Wildlife & Nature

Upcoming Video Festival to Show Off Rhode Island’s Natural Wonders

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One shot shows a cascade of fuzzy ducklings, just born the day or two before, tossing themselves like baby paratroopers out of a nesting box, beaks open and wings spread.

But these little birds aren’t going to fly.

A different shot from a camera down below finds the ducklings landing on a trampoline of leaves, before righting themselves, orienting toward the water, and waddling towards it.

The footage was captured by Michael Russo and Cathy Cressy and submitted last year to the Rhode Island Nature Video Festival.

Russo and Cressy, who live in Scituate, often send in their footage to the festival organized and curated this year by the Rhode Island Natural History Survey and Rhode Island College’s Environmental Club, Ocean State Film Society, and Film Studies Program.

The pair began recording footage of the ducks when they moved to northern Rhode Island from Washington County about three decades ago.

“It opened up an entire new world,” Russo said. Their new home was “within a snowball’s throw” of a swamp and several nesting boxes that the Department of Environmental Management had put up to host waterfowl.

“Out of the nesting box begins to fall little black things,” he said. “It turns out we caught, accidentally, a ‘jump day.’ I can’t tell you if it was wood ducks or mergansers, but it was one or the other, and just as we happened to be looking, they were hopping out of the box.”

The desire to capture the creatures on film developed from there. Eventually, they built their own boxes and set up cameras to capture the perfect shots.

The videos and the festival fit into a larger life philosophy for the pair.

“It’s just part of our being that nature is an important part of the world for us,” Cressy said. Both have worked for environmental nonprofits; Cressy was at Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy and Russo worked for a long time at Save The Bay. “We’ve both worked for causes that encourage people to understand how important nature is to the survival not only of the animals but us.”

Elise Torello of South Kingstown, another frequent contributor to the festival, said she shares a similar sentiment.

Torello captures footage of a variety of species, from fishers to herons to flying squirrels, on her trail cam. “If [we] didn’t have all this protected land and water, these animals wouldn’t be here,” Torello said, and she wouldn’t catch them in her videos.

Along with reminding people that conservation is important — Torello was a biology and wildlife management major at the University of Rhode Island and now sits on the board of the South Kingstown Land Trust — she said the videos also bring people a lot of joy.

She said people often tell her the clips give them hope.

She hopes that people see her videos and realize there are so many animals around humankind, they mean no harm, and they should be protected.

The creatures are out there, “just doing their thing, and minding their own business, and really don’t want anything to do with us,” as much as we love to watch them.

The seventh annual Rhode Island Nature Video Festival is scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 23, at Rhode Island College, 600 Mount Pleasant Ave. in Providence, at 2 p.m. The bad weather date is March 2 at 2 p.m.

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  1. Dear Colleen, thank you for this article. I just wanted to say that chicks are ‘hatched’, not ‘born’. It’s a small word difference but pretty big in the naturalist world as I recall (from my college years in the early 70s 🙂
    Jo is a friend and would tell you that I say this very kindly and with deep appreciation for the article!
    Buffy Boke

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