2012 Field Biologist: A Documentary by Jared Flesher
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This was the official website for FIELD BIOLOGIST.
Content is from the site's 2013-2014 archived pages as well as other sources.
In 2012 Field Biologist was filmmaker Jared Flesher's newest documentary project. That winter Jared traveled to Costa Rica with camera in hand.The film presents the major challenges facing biodiversity on Earth—climate change and habitat destruction chief among them—while also raising some fundamental questions: What makes someone a scientist? How important is a formal education? What risks are worth taking? What should you do with your life?
Available at Collective Eye Films: www.collectiveeye.org/products/field-biologist-educational?variant=706038097
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Field Biologist
Produced and directed by Jared Flesher
Running time: 53 min.
Field Biologist (Trailer)
The goal of Field Biologist is to create a rollicking nature film in which the star is not an animal but rather human passion for the natural world. If we are to come together to confront the biodiversity crisis on Earth, I believe it is passion, supported by good science, that will succeed in inspiring action.
Thank you for your support.
-Jared Flesher
Field Biologist director
REVIEWS:
"Field Biologist takes your breath away. First the mindbogglingly beautiful nature shots inspire your awe, and then protagonist Tyler Christensen goes and steals your heart. A must-see for any nature lover.”
—Rebeka Ryvola, Festival co-director, Environmental Film Festival at Yale
"Tyler Christensen is no science geek, and his fascination with our planet's natural wonders is infectious, accessible, and inspiring. What comes across is that exploring the natural world is not only fun, but that we can all play our part. This is an engaging and delightful film. I recommend it enthusiastically."
--Sir Peter Crane, Dean, S chool of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Yale
Director’s Bio:
Field Biologist director Jared Flesher is an award-winning reporter, photojournalist, and documentary filmmaker. He is also the editor of Edible Jersey magazine.
Jared has directed three documentary films that have screened at film festivals around the world: The Farmer and the Horse, Sourlands, and Field Biologist.
Jared's articles have been published by The New York Times Online, The Wall Street Journal Online, The Christian Science Monitor, Grist.com, and many others.
For fun, Jared enjoys growing food in his home garden, jogging with his dog, and exploring forests.
FILM SYNOPSIS
Field Biologist is the story of 22-year-old Tyler Christensen, a talented but underemployed high school graduate from New Jersey still trying to figure out what to do with his life. Tyler’s great love is being outside, chasing birds and studying wildlife. One day he decides—brushing aside his lack of a college degree or scientific credentials—to drop everything and travel to Costa Rica to start doing his own conservation-oriented research on birds in the tropics.
Tyler’s adventure takes him from the cloud forests of Monteverde to the mangrove swamps of the Nicoya Peninsula, culminating in a plan to try to help save the highly endangered mangrove hummingbird. The film presents the major challenges facing biodiversity on Earth—climate change and habitat destruction chief among them—while also raising some fundamental questions: What makes someone a scientist? How important is a formal education? What risks are worth taking? What should you do with your life?
OFFICIAL SELECTION:
Environmental Film Festival at Yale
Princeton Environmental Film Festival
Barcelona Environmental International Film Festival
Environmental Film Festival Australia
Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital
Colorado Environmental Film Festival
One Earth Film Festival
RVA Environmental Film Festival
Westwood Green Screen Environmental Film Festival
Thunder Bay Environmental Film Festival
Somewhat North of Boston Film Festival
Schiff Environmental Film Festival
1st Blog Post
12/6/2012
Packing
12/6/2012
I’ve been packing. It's about time — in fewer than 40 hours I leave for Costa Rica. For the next seven weeks, I’ll be dodging venomous snakes and chasing songbirds as I shoot my next documentary film, Field Biologist.
And I'll be blogging. This blog will be adventure journal, field notebook, and thoughts on the craft of making a documentary.
