Sac Audubon screens bird’s-eye Yellowstone doc ahead of hummingbird program
Sacajawea Audubon Society will present a special Livingston screening of Epic Yellowstone: Life on the Wing at the Shane Lalani Center for the Arts on Saturday, January 11th. The event begins at 7pm in the Dulcie Theatre.
Life on the Wing is part of a four-part documentary series on Yellowstone National Park. It was filmed over the span of three years by Bozeman-based Grizzly Creek Films and originally aired on the Smithsonian Channel in 2018. The series is hosted by well-known actor Bill Pullman.
It’s a bird’s eye view of an iconic place. Soaring above Old Faithful and the Lower Falls, winged creatures survey an extraordinary landscape. But a bird’s life in the extremes of the world’s first national park isn’t an easy glide. From an American dipper’s frozen dinner to a bald eagle’s struggle to feed her eaglets, see how the birds of Yellowstone survive and thrive over the course of a year.
The Life on the Wing screening will be followed with a Q&A featuring some of the film’s crew. Admission is free but a donation of $5 is requested to help offset the cost of renting the theater.
Back in Bozeman, Sac Audubon hosts naturalist author Noah Comet for its monthly program, “A Cultural History of Hummingbirds.” The event will take place on Monday, January 13th at Hope Lutheran Church, located at 2152 W Graf. The evening begins with a social at 6:30pm, followed by the program at 7pm.
Hummingbirds demand superlatives. Exceptionally tiny when at rest – the slightest species measuring just 2.25 inches – they are nevertheless unmissable in flight, clothed in sun-catching grandeur. Like dwarf stars of compressed energy, their nectar-fueled hearts prime them for bursts of 80 wingbeats a second, and for annual round-trip migrations of up to 5,400 miles. They are the only birds that can fly backward, an advantageous skill as they dart and hover and defend their territories ferociously. They sleep ferociously too, each night submitting to a torpor that can bring them to the edge of hypothermia. These birds may be small, but there is nothing small about them.
Their abundant fascinations have earned hummingbirds a prominent if under-examined place in cultural history, the subject of Comet’s presentation. Reaching back to the pre-Colombian Americas, he will explain how the bird evolved from a bloodthirsty deity into a transatlantic metaphor and commodity. Hummingbirds bright plumage eventually inspired British Romantic poetry and adorned French milliner’s shops as tokens of New World exoticism and trophies of imperialism; the birds also came to symbolize freedom within the anti-slavery abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century. Comet will trace these ideas and further explore the modern, pop-cultural gendering of the hummingbird.
Sacajawea Audubon Society programs are free and open to the public. The events feature a special guest speaker the second Monday of each month, September through May, at Hope Lutheran. The organization’s mission is to build on an interest in birds to promote the conservation of our natural environment through enjoyment, education and action. Learn more at www.sacajaweaaudubon.org. •