8 minute read
Call of the Wild
Illustrations by Owen Davey — Folio Art
When Tom Winston ’95 moved to Montana to learn about filmmaking, he never imagined his documentaries about the natural world and wildlife in Yellowstone would someday be broadcast by PBS, National Geographic and the Smithsonian Channel, reaching viewers around the globe.
COVER STORY
CALL OF THE WILD
Written by Joel Hoekstra
Tom Winston is standing at the edge of a reservoir at the base of Emigrant Peak when the osprey attacks. It’s a chilly summer afternoon in Paradise Valley, an hour’s drive from Winston’s home in Bozeman, Montana, but the skies are clear enough to afford some spectacular views of the serrated Absaroka Range, which cuts through the northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park. Winston is eyeing the snow on Emigrant’s summit (elevation 10,926 feet) when, seemingly out of nowhere, an osprey plunges headfirst into the water in front of him.
“Did it get something?” Winston exclaims.
The brown-and-white bird explodes out of the lake, shakes the water from its wings and flaps away — with nothing in its beak. The intended prey has evaded capture, leaving the osprey hungry and observers disappointed. But Winston, the founder and CEO of Grizzly Creek Films, a production company that specializes in natural history and wildlife films, is always excited to see raptors in the wild. Predators, like ospreys, as well as eagles, fishers, wolves and grizzly bears, are essential to a nature narrative. “If you don’t have good predators,” Winston observes, “you don’t have a very good story.”
Winston has been looking for stories in and around Yellowstone for more than a decade. National Geographic, the History Channel and PBS are among the clients who have hired him to film wildlife in the region, and Winston and his team spent much of the last four years working on a four-episode series titled "Epic Yellowstone," which aired on the Smithsonian Channel last March.
But while America’s first national park, established by Congress in 1872, includes such postcard-worthy wonders as Old Faithful, Mammoth Hot Springs and Yellowstone Falls, Winston notes that the park’s 2.2 million acres comprise only a tiny portion of what ecologists call the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Encompassing nearly 20 million additional acres outside the park, Greater Yellowstone, as the region is known, is one of the last large nearly intact temperate zone ecosystems left on Earth. Most of the flora and fauna that fascinate park visitors can also be found in the mountains and valleys surrounding the preserve. The area north of Yellowstone, which includes Paradise Valley, is particularly rich in wildlife sighting opportunities.
Leaving the reservoir, Winston gets into his gray pickup and navigates a dirt road back to U.S. Highway 89. Each feature of the landscape evokes a story: There’s the heron rookery he once filmed with a drone, the ravine where his team set up a camera trap for mountain lions, the riverbank where they got the first-ever footage of salmon flies hatching after three years spent in the water as nymphs. “Other than Alaska, this is the place to be in America if you want good natural history filming opportunities,” Winston says.
COMING INTO FOCUS
Winston’s affinity for nature has deep roots in his family’s heritage. His mother, Eleanor Crosby Winston ’60, grew up hiking and riding horseback in the woods around Long Lake, Minnesota, and has served on the boards of the Nature Conservancy and the Parks and Trails Council of Minnesota. His father, Fred Winston ’55, sits on the board of the Quetico Superior Foundation and served as the longtime editor of its publication, Wilderness News. In fact, the family has a deep connection to the Boundary Waters region. Tom’s grandfather was a close friend and ally of Ernest Oberholtzer, a conservationist who successfully fought against development of the Minnesota-Ontario Lakes region in the early 20th century.
Winston and his three siblings were raised in Long Lake, and he attended Blake for most of his education. He struggled with writing, however, so when a friend showed him his parents’ new JVC camcorder, Winston’s world changed. “Video was a natural way for me to communicate,” he recalls. “I would usually figure out a way to do a video that would get me out of writing a paper.” His senior year, Winston and a group of friends rented a Super 8 film camera and video equipment from the local cable-access station and spent their spring break filming a ski movie at Bridger Bowl, Grand Targhee and several other resorts out west.
“It was a pretty elaborate project for a bunch of 18-year-olds,” says John Wanner ’95, one of the ski-movie participants. “We’d shoot sequences all day from different angles, and when we got back to the hotel room at night, Tom and I would do film logs while our friends were being goofballs. We took it very seriously.”
Wanner, who served as a photographer for Blake’s newspaper, says Winston’s talent was evident from the start. “I would get lucky because I shot so many pictures, but Tom could frame things and see things that were naturally stunning,” Wanner says. “He would see things that I didn’t see.”
Winston graduated from Blake in 1995 and, after a summer spent on a ranch in Montana (“I was building electric fences and moving cattle on horseback,” he says. “It was a lifelong dream.”), he enrolled at Middlebury College. After earning a bachelor’s in geography, he relocated to San Francisco and found a job as an intern at a video-production company. The business’s main focus was making customer service training films for Hilton Hotels. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it broadened Winston’s skill set. “My bosses let me do everything,” he says. “And this was in the pre-digital age, a time when getting your hands on the equipment, like a $100,000 camera, was a challenge.” The experience solidified Winston’s belief that he wanted to spend his life making movies.
