Page 6 - Black Range Naturalist - Oct 2021

negatives, the most remarkable record of American wild animal pictures ever made...During this time the Finleys have written three books...nearly 200 of their articles have been published in leading magazines and papers of America and Europe. Many full or double-page spreads of photographs have appeared in the New York Times and other newspapers...twenty different lecture seasons have taken Mr. Finley through nearly every state in the the Union... Three large Federal Wild Reservations and several state refuges in Oregon, stand as the record of his efforts in arousing popular interest to conserving our out-door resources.”
Even when very successful, this can be a hard way to make a living, however. Finley’s records are full of letters of inquiry asking organizations if they are interested in his presentations, there are constant negotiations with publishers about compensation for articles and/or photographs, and there is a nightmare of constant scheduling conflicts.
All of that is on the business side; the field work was not easy either. Finley did not simply get in his car and go some place to film with his cell phone. A photograph of him photographing from
Finley’s interests were far-ranging and included all of the areas of natural history. For instance, in 1941, he was writing about peccaries and the White Sands of New Mexico.
We often read and write about professional naturalists who made their living in academic settings or were employed by government agencies. Finley represents a different type of character, one who studied and documented widely and then turned the material from those efforts into something the general public eagerly consumed. He wrote articles for a wide range of magazines, sometimes submitting material for consideration, sometimes responding to specific requests. His presentation tours, his books, and his articles made him a respected authority on conservation in the United States, and he leveraged that
respect effectively. It is not without reason that he had a National Wildlife Refuge named after him.
A summary of his publications was included in one of the flyers for the “Getting Personal With Mountain Lions” tour. It reads: “For the past twenty-five years Mr. and Mrs. Finley have hunted with cameras and notebooks... Twenty seasons of travel and adventure have produced over 200,000 feet of motion picture film and 25,000 still-life
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