Field producers for Assignment Earth arguably have the coolest job in the world. Reporter Rebecca Huntington blends exploring wild places, her favorite pastime, with storytelling to educate the general public on events and issues at the forefront of environmental conservation.

Born in Billings Montana, Rebecca, 38, now lives in Jackson, Wyoming. With a degree in Spanish and Journalism from the University of Montana and as a Ted Scripps fellow of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder she, brings a wealth of knowledge and training to her production work. Reporting for Assignment Earth since 2007 Rebecca connects with researchers and activists to offer viewers an on-the-ground perspective of efforts to protect and preserve the natural world.

What follows is a Q&A interview conducted for Assignment Earth

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The Sage Grouse is a candidate for designation as a threatened or endangered species. As the Interior Department considers the bird’s fate, several research projects are underway across the west to study its behavior, movements and nesting patterns.

Wildlife biologist Bryan Bedrosian locates the birds at night. Sage Grouse sleep out in the open so they can see predators coming. But this also blows their cover.

“The way we see them is by a really powerful spotlight we bring out,” Bedrosian said. “And through binoculars we can pick up the shine, the reflection of their eye.”

Using this common technique researchers can spot a group of sleeping grouse for 800 meters. To capture them Bedrosian deploys rock music and what looks like an over-sized butterfly net.

“We go up to them playing loud music so it distracts them, covers up our foot steps, disorients them a little bit to what’s happening,” he said.

With almost 44 percent of Sage Grouse habitat lost to agriculture, urban development, road construction, energy production and other causes, scientists like Bedrosian are providing vital information that may help this chicken-sized desert bird from going extinct.  What researchers discover could restrict future land usage, especially in Wyoming where sagebrush, the birds’ primary environment, covers more than half the state.

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For millennia, water has spread across the broad expanse of the Florida Everglades. But in the last 100 years or so man has blocked its path with roads and dug canals to drain and reroute its course. Now some parts of the Everglades have too much water and some have too little.

“The problem is the Everglades are our water supply.” said Eric Buermann of the Southern Florida Water Management District. “And there’s only 40 percent of the natural Everglades left after man’s drainage and decimation of the natural environment.”

Investing almost $1 billion the state for Florida has instituted a research program to correct the growing problem. Engineers hope to apply what scientists learn to get water running again where there’s too much of it and let it flow into places where there’s much too little of it, like the Everglades National Park. Read the rest of this entry »

“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – Winston Churchill.

When it comes to oil spills no one knows this better than Native Alaskans.  Indigenous Arctic tribes learned their lesson during the Exxon Valdez debacle of 1989. In this edition of Assignment Earth several leaders of the Inupiaq Tribe came south to tour the devastation of the recent British Petroleum disaster that continues to spew toxic crude into the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast.

“We had many miles of our beaches like this,” said Alaskan native Earl Kingik. “ A lot of our shore birds fly away and don’t come back to Point Hope due to this kind of oil activity, this oil spill.”

Native Alaskan/Exxon Valdez survivor Earl Kingik tours the Gulf Oil Spill

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Dust that settles on high mountain ice will have a profound affect on the rate at which snow melts and flows into steams below. New research shows that light absorbing particles speed the transmission of sunlight to melt snow much faster than previously thought. Read the rest of this entry »

The Montana Legacy Project buys 310,000 acres of prime timber holdings to prevent real estate development and save the lands for public use and sustainable forestry. The deal will cost $490 million, the largest single conservation purchase in U.S. History.

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With government support, a huge land purchase by conservationists protects prime habitat for grizzlies, mountain lions and other sensitive species. In order to maintain wilderness habitat in the Swan Valley of Montana The Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land has bought and set aside 367,000 acres in the Montana Legacy Project.

Land once the owned by the state’s biggest private property holder Plum Creek Timber Company is now closed to development. Parcels scattered throughout forested area will be protected as corridors for the free movement of many wild species including large carnivores.

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At high elevations in the northern Rockies, mountain pine beetles are killing countless whitebark pine trees, a major source of food for wildlife including grizzly bears. Read the rest of this entry »

Building captive colonies for eventual re-introduction to the wild, scientists from Atlanta rescue endangered frogs and other amphibians threatened with extinction by a fatal fungus spreading through South American forests.

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In the shadow of the Canyonlands of Eastern Utah, a site has been proposed for the state’s first nuclear power plant. Located outside the town of Green River, the plant would generate electricity for three million homes and provide a much need economic boost to the community. But the project would depend on huge amounts of water from the Green River itself, raising questions about its capacity to support this new development and other claims to its shrinking supply, not mention the impact on fish and other wildlife

“Whether it be oil shale, coal gasification plants, nuclear power plants and so, quite frankly there’s not enough water to support all these things,” said John Weisheit, the conservation director of Living Rivers in Moab. “In a river system such as this, even a small incremental drop can strand endangered fish habitat.”

In the edition of Assignment Earth we weigh the balance between energy generation and environmental protection. Read the rest of this entry »