terra: The Nature of Our World - Montana PBS & Survivors in Paradise

http://www.montanapbs.org/Terra/

"This science and natural history series presents stories that speak to the relationship between human civilization and the planet. An accessible and thought-provoking series, terra offers a window to the natural world by exploring frontiers of research, examining applications of science, and celebrating diversity in our natural environment. Topics range from habitat issues, species survival, profiles of individuals working in the field and even major ecological alerts.Produced in conjunction with the graduate program in Science and Natural History Filmmaking at Montana State University and Filmmakers for Conservation Ltd. terra provides independent filmmakers and students a venue in which to present their own perspectives on ecological and environmental topics. terra is presented by KUSM/MontanaPBS, MSU Bozeman." Watch the podcasts! http://www.terravideos.blogspot.com/

Famous examples of adaptive radiation, the Hawaiian honeycreepers are also going extinct at an alarming rate. Hope for the future of native birds in Hawai'i may lie with the Amakihi, a species that is making a surprising comeback in the face of deadly avian malaria, and with the team of biologists trying to combat the disease. History, genetics, and island biogeography come together in this remarkable story of evolution in action.

In 1826, the first mosquitoes arrived in Hawai'i aboard a whaling ship. In this episode of terra we learn how they spread avian malaria to native birds, accelerating extinction in this already imperiled ecosystem, and we join scientists as they investigate how one species is bucking the extinction trend through evolution. History, island biogeography and genetics converge as the 'Amakihi, a native honeycreeper, mysteriously re-populates the lowlands of Hawai'i, providing hope for the future of other native birds in Hawai'i. Produced by Susanne Clara Bard for terra, presented by KUSM/ MontanaPBS, MSU Bozeman. Surviviors in Paradise first aired September 22, 2005 on Montana PBS. For more information, visit: www.montanapbs.org/Terra/episode105/ Available as a podcast soon. Stay tuned! All images copyright Susanne Bard Productions 2005

Secret Fun Facts

I was born on the 31st of July, 1971, during the Apollo 15 lunar landing, in Seattle, to the daughter of a WWII pilot & diplomat and the son of a clothing salesman & chicken farmer. It was the warmest day of the hottest week of the dryest month of the year, and also a Saturday. In fact, it has never rained on my birthday in Seattle ever since. All of which is completely irrelevent.
I was raised in a barn while my mother built our house from scratch. This was the barn a few years after we lived there. The room with the three colored windows was my bedroom.

This is the house my mother built. She still lives there.

I was a solitary child, and had my own woods to explore for hours on end, with only my animals for company.

When not out in the woods you'd find me in Santa's Workshop, making the dreams of other children come true, or selling wooden puzzles for my mother at the Pike Place Market.

In between all that, I raised a herd of dairy goats as a 4-H project. They lived in the barn after we moved out.

I spent my holidays in the Icicle Canyon, near Leavenworth, Washington, sleeping in great big Army tents, exploring the Enchantment Lakes Wilderness and learning from the best adopted grandparents anyone could ever wish for. Bill and Peg are in their 90s now, and no longer embarking on their epic hikes, but if even just a little bit of them has rubbed off on me, I am lucky indeed. http://www.camelotmedia.com/enchantment.html

When I was 16, I decided to see the world, and headed to Paraguay for a summer to vaccinate children against Yellow Fever, polio, tetanus, measles and other nasty diseases.

Since then, I have been all over, digging for Mayan ruins in Belize, studying bird vocalizations in Panama, nearly drowning in Costa Rica. My two favorite places on earth are Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (where I danced and played fiddle till the cows came home) and Spain (where I went hunting for toads in the middle of the night in frigid alpine lakes with a half-crazed herpetologist), and last year I also visited Venice (where I got lost wandering the streets at 4AM) and London (where nothing particularly noteworthy happened), and I led a group of unsuspecting Finns in a live re-enactment of Gilligan's Island, which was an awful lot of fun, and we all jumped in the sauna after.

Somewhere along the line, I realized that travelling and milking a herd of goats twice a day are mutually exclusive activities, so I packed up the blue ribbons and moved to the city. These days, you'll find me in Judkins Park...I love my neighborhood and the friendships and community that are built around bumping into people you know on a daily basis and working on projects together to make it a better place, where people want to live.