Let's start where every great film starts, with a challenge:
My challenge at the moment is to fit everything I need to shoot a documentary (plus live abroad for two months) in a suitcase and two carry-ons. The weight limit for the suitcase is 50 pounds; the weight limit for each carry-on is 40 pounds. Most travelers in my situation could pay extra to bring up to two additional bags, but my extra baggage opportunities are being devoted to the transport of hummingbird feeders that will be used by the research team I’m following. (More on them in upcoming posts.)
I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of traveling efficiently, with the least amount of equipment required to do the job well. In this case, however, I need to pack light while still making sure I have at least two of everything. (James Cameron preaches “massive redundancy.”) So I head into the Costa Rican forest with two DSLRs, a few lenses, three microphones, two ways of recording audio, two external hard drives, two tripods, and lots of extra wires and connectors. Not exactly massive, but it will give me some redundancy in case something breaks.
I’m shooting Field Biologist on the Panasonic GH2, the same camera I used to shoot Sourlands.
After hundreds and hundreds of hours of use, I feel that I know my GH2 intimately. But can it withstand a direct hit from a coconut?
I’ve got boots, sneakers, and sandals. Shirts, shorts, pants. Socks and underwear. Daylight balanced CFL light bulbs. I hope they let those on the airplane.
I also have reading material, although I had to be choosy. The three books traveling to Costa Rica with me are The One-Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka, Driven to Extinction, by Richard Pearson, and Plant Local, by Jared Rosenbaum. They are each about ecology, in one sense or another. The fourth book on my list, the first not to make the cut, was my B&H catalog.
The plane to San Jose leaves Newark on Saturday morning at 7 a.m.
Reprinted from the June 25, 2014, issue of U.S. 1 Newspaper
A Hopewell Field Biologist Follows the Flockby Lynn Robbins
Tyler Christensen
Tyler Christensen was counting down the hours for his next birding excursion. He would be capturing, banding, and releasing birds that nest and mate in Hopewell’s Sourland Mountains. But on this trip, he wouldn’t be searching anywhere near Hopewell. He was headed for Costa Rica, a winter home for the song birds who migrate from the Sourlands and throughout New Jersey in the fall.
It was early December, 2012, and Christensen’s destination was the Nicoya Peninsula Avian Research Station (NPARS), which he co-founded to protect a species in potential peril and a driving force of his personal nature, curiosity.
Joining Christensen in Costa Rica would be Hopewell film maker Jared Flesher who would be creating a documentary about the adventures and research findings of Christensen and his NPARS co-founding partner Sean Graesser. A Hopewell native, Graesser is a photographer and bander and works for the Connecticut branch of the National Audubon Society. The NPARS team also includes grounds keeper, birder convert and go-to man Dairo Vinasco; and a small group of committed field technicians. The name of the film would become “Field Biologist.”
The documentary, a presentation of both the Yale and Princeton environmental film festivals, marks its New Jersey premiere at Princeton Public Library on Saturday, June 28, at 7 p.m.
Flesher, who produced “Sourlands: Stories from the Fight for Sustainability,” released in 2012, decided to tell Christensen’s story because he saw a connection between Costa Rica and Hopewell’s Sourland mountains.
“Migratory songbirds fly thousands of miles each spring to find habitat, breed, and raise chicks,” Flesher says in his film journal. “Then they fly ... to winter places like the Nicoya Peninsula ... In Costa Rica, our team has banded Kentucky warbler, ovenbird, wood thrush, chestnut-sided warbler, black-and-white warbler, worm-eating warbler, and yellow warbler. These are all birds found in the Sourlands forest each summer. These birds would cease to exist without intact habitat at each end of the journey.”
NPARS exists to keep these habitats intact, protecting them from commercial development. This ornithological research and conservation project is run by volunteers and receives contributions from several organizations, including the Washington Crossing Audubon Society.
For two months each winter, NPARS operates several bird banding stations along the eastern coast of the peninsula, collecting data from migrant songbirds and resident Central American species. Volunteer workers net the birds, band and release them, and record the information for databases maintained by the Costa Rican government and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
While filming “Field Biologist,” both Flesher and Christensen blogged about their planned endeavors and surprises along the way. Flesher’s posts range from December, 2012, through early February, 2013. Christensen’s posts include two excursions, the first taking place during the filming, and the second during a follow-up visit a year later.
