User:BirdViewer

I've only recently joined as an official user though I've spent many hours clicking around the Wikipedia when I should have been working. I love to get lost in this thing and can only imagine how great it would be to be a kid with a resource like this. The kid that I was would have been thrilled to see movies along with the articles so I've determined to overcome my "HTML" " Wiki Markup" and other tech phobias and contribute.

I've got a lot of footage of North American birds, fish, and invertebrates plus still photos that can be pulled from the footage since the original is all film or progressive scan HD. The stills I would donate to the Commons so they will be within all the Wikipedia rules.

The movies are links to our website where we do try to sell bird DVDs to support our nature-filmmaking obsession. My husband and I have been working together on natural-history films since 1980. He drags the camera, me the recorder. We've made films for National Geographic, Nature, Nova, Fish and Wildlife, and museums and aquariums and filmed scenes for BBC series like "Life of Birds," "Blue Planet," "Plane Earth" and the just-finished "Life in Cold Blood." On our own, we're working on a DVD-video guide to all the birds in North America. That's mostly why we have all this bird material, including lots of cool behavior.

It takes me years to make the DVDs, but only a few minutes to do the little web-movies. That's mostly why I'm doing them, to feel the joy of actually finishing something in a day. We're not selling the web movies, only hoping to spark more interest in birds and in our bigger movies once in a while and maybe creating enough bird-loving traffic to our site that it will be worth something someday. Who knows. I'll have to get a lot more movies onto it. I know that Wikipedia links don't count as traffic - I just really admire Wikipedia and the whole idea of it. In keeping with the Wikipedia conflict-of-interest rules, which are good and necessary, I will not link to any of the movies on my site myself, but will notify editors of their existence and they can judge whether the link is worthy and then do the linking themselves. If you're working on an article about a North American nature subject that needs an image or some audio-visual, ask me and I'll try to load something up.

video example - image example (need to learn how to get the thing to center or go right) -