Action Scene: ARCHBOLD BIOLOGICAL STATION’s Ranch Manager GENE LOLLIS (right) at work on the range

A REMARKABLE FILM – one that strikingly reconciles potentially warring interests – is now being showcased at a remarkable venue.

The film is a portrait of a unique American habitat, the eerily beautiful scrubland of south-central Florida, where the painstaking science that’s essential to protecting our environment is being successfully interwoven with the hard-nosed (and, according to some critics, ecologically harmful) business of cattle-ranching.The movie is titled, with simple pointedness: Cowboys and Scientists.

The remarkable venue is the Wild and Scenic Film Festival which is held in northern California every year about this time (2019’s begins today, running until January 21st) – and which is also a striking phenomenon in itself: a wildlife movie festival that goes out on the road, staging screenings in scores of different locations across the US.

The film is Cowboys and Scientists. And first of all while we consider the film: a layperson’s question … who even knew there are cowboys in Florida?

I confess that I for one did not, until I visited the 10,500-acre Buck Island Ranch which forms a sizable part of the acreage run by Archbold Biological Station. The station was set up in 1941 and valiantly continues today as both a preserve for threatened wildlife and a repository of concentrated, essential work in life-sciences. Its embrace of cattle-ranching may appear somewhat unexpected, but it is testimony to the Station’s pioneering and comprehensive approach to conservation, under the leadership of Board Chairperson Mary Hufty and Executive Director Hilary Swain.

Watch the movie here:

The film captures – in unfailingly lyrical footage – the dedicated efforts of Archbold’s scientists as they closely monitor the region’s flora and fauna, alongside the work of the livestock management team (the cowboys of the title, of course). All of them combine to maintain an ecosystem that ensures environmentally sound and socially responsible food production, as well as being economically, by the way, very profitable.

It seems only fitting after a viewing of this film to know that Buck Island Ranch won the 2018 “Sustainable Rancher of the Year” award from Florida’s Audubon Society. The Society commended Buck Island for showcasing “how cattle-ranching and our natural environment can co-exist successfully”.

Research Director BETSEY BOUGHTON sets up monitoring equipment on the Ranch

THE CAMERA HOMES IN on biologist Betsey Boughton and Ranch Manager Gene Lollis – who says “I’m just a cowboy” but also calls Buck Island his ‘real-world laboratory’ – as they go about their business in the field, or on the range. Boughton talks us through capturing and tabulating data from the measuring and recording devices that are dotted across the spectacular landscape almost as often as the essential irrigation channels.

We accompany Lollis on horseback as he supervises the annual cycle of two breeding seasons, with calves being weaned in both the spring and the fall and sent to market a few months later. “Never,” said my friend Walter Stuart, who himself ranches in Colorado, and scrutinized the film along with me, “has cattle-raising looked so beautiful.”

Scientists and Cowboys on Buck Island Ranch [Photo: Carlton Ward]
At back of the Ranch work – and what is implied though perhaps understandably not fully detailed in the film, as it stays glued to its compelling visuals – lies a vast, unsurpassed and continually-replenished reservoir of scientific knowledge … most vitally, perhaps, the Station’s researches into climate change. The Station maintains studies (climatologic, hydrologic, atmospheric, and biotic) that in many cases date back longitudinally to the 1930s, from not just the Ranch but also from all the unique species and habitat of the Station’s entire spread comprising over 20,000 acres – and it makes its invaluable data-sets available to fellow-scientists and researchers around the world … and available online to us the public, too. Visit: http://www.archbold-station.org:80/station/html/datapub/data/data.html

The Wild and Scenic Film Festival, after its current ‘at home’ event in Nevada City and Grass Valley, CA (showing 150 films including Cowboys and Scientists, and featuring 15 world premieres) goes on tour for the rest of 2019. It will deliver screenings in over two hundred communities from Annapolis to Walla Walla (how I wish they were also including Xenia, Illinois, Yamhill, Oregon and Zumbro Falls, Minnesota!)

This touring specialty began in in 2003 and the organizers reckon they’ve served on average 65,000 film-goers per year. As well as valuably highlighting the work of first-class environmentally-minded film-makers (like Eric Bendick of Grizzly Creek Films who made Cowboys and Scientists) the tour is a fund-raising opportunity for the mostly non-profit environmental groups, schools and museums, plus some businesses, who will host the traveling Festival. A year of Wild and Scenic touring can typically raise three-quarters of a million dollars.