It’s been a busy few months for Day’s Edge Productions – we’ve been just about everywhere except our blog, it seems! Luckily, there’s a good reason for our blog silence: there are big things in the works! In the first half of 2013, we’ll be heading to Uganda to climb the Rwenzori Mountains and document their fast-disappearing glaciers, and we’ll travel to the Solomon Islands to make a really exciting film about how new species arise! We’ll do our best to keep the blog up-to-date with news of our adventures. But aside from planning our upcoming expeditions, we have actually been doing some interesting things with tangible results!

In August and October, I spent a few days filming on Colorado’s Yampa River with a crew from National Geographic. We were covering a really interesting story – 2012 was an extremely dry year in the West, and several Colorado conservation groups came together with National Geographic to secure the water rights necessary to keep the Yampa River flowing at a healthy level. Most water leases are made in order to use water from the river; this one was made to keep water in the river. It’s an innovative conservation measure that just might have kept the Yampa River – and its inhabitants, like the native mountain whitefish healthy in a pretty bad draught year. Check out the video that resulted from this shoot, courtesy of the National Geographic Freshwater Initiative:

A male Anolis evermanni in Puerto Rico

Earlier in the year, Nate and I also sold some footage to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for their long-running nature series The Nature of Things with David Suzuki. They needed footage of Anolis evermanni for an episode on animal intelligence, “Mysteries of the Animal Mind,” and – wouldn’t you know it – we had captured some nice footage of this anole species during one of my research trips to Puerto Rico! Anyway, it amounted to a modest footage-licensing deal, but since this is our first broadcast credit, it’s still a bit of a milestone for us! Check out this short excerpt from the program, which features some of our footage in a segment about Dr. Manuel Leal’s research on anole intelligence (our footage was used in a couple of other places, but we couldn’t share the whole program!):

If you’re in Canada, you can probably watch the entire episode here, but if you’re in the United States you’ll have to settle for our excerpt!

Finally, we’ve been working hard on The Symbol, our book about the Ibiza Wall Lizard, and we’re making good progress. We’ve still got some work to do, but we can’t wait to share the fruits of our labor!

The Rwenzori Mountains—also called the Mountains of the Moon—rest between Uganda’s Nile basin and the immense tropical jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo. With their peaks at 5,109m above sea level, the Rwenzori range is one of the rare tropical locations where glaciers occur. But not for long; climate change is altering every environment on the planet, and these ice-covered mountain tops are thawing fast. The glaciers may be gone in less than 20 years.

We need your help to tell the story of this vanishing world. Vote for our project to help us win the Dos Equis Stay Thirty Grant – a $25,000 prize that will fund our expedition to Africa. You can vote once a day, every day, from today, October 9th until October 30th. Please vote for us, and share this link with as many people as you can via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and carrier pigeon… This is an important story about climate change that needs to be told.

To vote for us, click on the above image to go the voting page. Once you put in your age, click the red “grant worthy” button in the bottom right corner of our submission: Men on the Moon: Journey to a Vanishing World.

Please vote! Please share! Then, please do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, until October 30th! Thank you for your support!

Closeup of an Es Vedrà lizard. The combination of a deep blue body and yellow back is not found in any other population.

We visited dozens of islands during our month-long expedition to the Pityusic archipelago to photograph the endemic Ibiza Wall Lizard (Podarcis pityusesis). We photographed lizards clad in brilliant blue, green, and orange, cryptic shades of brown, and even black. But right from the start, we knew our expedition wouldn’t be complete until we climbed Es Vedrà. Es Vedrà is an island shrouded in mystery – it is visible throughout the archipelago, a monumental 1250-foot-high pinnacle of rock rising abruptly from the Mediterranean off the southwest coast of Ibiza. But Es Vedrà is uninhabited and off-limits to the public, so few people have a chance to explore it, and fewer still reach the summit. The island has inspired countless legends through the centuries. More importantly for us, Es Vedrà is home to what may be the most spectacular population of Ibiza Wall Lizards in the entire archipelago.

The most conspicuous terrestrial animals on Es Vedrà are wild goats, descended from domestic goats introduced to the island by humans centuries ago.

In the final week of our expedition, we finally had a chance to face Es Vedrà. This film chronicles our trek to the summit. Nate had reached the peak once before, so we had a rough idea of what lie ahead. Still, we knew we would encounter challenges along the way! Early on our hike, the pouch that held our wireless microphones got torn off my backpack as I pushed through some dense brush, and we didn’t realize the mics were missing until we reached the summit. Unfortunately, that meant that we couldn’t record our impressions when we were there. But in case the video leaves you with any doubt… it was SPECTACULAR!

We retraced our steps on the way down, and – miraculously – Nate managed to find the mics! What a relief!

Our other objective on Es Vedrà was to capture a high-resolution panorama from the summit, so that our friends and project backers could share our experience and get a sense of what we could see from the summit. You can explore the high-resolution panoramic image below, or use the cool full-screen interface at the Gigapan website, complete with annotated “snapshots” within the larger image.

Exhausted but happy, Nate, Amanda and I stand atop Es Vedrà!