the tour was someone I had not seen since I left Dalton – she had been a good friend, but she had married a Frenchman and lived in France, Morocco and Jordan so there wasn’t much opportunity to get together and we lost touch. We had lunch together after the tour and talked a blue streak. That evening at our class dinner I renewed my acquaintance with people I’d seen 5 years ago at the last reunion, as well as some I had not seen at all in the decades since leaving school.

I was astonished to discover how deep those roots are. Whether it’s just the formative nature of the middle and high school years, or something about these particular people and my school (very progressive) or the tumultous epoch in which I grew up, but I found I now have even more in common with many of the people I went to school with than I did when I first knew them. After staying well beyond the time when our reunion dinner was supposed to end, four of us went out to a restaurant and sipped tea or wine and talked for another two hours. I will definitely be staying in closer touch with these people. And, it doesn’t hurt that some of them are filmmakers!

Close on the heels of this trip down Memory Lane I had another opportunity to see an old friend with whom I’d lost touch. And again I dragged my feet – it was a hot night and I had trouble getting myself out the door. But get out I did. The featured speaker at last night’s meeting of the Hampshire Bird Club had been a good friend when I was an undergraduate and he a graduate student at Princeton. Bruce Beehler has been studying the birds of New Guinea ever since I've known him; now his research is part of his job at Conservation International. A trip to New Guinea in 2005 yielded so many new species of plants and animals that it got considerable media attention, and the 60 Minutes crew persuaded Bruce to take them back with him in 2007. They produced a 12 minute segment that was well received in December 2007, and Jay Leno even spoofed it last week! The original segment can be seen below, with a shorter segment showing the courtship dance of the golden-fronted bowerbird.

Someone videotaped Bruce’s talk last night, and I spoke with the videographer, who plans to produce a piece about it for community access television and he invited me to narrate it. I love finding ways to blend my current career in voice-over with my previous one as a biologist, and this is definitely one of those ways.

The moral of this story: Always, always say yes to opportunities to get out of the studio and be among people. You’ll almost always have fun, and you never know where it might lead.

Voice-over Networking: NATURE Edition.

You just never know what cool events are going to pop up in my little town. A few days ago I heard, rather at the last minute, that the local PBS station was hosting an evening with Fred Kaufman, Executive Producer of Nature. I love those shows, and documentaries are of course of great interest to a voice-over artist since they are almost always narrated. So I inquired and there had been a cancellation and I managed to get a ticket. The event was held at my beloved Garden House at Look Park, just a mile and a half from my house, so that made it all the more appealing.

The lovely stone fireplace was once again blazing with a welcoming fire, just as it was the last time I attended an event at the Garden House. On exhibit were the winning photographs from the WGBY Wild About Nature Photography contest, as well as a number of other excellent nature photographs by local artists. I marveled at these wonderful works and had a very pleasant conversation with a WGBY staffer, who kindly requested my business card so he could pass it along to one of his colleagues at the station.

Ample h’ors d’oeuvres prepared by the Blue Heron Restaurant were available, and I helped myself and took a seat next to the small band, Cidade, which was playing Latin music. A guitarrist, violinist, bassist and percussionist made up the group, and whereas I suppose I should have been networking, I couldn’t tear myself away from this wonderful music. I had never before heard a band play tangos as listening music – most bands don’t even seem to know what they are.

Before long it was time for the warm-up act for Mr. Kaufman: Julie Ann Colier, a raptor rehabilitator from Wingmasters, brought along several owls and hawks to show us. Julie grew up in western Massachusetts and she talked about some of the changes in status of these birds since her childhood, such as the drastically reduced numbers of the American Kestrel – our smallest falcon – due to pesticide use. The owls she brought, as well as the Red-tailed Hawk, are doing fine, but numbers of the beautiful Golden Eagle have declined sharply in the northeast in the last 40 years.