I'm scientist, writer & producer, sometimes all at once. I have a thing for birds. I've taught basic biology, animal behavior, environmental science and remedial (!) sex-ed to undergraduates. I have a master's degree in Animal Behavior from the University of Washington where I studied the evolution of bird song learning. In Panama I tested vocal discrimination in Spotted Antbirds, and for my master's thesis, I studied songs and aggression in Townsend's and hermit warblers across a transect of hybridization in the Cascade mountains. Think about it - you need to sing to get a mate, and different species sing different songs, so what would you sing if you were half of one species and half of another? http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5809902/

I lived in Montana for a year learning how to make science documentaries, which gave me the opportunity to spend six weeks on the Big Island of Hawaii, making a short National Science Foundation documentary about the evolution and conservation genetics of native Hawaiian birds. It first aired on September 22, 2005 on Montana PBS: www.montanapbs.org/Terra/episode105/ . Then in October, I was invited to present my film in front of a French audience at a film festival there. They did a fabulous job of dubbing the whole thing into French, and were extremely gracious despite the fact that my French is terrible. They love their birds in France!

But who am I really? Just a nice girl, with most of her ducks in a row (except that little yellow one that keeps running off and quacking by itself all the time), keeping herself entertained with good friends and funny stories, a touch of sarcasm (okay, a lot of sarcasm), but no BS. My life has never been easy, but it is humor that gets me through each day. Battling against the forces of evil and willing to risk everything for the truth.

Sunset at Three Sisters, near Tumalo, Oregon, 2004

Sasha the Dog

2/6/06

Dear Friends, I'm very sad to tell you that Sasha the dog died on Tuesday morning. She was only 8 1/2 years old. About a week after Thanksgiving, Sasha collapsed, and the vets at the emergency clinic took an ultrasound and found a tumor on her heart that had already spread to her spleen. She recovered from this traumatic experience beautifully, even though they gave her only a few days to live, maybe a month at most. She responded very well to a diuretic that helped keep fluids from putting pressure on her heart, and within a few days, she was the same energetic and perky dog she always had been, except she was no longer allowed to go on the long walks to the lake we used to take. She got almost two more months to enjoy life, and showed no signs of pain during that time. On Tuesday morning, she got up and went into the kitchen and collapsed suddenly of congestive heart failure. Everything happened so quickly, I don't believe that she suffered much at all. Sasha was a very special dog. Anyone that knew her was acquainted with her unique personality. Her early life was difficult, growing up on the mean streets of Tacoma, until she was taken in by the Humane Society. She was adopted by a college student and her group of friends at the University of Puget Sound when she was 1 /12 years old, and went from a very shy, neglected pup, to a loyal, loving dog. She excelled in obediance classes but still went crazy every time she saw a cat. The vets said she was was half Dalmation, half English Pointer, but no one really knows for sure. William F Buckley the Third told me she was a turkey dog, whatever that means, and she could have gone to bird dog school if dhe's had the chance. She was part hunting dog, part guard dog, and you'd always feel safe walking anywhere if Sasha came along, even in the middle of the night. In the spring of 2001, the girl she had been living with graduated from college, and joined Teach for America for an assignment in Louisiana. She was not able to take Sasha with her, so she posted her "profile" on petfinder.org, to find her a new home, and that is how I found her. I drove down to Tacoma, and knew as soon as I met her that she was the right dog to adopt. Sasha was an active dog. The first trick she ever showed us was "doggie dancer", where she would jump up in the air and twist herself in a circle, especially if there was food involved. In fact, Sasha would do almost anything for a treat. She liked to do other tricks, like growling on command, playing dead, high-five and high ten. In the car, when the humans started to sing, she would howl along with them. Cats were her obsession. She could stare out the window for hours, without moving a muscle, fixated on something that looked vaguely catlike across the street. She was the neighborhood watchdog, and people always noticed her black and white face through the window when they walked by the house. She once tried to eat a duck, but was unsuccessful. Sasha had a weakness for street food. Anything anyone had dropped, even if it was invisible to the human eye, she would root out with fer powerful little nose, and was loathe to give it up. At the dog park, when she got revved up, she'd go into crazy dog mode. Her eyes would glaze over and she'd start running in circles until exhausted. She loved to chase other dogs who chase balls, but she was no retriever herself. She didn't like the water, but would run along the shore up to her elbows in pursuit of other dogs. She loved hanging out with friends Angie and Maya, who took care of her while I was out of town. She enjoyed sleepovers with her doggie friend Chester at neighbor Ann and Gretchen's house, where she always made a B-line for his food bowl. She went with me to do field research on birds in the Cascades, and got very excited when she saw an elk. She camped and hiked with us at Paula and Miska's wedding near Bend, Oregon. At my old house in Fremont, we lived on the second floor, and one day in te summertime, I came home, and couldn't find the dog anywhere. Finally, I located her. She had seen a cat, and climbed out the open window onto the roof to investigate. She hated the word "bath" and would become very excited at the word "kitty". She hated baths in general, but would jump right into the bathtub to get it over with. Sasha got many compliments for her good looks. After a bath, we'd go on a walk and inevitably run into several people who said she was the best looking dog they'd ever seen. Sasha went with me to Montana, and she ran up and down the trails with glee. She loved snow, but wasn't born to be a snow dog, and one time we walked into a snowy Bozeman park, and she fell over because her little paws had started to freeze, so I had to pick her up and carry her to the car. She once saw a wolf-dog in Bozeman, and went so nuts that she broke her leash, which was rated to 110 pounds. She loved looking for ground squirrels in Idaho. One of our favorite things in the last few years was to go on long walks through the Colman Park pea patch in Mount Baker all the way to Lake Washington or Seward Park. We'd be out for hours, enjoying a summer sunset or a midnight stroll. Sasha touched a lot of people. She was fierce, but also fiercely loyal. She led with her nose. She was there for me through some very hard times with unconditional love. She was family. It's strange to come home now to an empty house, and not have her wake up, bleary eyed from her nap on the bed, to greet me after work, ready and raring to go on a walk. I miss her very much. Thanks to everyone who gave her love, played with her, took care of her while I was out of town, and had a chance to know her. She is buried under a redwood tree at my mother's house in Redmond, with some of her favorite bones, a chew toy, and a tennis ball.