Tom Winston '95
He applied to several graduate programs, including a new Master of Fine Arts program in science and natural history documentary filmmaking, funded by the Discovery Channel, at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman. In 2003, he was accepted and enrolled.
Most American filmmakers live in New York or Los Angeles, but after graduating from MSU, Winston remained in Bozeman, enticed by both professional and personal opportunities. Producers from Japan, the United Kingdom and elsewhere arrived in Yellowstone every summer to shoot new productions, and Winston cobbled together freelance jobs doing production, camera work and directing. He eventually founded Grizzly Creek and later hired a talented writer and Bozeman native named Shasta Grenier to help write scripts. They married in 2015.
“I go to the East and West Coast just enough to know that I like Bozeman a lot better,” Winston says. “Plus, being here, I feel like I have a better perspective. I can find stories that go beyond the clichés about the natural world in Yellowstone because I’m closer to it.”
PATIENCE AND INGENUITY
A few years ago, Winston was preparing to do a series on Yellowstone in winter when he heard a bobcat on the Madison
River. Local residents had spotted a lone male hunting ducks along the snow-filled riverbanks — which surprised Winston, since the species, a relative of the common housecat, has narrow legs and small feet and tends to avoid deep snow. The filmmaker’s team decided to get a look
for themselves. “We were on that bobcat for probably 20 days,” Winston recalls. Early each morning, they would locate the cat and watch it stalk its prey along the Madison. Some days they watched for hours and saw nothing happen. Some days, the bobcat captured a mouse or plunged into the river only to miss its target, emerging a wet mess. They shot secondary footage of ducks, of the rippling water, of snow falling. And then one day, they got the shot they needed to make a story: The bobcat sprang off a riverbank and caught an unsuspecting duck.
“I’d put that sequence up against any animal-behavior sequence done by the BBC or anybody else,” Winston says, referring to the bobcat story, which was incorporated into the Smithsonian Channel’s "Epic Yellowstone" series. “You definitely have to go in with a plan though. You need to shoot the scene as if you’re
a director shooting in scripted scenario, even if you only see that animal for 10 minutes the entire day. And you’ve got to be thinking about how you’re going to edit that sequence to produce a story.”
The stars of wildlife production can be temperamental, of course (birds fly away, foxes vanish, bison turn their backs), but Winston steers clear of filming captured animals. He also tries to tell scientifically accurate stories, and he’ll go to great lengths to get the right footage. For a recent production about birds in Yellowstone, for example, his team hollowed out an old log, fitted the interior with LED lights and strategically placed camera holes, and fixed it to a post to mimic the wild nesting environment of bluebirds. After a female bluebird took up residence and laid eggs in the model home, Winston’s team returned and filmed the newborn chicks before they fledged. “It was a lot of McGuyvering,” Winston confesses.
“Tom’s team is remarkably innovative and resourceful,” says Tria Thalman, an executive producer at the Smithsonian Channel. “They’re always building stuff, modifying equipment. They’ve been able to capture some wonderful animal behavior for us even though we didn’t have a huge budget.”
NATURE NURTURED
Before leaving the Paradise Valley, with Emigrant still in sight, Winston stops his pickup and parks on a bend along the Yellowstone River. He pulls out a laptop and plays some footage of a molting salmon fly — a transformation that fascinates him. “I was never hardcore into ecology,” he says, “but my work on these films has drawn me deeper and deeper into conservation.”
Winston sits on the board of directors of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a Bozeman nonprofit that recently lobbied successfully to block a mining company from drilling for gold in the Yellowstone River watershed. Remarkably, a Congressional bill to permanently revoke mining claims in the lands surrounding the national park received bipartisan support and was ultimately signed this past spring by then Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and President Donald J. Trump.
“[The bill is] representative of how much the economy here is moving from mineral extraction to being more dependent on natural beauty,” Winston says. “Everyone knows that the future of the local economy is tourism-related. It’s no longer about getting whatever you can get from the land. The whole economy now relies on a healthy Yellowstone River.”
Habitat conservation also lies at the heart of a Florida panther project that Winston is working on. Over the last 200 years, the entire panther population east of the Mississippi has been wiped out — except for the elusive Florida panther. Now, a plan to route an interstate highway through the northern Everglades threatens to cut the species’s habitat in half. Winston, who has been raising money to finance the project and will complete production this fall, is eager to get the film finished and in front of viewers by 2020, when the Florida legislature will review a study it commissioned regarding the potential impact of the interstate project. “The central question is: How do the people of Florida feel about one of the last undeveloped places in their state being developed?” Winston says.
The panther film will include testimonies from a longtime Florida nature photographer, a master animal tracker, a biologist and a veterinarian, but whenever possible, Winston tries to let the animals speak for themselves in his films. He wants us to marvel at the buffalo’s strength, the wolf’s speed, the grizzly’s power and the heron’s grace. “If you want people to care about the natural world, you need to show them why you love it,” Winston says. “That’s important because people need to love the natural world before they’ll be willing to protect it.”
