A still from Levey’s latest video, “Lincoln Wildlife: The Month in Review.” See more of his videos on his website, The Natural World.
By Alice Waugh
In a town already well known for its love of nature and wildlife, Lincoln resident Norman Levey offers a breathtaking new view of the natural world with the videos on his blog, The Natural World, including his latest effort—an immersion in the sights and sounds of summer called “Lincoln Wildlife: The Month in Review.”
As well as birds and a couple of mammals, the crisp HD video features closeup shots of various types of crickets making their distinctive sounds. Informative yet succinct subtitles help viewers understand what they’re seeing and hearing.
Levey, whose day job is in repair and restoration, got interested in birds as a boy when his grandparents gave him a pair of binoculars, “and I saw some birds I’d never seen or even heard of,” he said. His videography hobby got started about three years ago when he was asked by Lincoln bird expert Gwyn Loud to help him with a presentation for the Council on Aging. He helped Loud with PowerPoint as she requested, “but I also thought I’d do a ‘beyond the birdfeeders’ thing, so I took some videos of migrating waterfowl,” he said. The result was a 17-minute video of fall and winter birds on Flint’s Pond.
“People were just totally blown away,” Levey recalled. “They said, ‘Gee, we didn’t know we had this many kinds of ducks in Lincoln’.”
Levey never took a film class, and he doesn’t own fancy equipment—he uses a relatively inexpensive “superzoom” bridge camera and a five-year-old laptop—but he learned by watching lots of wildlife videos (especially National Geographic films from the 1970s) and spending many hours teaching himself to shoot and edit video. “It’s all in the editing—that’s where the magic is,” he said.
It helps that prices for electronic equipment have come way down in recent years. Video editing software usually comes standard with computers these days, “and the camera I use now would have cost $10,000 just a few years ago,” he said.
“A lot of people don’t know about the diversity of wildlife we have, even on nature walks. But if you can get on your belly and bushwhack out to a pond at six in the morning with a camera, it just opens a whole new world to people,” said Levey, who is also the Lincoln coordinator for the National Audubon Society’s annual Concord Christmas Bird Count—”the granddaddy of citizen science projects,” according to its website.
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