Susanne

Sasha 1997 - January 24, 2006 "Ever Vigilant"

Donate here to help save the life of a homeless pet:

http://www.petfinder.com

Judkins Park Then and Now

Neighborhood Pride

The Judkins Park Irregulars - Tree Planting 2005

Trolley Coach 24th & Dearborn

1960s

Photo Gallery #2: Marchers and Protesters - Washington D.C. May 2004

Many Passionate Opinions Converged on the Mall That Day...












Even Jesus spoke up
Mamas for Choice

Photo Gallery #1: Washington D.C. May 2004

Paraguay 1988

Tree in Paraguay 1988

What remains after the rainforest is gone. Paraguay

Paraguayan Girl and sibling? Gasory Village. All the other children had run off because they heard us vaccinators were coming with needles. 1988

Iguacu Falls Brazil 1988

Resume

SUSANNE C. BARD
Seattle, WA & Washington, D.C.
susannebard@yahoo.com

EDUCATION
*1994: B.A. Reed College, Portland, Oregon.
*2001: M.S. Animal Behavior, University of Washington, Seattle.
*2006. MFA in Science and Natural History Filmmaking, Montana State University, Bozeman.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR RESEARCH
*1999-2001. Master’s Thesis, University of Washington: “Hybridization and song learning in Townsend’s and hermit warblers in the Pacific Northwest.”
*1997-2001. Research Assistant and Song Recordist, Song Learning Laboratory, UW. Conducted year-round behavioral observations and experiments in a large population of song sparrows. Beta tested Syrinx-PC song analysis software as part of my research.
*2000. Research Assistant, Avian Conservation Laboratory, UW. Researched, indexed, and updated a bibliographic database on conservation and birds.
*1997. NSF Summer Research Award, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama. Conducted song playback experiments on the Spotted Antbird.
*1996. Research Assistant. UW Department of Fisheries. Tracked the vertical movements of Cutthroat trout in Lake Washington using ultrasound telemetry.

