We started shooting the early spring species such as salamanders a little earlier than we planned to because of the unusually warm winter/spring we had. That caused the migrations that we count on for filming material to be pushed up several weeks and left us scrambling to get stuff filmed. There were a lot of long cold nights spent in the rain back in February and March that we had to deal with to get what we needed. This whole thing is still a learning process for us and we still struggle with getting the audio sounding good, but other than that this spring has been great for us and we have made some serious progress on this film.
This film has really opened up some cool opportunities for us as well. We recently opted to drive up to Michigan to film the Eastern Massassauga Rattlesnake instead of trying to film them in Illinois and is was a real treat. Nick Scobel showed us around Michigan and found us a really beautiful rattlesnake with out too much trouble.
The reason we decided to drive 8+ hours to film one snake is because the Massassaugas in Illinois are critically endangered and are rather difficult to find. Aside from that I thought it would just be easier on every one if we just drove to a state where they are not as threatened as they are here.
Summer is sneaking up fast on us and we are still scrambling to get all the spring footage we need. While I am happy with the footage we have shot, there are still a few species we missed in the spring time that are very hard to find outside of their breeding season. That means there is going to be a hard decisions that we are going to have to make in the future. Do we release the film without a few species that we planned on having or do we push the release date back a bit and film them next spring? We will have to see how the rest of this year plays out before we commit to anything.
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