Clay Bolt is the Senior Communications Lead for WWF's Northern Great Plains (NGP) Program where he supports efforts to protect the grasslands of the Great Plains, restore plains bison and black-footed ferrets, and support food sovereignty initiatives for the region's Native nations. Clay also provides communications support to the NGP program's Sustainable Ranching Initiative, which is committed to working with ranchers to restore croplands back to grasslands, improve management of intact grasslands, and protect grasslands with agreements that prevent conversion.

Clay is also a Natural History and Conservation Photographer specializing in the world's smaller creatures. Clay's photography appears in publications such as National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, and National Wildlife Magazine. He is a Senior Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers, a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, and a past president of the North American Nature Photography Association. His work currently focuses on protecting North America's native bee species with a particular focus on threatened and endangered bumble bees. In 2017, he was a leading voice in the successful fight to protect the rusty-patched bumble bee under the Endangered Species Act- North America's first native bee to achieve this status. In 2019, Bolt became the first photographer to document a living Wallace's Giant Bee- the world's largest bee- as part of a four-person exploration team to rediscover the species in the Indonesian islands of North Maluku.