THANK YOU CELEBRATION

Welcome to the Live Q&A and Screening of Deep in the Heart

Thursday, October 6

Thank you for your generous support of the 2022 Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival!

The 7th Annual Monarch Butterfly and Pollinator Festival will take place at Brackenridge Park on Saturday, October 8th and includes a variety of free educational and family-friendly events that celebrate our pollinators and our culture. Please join us!

Program

5:30-6:15: Mezcal Tasting and Reception
5:45-6:15: Plant Tour with Mark Lawson
6:15-7:00: Q&A Panel with Nathan Fuller and Skip Hobbie, moderated by Robert Rivard
7pm: Deep in the Heart Screening (Run Time: 1 hour and 41 minutes)

Deep in the Heart is a visually stunning celebration of what makes Texas unique — its diverse landscapes and remarkable wildlife behavior that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Told through the eyes of wildlife species ranging from the mysterious blind catfish to the elusive mountain lion, the story follows our ever-changing relationship with the natural world and showcases our ability to destroy, conserve, and recover wildlife and the habitat we mutually depend on. Narrated by Matthew McConaughey and featuring state-of-the-art cinematography, this family-friendly film journeys from the highest peaks in West Texas, through our aquifers, rivers, and bays, and deep into the Gulf of Mexico. Deep in the Heart aims to conserve our remaining wild places, to show the connectivity of water and wildlife, and to recognize Texas’ conservation importance on a continental scale.

Meet the Panelists

Skip Hobbie

Director of Photography, Deep in the Heart

Deep in the Heart’s Director of Photography, Skip Hobbie, is an Emmy Award-winning cinematographer based in Austin, Texas. A life-long devotee of Texas insects and critters, Hobbie attended the University of Texas and turned his passion for wildlife into an impressive globetrotting career filming for National Geographic, Animal Planet, Discovery and PBS. His passion for technology and cinematography come together to create a powerful weapon for conservation. Hobbie’s ability to capture dazzling footage of animals in their natural habitat allows audiences to connect to the wildlife that would otherwise be elusive.

A native Texan, Hobbie has taken his passion for wildlife all over the world and through his adventurous use of technology, viewers are able to live vicariously through him to have incredible experiences with nature, from seeing close-ups of Mountain Lions to experiencing the dark skies of Big Bend National Park.

Dr. Nathan Fuller

Bat Biologist, Texas Parks and Wildlife

A passionate advocate for bat conservation, Dr. Nathan Fuller serves as the Bat Biologist for Texas Parks and Wildlife. He received his PhD from Boston University where he researched the white-nose syndrome in bats, a fungal disease affecting bats in North America that has led to dramatic population declines of hibernating bats over the past decade. These often-overlooked pollinators are responsible for pollinating the plants that give us tequila, mezcal, chocolate, bananas and mangoes, and they are under threat. “Bats are unique, they’re smart, they’re caring mothers, and every time you try to make a generalized statement about bat behavior there’s always an exception somewhere among bat taxa. What better thing to study than a taxonomic group that always keeps you guessing?” said Fuller.

Fuller’s research has been widely published, and he can be found speaking for bats in news articles across the state from the Houston Chronicle to Texas Monthly.

Robert Rivard

Founder, San Antonio Report

Robert “Bob” Rivard is co-founder of the San Antonio Report, a nonprofit news publication serving Central and South Texas since 2012. Over his long career as a journalist, Rivard has served as the executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News, a senior editor and correspondent for Newsweek magazine, and reporter for five Texas newspapers. He is the author of Trail of Feathers, a nonfiction book chronicling the disappearance and murder of Express-News Mexico City correspondent Philip True, which was published to wide praise from the New York Times, Texas Monthly, and others. Rivard has received many accolades throughout his career, including Editor and Publisher Magazine’s prestigious ‘Editor of the Year’ and Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize for Distinguished Journalistic Service.