But almost as important as that are the places this job has taken me: places I’d never otherwise have known existed, let alone been able to visit. There’ve been black mangrove swamps in Jamaica, alive with exotic birds, saltwater crocodiles, and sea turtles. A volcanic island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. A coffee plantation with an ecologically sustainable twist in Costa Rica. A ride through a wild buffalo herd in a pickup truck with a very large Gros Ventre game warden in northern Montana. A day in a fishing trawler with local fishermen, rocking along the base of gannet rookeries off the coast of Newfoundland. Not to mention the laughingest party I’ve been to in at least 50 years, in a fishing stage in Petty Harbour.

In January of this year our crew traveled to the San Andreas Fault valley south of San Francisco, where we took to the air in private planes operated under the aegis of Lighthawk, a volunteer pilots’ association that assists in conservation causes. Our trip there was to monitor efforts of both federal and private organizations to restore the endangered California condor. We soared for hours above the sharp, dry hills of the coast with a radio direction finder on our wings, searching for the unique radio signals of a few particular condors, and then hiked the trails of Pinnacles National Park to spot a few more of them – huge, but hovering so high above they appeared just dots against the sky.

This week we’ll be flying with Lighthawk again, but this time farther south, on the Arizona-Mexico border at the delta of the Colorado River. Our interest in California was the fight to save condors; here it’s the concerted efforts of several organizations to save what little is left of the once-mighty Colorado, which has often been described as the “Nile of North America.” Today, apparently, it’s been so tapped, for various purposes, by over 100 upstream dams that barely a trickle of it reaches its mouth in the Gulf of California. It’s been the death of a thousand cuts. A formerly two million-acre estuary, one of the largest and most productive in the world, supporting birds, vegetation, fish, wildlife, and an indigenous tribe, the Cocopah, has shriveled to a brown, desiccated desert no longer replenished by river sediments and increasingly eaten away by rising sea water.

I’ve seen a lot of river mouths in my time, most of them from water level in a canoe – from the very lively Leaf River escape rapid in Ungava with its 48-foot tide to the gentle, char-filled Kuujjua on Victoria Island. They all debouch concentrated volume of their journey. This one will be different, in spite of the videos we’ve all of rafts and drift boats leaping down chocolate roar of the Grand Canyon. A lot of that volume will have been drawn off to irrigate the farms of California’s Imperial Valley, and more to provide water to cities and towns all along the way, home to about 30 million people. As a desert river, the Colorado is just about the only source of water for all that development. So it’s no wonder there’s nothing left for its own delta

The best way to see it is from the air, in a light plane, with pilots who understand what they’re looking at. One of ours will be a retired engineer who worked on some of the impoundments, saw the results of his work, and has since been dedicated to mitigating its effects. On the ground, we’ll get to interview folks from various conservation organizations, the University of Arizona, and indigenous Cocopah, some of whose elders remember the river before it became moribund.

I wouldn’t have the producer’s job for twice what he’s making. All those moving parts: scheduled airlines (I’m flying from Burlington, the crew from Manchester); dates for interviews; private planes flying here and there; crossing the border – some of us in cars, others in Cessnas – for three days in Mexico. No, thanks. All I’ve got to do is read all I can get hold of, and what he sends me, and be prepared to ask good questions without hinting that I might already know the answers, all the while helping the interviewee forget that cameras are trained on us.

I just checked the weather in Mexicali. It’s in the 90s. After a New England winter, my body looks like a bowl of tapioca pudding, but it’s going to have to come out of its shell. And I’m going to have to remember how much I enjoy seeing and learning things I’ve hardly dreamed of till then.