MEDIA PRODUCTION
*2006-Present. Associate Producer, Worthy of the Nation, 60 X 1 episode in HD, for Smithsonian Networks.
*2006. Associate Producer, Ms. Adventure, 60 min X 13 episodes, for Animal Planet at Tiger Tigress Productions.
*2004-2006. Coordinating Producer (71 episodes) and Writer (15 episodes) of A&E’s Sell This House and Move This House series; archival researcher for the History Channel’s Tech Effect series at Screaming Flea Productions.
*2003-4. Producer: Survivors in Paradise: an NSF-funded documentary about the impact of avian malaria on native Hawaiian birds, and the rapid evolution of resistance to the disease in a honeycreeper, the Amakihi. First aired September 22, 2005, Montana Public Television.
*2002. Producer. Montana Outdoor Science School, a public relations/fundraising video for a K-12 experiential education program.
*2002. Series Producer. Sound Science for Yellowstone Public Radio, a show about scientists and the process of discovery.

SCIENCE EDUCATION
*Teaching Assistant, University of Washington and Montana State University. Instructed the following courses: Comparative Animal Behavior (UW), Principles of Environmental Science, (MSU), and Cellular and Molecular Biology, (MSU); taught writing and supervised field biology class projects.
*Volunteer, Seattle Girls’ School. Taught middle school girls nature sound listening and field recording techniques and how to analyze vocalizations. Also produced several videos on environmental topics with the students.
*Guest Speaker: “Birds of Hawai’i: Evolution and Conservation” a slide show for adults, and “Discovering Birds” an interactive science program for elementary students.

COMPUTER SKILLS AND ADDITIONAL EXPERIENCE
Windows and Macintosh platforms.
Proficient in Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Access; Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, Encore DVD, Audition; Final Cut Pro, and Syrinx-PC (Song analysis software).
Fluent in Spanish.

INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE
*1995. Camp Director, Boston University Archaeological Field School, Belize.
*1992-1993. Study Abroad Program at the University of Costa Rica.
*1988. Health Educator and Vaccinator (childhood and adult diseases) Amigos de las Americas, Paraguay.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR AND RELATED COURSEWORK-Univ. of Washington
·Ornithology
·Endocrinology
·Wildlife Biology
·Evolutionary Genetics
·Principles of Ecology
·Molecular Evolution
·Comparative Reproduction
·Developmental Biology
·Molecular Techniques
·Mechanisms of Animal Behavior
·Seminars: Avian Conservation, Behavior and Conservation, Radio Telemetry, and Avian Molecular Genetics
·Statistics (5 quarters)

MEDIA PRODUCTION COURSEWORK-MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY
·Video Production Techniques and Lab (2 semesters-DVCAM; Final Cut Pro)
·Creative Nonfiction (documentary writing)
·Principles of Production Management (including budgeting)
·Audio Production
·High Definition Cinematography
·Survey of Science and Natural History Filmmaking
·Critical Theory of Science and Natural History Filmmaking

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
*Bard, S.C., M. Hau, M. Wikelski & J.C. Wingfield. 2002. “Response to intruder song playback in a neotropical suboscine rainforest bird.” Condor 104:2, pp. 387-394. Presented at the 2000 AOU Meeting.
*Bard, S.C. Master’s Thesis, University of Washington. 2001. “Hybridization and song learning in Townsend’s and hermit warblers in the Pacific Northwest.” Presented at the 2001 AOU and ABS meetings.
*Burt, J.M., S.C. Bard, S.E. Campbell and M.D. Beecher. 2002. “Alternative forms of song matching in song sparrows” Animal Behaviour 63: 6, Pp. 1143-1151.

Dragons in Venice

A Three Hour Tour - Finland Style

My theory is that people are more outgoing when you put glasses on them, so I bought a bunch of silly glasses at Goodwill before I left for Europe, and hauled them all the way to Finland, where I subjected some generally reserved Finns to a re-enactment of Gilligan's Island, while wearing the glasses. Gilligan, the Captain, The Professor and Mary Ann, the Movie Star, the Millionaire and his wife were all there, and afterwards we jumped into the sauna.

The Mate was a mighty sailin' man...

...the Skipper brave and Sure.

...Five passengers set sail that day for a three hour tour, a three hour tour.

The ship took ground on the shore of this unchartered desert Isle, with Gilligan, the Skipper too...
...the Millionaire and his Wife

...the Moviestar

...the Professor

...and Mary Ann

...here on Gilligan's Isle