Simply stated, I’m a huge fan of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and have devoted many years of my life to photographing the bird refuge and its wonderful wildlife and scenery.
From that passion, I started this blog over 5 years ago to help other people appreciate and treasure the bird refuge as much as I do.
Besides this blog, I have also started a small but growing channel on YouTube about my birding and nature excursions but recently I had to pull down all the videos that were specifically about and recorded on the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge.
From what I have learned through researching the matter further, recording and uploading videos from federally owned public lands such as the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge to platforms such as YouTube that monetize the content is against federal law.
It’s quite an extensive story but for all intents and purposes, the short version of it is somehow it all started a couple years ago when a few YouTubers got in trouble at a national park for recording videos for their channel and one of them took the National Park Service to court over it.
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The YouTubers won but the park service appealed and the ruling eventually got overturned so we are back to not being allowed to record YouTube videos on federally owned public lands, including the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge.
Yeah, I don’t get it either but that is the world we live in apparently.
(Do you like podcasts? Great News because now you can follow Bear River Blogger on Spotify for our newly created podcast channel about our excursions in nature.)
It’s a little bit more involved than the brief explanation I gave here but the bottom line is as a result of all of this, I am adding podcasts to my content creation efforts to hopefully continue to share what’s going on about the famed Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge.
So as a result, I won’t be doing any video updates on the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge but I will be working on my new podcast channel that will, for the time being at least, be a substitute for videos about the refuge until congress can somehow fix this absurd situation regarding recording videos recorded on federally owned public lands and uploaded to social media platforms that monetize the content.
So feel free to join me on my Bear River Blogger podcast channel where I’ll continue to bring news and information about the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge as well as the other places in nature I love to photograph for this blog.
