The Nature Makers

Bud Watch Party: The Nature Makers

Sunday, September 5, 2021 - 12:00am
Monday, September 6, 2021 - 12:00am
Tuesday, September 7, 2021 - 12:00am
Wednesday, September 8, 2021 - 12:00am
Thursday, September 9, 2021 - 12:00am
Friday, September 10, 2021 - 12:00am
Saturday, September 11, 2021 - 12:00am
Sunday, September 12, 2021 - 12:00am
Monday, September 13, 2021 - 12:00am
Tuesday, September 14, 2021 - 12:00am
Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - 12:00am
  • Virtual Event -- Access Info Below
A moving portrait of passionate people and the extraordinary creatures they’re fighting to preserve, including sandhill cranes, humpback chub and prairie dogs.

WINNER! Best Feature Film at the 2020 Colorado Environmental Film Festival!
A second chance to catch the feature film for the 10th annual Yampa Valley Crane Festival...or watch it again!

In a world increasingly dominated by humans, three teams of wildlife conservationists go to extraordinary and seemingly unnatural lengths to try to save three threatened species in the American heartland. Stunningly photographed in the Grand Canyon and on the American prairie, The Nature Makers follows rugged biologists who’ve deployed helicopters, giant bulldozers and a host of human tools to defend wild nature. In the 21st century, defending the wild often requires, quite paradoxically, technology and aggressive human intervention.

This documentary film shares the story of how we found ourselves on the brink of losing so much of the natural world around us. And, in a time of dire environmental warnings, it charts an optimistic, though unmistakably challenging, path forward.

On the Platte River in Nebraska, dams and agriculture have so changed the landscape that a team of biologists led by Brice Krohn now must scour the river with heavy machinery to perform, with technology, the functions that used to be carried out naturally by spring floods. Without that work, the river landscape that has supported the magnificent sandhill crane migration for hundreds of thousands of years would disappear.

In the American West, dams and intentional poisoning campaigns have driven an important native fish, the humpback chub, to near extinction. Now, deep in the Grand Canyon, a team of biologists led by Brian Healy loads the endangered chub into barrels and flies them by helicopter into remote tributaries of the Colorado River. It’s a last-ditch effort to repopulate the fish into their native streams before the species disappears forever.

In Colorado and South Dakota, decades of organized poisonings and intensive land development have reduced the ecologically pivotal prairie dog to between 1-5% of their original numbers. When alerted to an endangered colony, a team led by Lindsey Sterling Krank uses construction equipment and industrial tubing to build artificial burrows for prairie dogs they’ve rescued from a gruesome death by poison.

Stream the 63-minute film at the link. You'll need to log on to Kanopy to watch for free with your library card.
 

Run Time: 

70 min.

About Bud's Watch Party

During this time while we're staying socially distant, Bud Werner Memorial Library continues to spearhead special opportunities to view hot documentaries at home.The library hopes that you'll enjoy watching these thoughtful films, then come together for community conversations to share the experience and maybe even put our isolated heads together for some thought-provoking brainstorming and solutions.