On January 20 of this year Christensen shared an unexpected event on the way home from a grocery store: “Two sounds drifted over the noise of cars. We knew this to be the sound of the enigmatic and renowned three-wattled bellbird, and it was singing from just up the hill from where we stood.”
Christensen then describes a farcical struggle to document the bird and has the team listening to treetop songs, racing along pathways through hotel grounds and vegetation, and, at last, finding the “spot where we could see, at the top of an ylang-ylang tree, a brown-and-white bird about the size of a pigeon” and become mixed-up with complications that involved the need for telephoto lenses and the ensuing stalled vehicles, running, cursing, gate jumping, and an eventual victory. “All in all in under 15 minutes (which, believe us, is very good time),” he says.
But not all of Christensen’s unexpected discoveries resulted in rollicking road trips — like the time he and Flesher came across a butterfly they had never seen before, or better put, had never heard before. “Hovering just over the log were two white and black butterflies. They were, did our ears deceive us, crackling? Neither of us had ever met a butterfly that makes snap/crack/pop sounds as it flutters. We consulted a field guide as soon as we returned to the research gazebo. Our exact butterfly wasn’t listed, but there was a genus that sounded about right: cracker butterfly. The males crack their wings, either to attract females or scare off other males,” writes Flesher.
On one of the team’s side trips, they traveled to the Monteverde Cloud Forest, famous for its bioperse ecosystems, in Christensen’s words, “a world-renowned birding hotspot.” There they observed a bird he describes as a poster-species for the conservation of the cloud forests, a bird that has brought attention and funding to the region.
“Without doubt, the most iconic bird found at Monteverde is the resplendent quetzal,” notes Christensen. “The quetzal’s beauty (shimmering iridescent green, crimson breast, and long flowing tail) and its secretive demeanor make it one of the most charismatic of the cloud forest avifauna. The quetzal is at the top of the ‘most wanted’ list for most of the thousands of birders who flock to Monteverde each year to enjoy its rich community of highland bird species.”
Christensen has been interested in nature ever since he was a child growing up in Pennington. His parents, who operated a roofing business, took Christensen, his brother and his two sisters on frequent outdoor vacations. His father, who died about five years ago, was fascinated with reptiles and amphibians. “He deserves a lot of credit for my passion for biology and nature,” Christensen says.
When Christensen was about 13, while on one of their family vacations in Costa Rica, he met a tourist guide who could identify birds just by listening to their songs. “He was a good ambassador to the world of birds. He opened my eyes and ears. I was hooked,” Christensen says. Back home, he became a volunteer for Hannah Suthers’ bird banding station in the Sourlands and earned his master’s banding permit from the U.S. Geological Survey.
After graduating from Hopewell Valley Regional High School, Christensen opted to continue his personal research, deferring a college degree. In addition to co-founding NPARS, he has worked for the Mercer County Park Commission as a nature guide, and today raises chickens and works at farm markets on weekends. He will study at Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences and work as an ornithology teaching assistant at the school of environmental and biological sciences in the fall.
Upon returning to the states after the 2013-’14 excursion, Christensen published the results of the NPARS research. During this “productive season,” the team processed a grand total of 529 birds, including 72 banded by early NPARS or other researchers.
Christensen is already planning the 2014-’15 excursion to Costa Rica and is hoping to reach agreements with his Rutgers professors to take exams online.
He hopes that people who see “Field Biologist” will be inspired to get involved. “The natural world is full of interesting and exciting things in need of protection,” he says. “To be a conservationist, you need curiosity. You need to follow the scientific method, the way of thinking. But curiosity is the most important thing.”
Field Biologist, New Jersey Premiere, Princeton Environmental Film Festival, Princeton Public Library, 65 Witherspoon Street, Princeton. Saturday, June 28, 7 p.m. Free and open to the public. 609-924-9529