Fred Kaufman gave a wonderful talk about some of the highlights of the projects he has worked on over the last 25 years with Nature. He also showed film clips from several of them including the famous footage of a fox hunting mice during winter at Yosemite, and an incredibly touching scene of two female elephants being reunited after two decades apart. One clip he did not show is included in a two-part program currently airing entitled “What females want and what males will do” (6 April and 13 April 2008). Featured in this footage is the courtship dance of a manakin (I believe it’s the red-capped manakin, Pipra mentalis). I found a video of this on Youtube, set to Michael Jackson music (you’ll see why). [UPDATE: The video has been removed from Youtube, for reasons unknown to me. My apologies for the inconvenience.]

I talked with Mr. Kaufman after the program, and learned that they now have one narrator whom they use for all their Nature documentaries – the wonderfully talented F. Murray Abraham. A great choice! Of course, I had hoped that they were adrift and scanning the small towns of western Massachusetts for a voice actor to take over this job, but I cannot deny that Mr. Abraham has more film credits than I. I’m working on that though!

A most enjoyable evening! As always, the WGBY staff did a super job of organising and publicising a wonderful event.

Una cosa rara.

A strange thing.

Lately I’ve been investing a fair bit of over-achieving energy in a presentation I was giving today on the geography, climate and natural history of the “Southern Cone” countries of South America - Chile, Argentina and Uruguay - in my Spanish class. I planned very carefully what I would say, and fretted because the words didn’t always come out perfectly in my rehearsals, making me worry endlessly about the future of my Spanish voice-over aspirations. I really enjoyed the preparation, though, because I was learning a lot about the region, which is a fascinating one, and the language is beautiful and I loved learning how to say things like “temperate rain forest” (bosque pluvial templado) and to describe the habits, in Spanish, of birds that I already knew well.

So, today was the day. I had my notes carefully typed up with cues to tell me when to change the slides. The time came to start my talk, and I set those notes down and never even looked at them except to double-check the name of a certain volcano. It was as if “the smell of the grease-paint” took over and I forgot all about mispronouncing words and just tried to make the subject as interesting as possible for my fellow students. It was more fun than I’ve had in quite a while and the words flowed effortlessly. I was so pleased when my professor told me afterwards that my experience as a teacher and public speaker showed!

So, there’s a lesson here – when you have an audience, whether they are right there in front of you or just in your imagination in the voice-over booth - get out of your own way and try to speak to them the way they would like to be spoken to. The strange thing is that I was not really conscious of doing this today – only in hindsight do I realise that it happened. Speaking to a live audience is a great way to remember how to do this. So many of you do it on a regular basis but it has been a while for me and I had forgotten how much I enjoy it. I recommend it!

Las focas de Patagonia

Bird gives clue to location of Springfield.

At the very end of the new Simpsons Movie, a single bird song is audible. That bird is the Bobolink Dolichonyx oryzivorus, a member of the blackbird family that has sometimes been called skunkbird because of its contrasting light and dark plumage. The bird is a long-distance migrant, traveling from its wintering grounds in southern South America all the way to the northern United States and southern Canada where it breeds. If the Simpsons Movie is set during the breeding season rather than spring or fall, it’s possible that we can narrow down the number of possible Springfields by over fifty percent.

Click here to hear an exclusive MCM Voices news report about this important clue to the location of America’s favorite family.

Bobolink – photo courtesy USFWS

Breeding distribution of the Bobolink

Avian Voice-over

The voices I'm hearing today are avian - it's really spring and the eastern phoebes have returned to Massachusetts. Red-winged blackbirds have been here for over a month, but the phoebes are the first truly insectivorous species to come back. I brag sometimes about being able to imitate bird sounds, but honestly, it's pretty hard to imitate a flycatcher's voice with verisimilitude. I keep trying though.

So, I'm enjoying this taste of the new season. Sounds of American robins, blackbirds, titmice, chickadees, downy, hairy, red-bellied and pileated woodpeckers - the kinglets, juncos and white-throated sparrows are still here or passing through - and it won't be long before the waves of warblers add their many and varied voices to Nature's multi-track mix. And the frogs - boy do we have frogs around here. Haven't heard 'em yet though. No rush.