Page 3 - BRN April 2021
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 Making “Trailing With Toasty”
 by Bob Barnes
On September 1, 2020, the Black Range Website released “Trailing With Toasty”. The video documents the predator-prey research which Harley Shaw is conducting east of Hillsboro. Sometimes we take natural history videos for granted. They just appear, to quote Aristotle and Plato - “out of the ether”. (Actually they would have called it αἰθήρ.)
But let me tell you, it just ain’t so. Like the idea that everything is made of earth, water, fire, and ether, the concept that these videos just appear is now generally held in disrepute. But if not from the ether, how?
I have made natural history videos for decades, always to share, always for the common good. The recording equipment has become much more sophisticated, much higher in resolution, and lighter (a big deal for an old man like myself). Even the tripods are much lighter. And the editing, well let me tell you, the days of starting one dissolve and going to breakfast, coming back to watch it finish up, and then to decide that it really doesn’t work are history. Now a dissolve happens as fast as a keystroke.
Harley Shaw is retired. He now works full time but is no longer paid for his efforts - that is the definition of retired. When he had a day job he conducted research projects on various fauna in Arizona as part of his career with the Arizona Department of Game and Fish. More than a decade of that career was spent on Mountain Lion research. He is renowned for that work and for the numerous books on natural history which he has written. A few years ago, he and I made “Dogs and Lions”, a video about his
time doing Mountain Lion research. Now he is focusing on fauna of a different size, specifically - cottontails, even more specifically, their role in the predator-prey cycle. His primary equipment in this effort is a beagle named Toasty. That equipment melds perfectly with the curiosity that flows through Harley’s head. It is interesting stuff, and I have walked the foothills east of Hillsboro on several early morning outings watching Toasty trail bunnies, watching Harley watch Toasty (photo below).
At some point Harley’s thinking about the predator-prey issues east of Hillsboro matured to the point that he asked if we might do another video.
We started in March 2020 and over several weeks spent a great deal of time recording raw video. Harley recorded a narration track and I did an initial edit. That first edit was as I put it “a lot of dog barking and sniffing”.
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