Ep. 814: Photographing Wolf Kills, Underwater Beavers, and Other Impossible Shots

00:00:08
Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you, shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening past, you can’t predict.

00:00:19
Speaker 2: Anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T l I t E dot com. Join today by wildlife photographer extraordinaire Ronan Donovan. If you ever I don’t know, man, if you ever look at National Geographic Right or stuff like that, or some super like amazing wildlife images that pops up and it makes its way all over the place, like, for instance, if you’re kind of into wildlife and you have recently seen these extraordinary images of a beaver swimming around under the ice doing his business, or the whitest wolves you’ve ever seen ganging up and killing Musko’s pictures which we’re everywhere for a while. That’s this guy’s wildlife bile just turned photographer filmmaker did Kingdom of the White Wolf for a nat GEOFILM series. He’s a national geographic explorer and storytelling fellow and describes himself as a conservation photographer.

00:01:36
Speaker 3: Don got that right, Yeah, that sounds great.

00:01:38
Speaker 2: And what we’re talking about is who introed us was one of our camera guys who’s a vision who paints his pictures of visual imagery. Rick Smith and I was talking about how me and Rick getting a lot of fights. One of the biggest fights I’ve gotten in about with Rick Smith was about a white T shirt. We’re filming one time and we were in Hawaii and I had on a white T shirt. Rick’s like, you can’t film in a white T shirt? And I said, watch me, and we got to fight about it. I wore the white T shirt and to this day when I see that footage, I’m like, Wow, you really can’t wear a white T shirt.

00:02:19
Speaker 3: They can’t do it. Yeah, Rick, generally everything that he puts out is very well thought out.

00:02:27
Speaker 2: Everything is not thought out. Sometimes Rick is wrong. Rick’s off and wrong, and then we have there’s a thing that will happen where.

00:02:40
Speaker 3: Uh are are.

00:02:44
Speaker 2: We have another guy, Seth, who comes on the show all the time, and Seth and Rick aren’t exactly aligned on certain political issues. For instance, COVID respects. They had very different views on what would be an appropriate response to COVID. And my god that I get sick of hearing about that. You’d be like out in the woods, you know, camping or whatever, and just in the background you just hear those two. Yeah, me and Rick Bout came to blows over white T shirts. But he introduced us, and here we are.

00:03:25
Speaker 3: Here we are. We’ll see how many fights we get in something.

00:03:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, tell me, so we’re not gonna We’re not gonna be together long enough. We have to go spend a week or two together and then we’ll get a fight. Tell me about the the the beaver under the ice thing. It never occurred to me. You don’t see pictures of beavers under the ice.

00:03:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean that’s you know, that’s like their whole winter world. Yeah.

00:03:47
Speaker 2: I’m always explaining that. I was explaining that to a guy the other day, where a guy had a problem with beavers that plugged up his irrigation ditch. But then they drained the ditch, and I was explaining, they make mistakes. Like he thought he was cool and could build like an under the ice environment here because he’s planning on for four months. Whatever he’s planning on. He’s trying to figure out how can I live where I never go into the open air, And then you drained.

00:04:19
Speaker 3: His spot.

00:04:20
Speaker 2: Now he’s in a tough position. He’s got to strike off cross country.

00:04:26
Speaker 3: Beaver and winter without his food, cash and a home.

00:04:28
Speaker 2: It’s like it’s like he made a bad mistake. Probably he’s made a bad mistake and then he’s gonna be like get killed by a yard.

00:04:35
Speaker 3: Doge, cougars whatever it is.

00:04:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, to tell about that a little bit, like you wanted to someone said, hey, get a picture of a beaver under the ice.

00:04:44
Speaker 3: The assignment came through and it was. It was with the writer Ben gold Farm. Yep, he was great.

00:04:50
Speaker 2: We talked about having him on the show. He wrote a book called Eager.

00:04:52
Speaker 3: You should totally have him on. Really, he’s really interesting. He’s presenting Bowsing a few times, great times. Communicator, funny, easy going guy and very well researched on all things beaver. And he’s got a new book that was about the Boss Roads, yeah, which is also another interesting but yeah, he.

00:05:10
Speaker 2: Mark one of our colleagues, Mark Kenyon, had him on the show. Yeah about the road stuff.

00:05:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, I’ve seen him present and he’s great.

00:05:16
Speaker 4: Oh there he is with Dan Flores.

00:05:18
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, I mean there’s a picture of it. Yeah, I’m sure there are buds.

00:05:24
Speaker 4: You can tell sounds like you’re late to the he needs a hair cut.

00:05:27
Speaker 2: Let me see that.

00:05:31
Speaker 4: All right, that’s definitely Dan.

00:05:33
Speaker 2: You can see that’s Dan.

00:05:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m sure they’re good friends.

00:05:38
Speaker 2: Okay, so go on.

00:05:39
Speaker 3: So yeah, the story got pitched and it was you know, it was kind of like a benefit of beaver’s on dry landscapes kind of the story to make it succinct, and they wanted a lot of livestock out culture kind of working lands with beaver’s kind of images and some natural history of beavers. And I pitched the idea of like, well, I want to see what they do under the ice. I want to I’m accessing there winter food cash. And it took it took like three winters of trying.

00:06:06
Speaker 2: I’m serious.

00:06:07
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, there’s like there’s some pictures that are of the initial mistakes.

00:06:14
Speaker 2: Let me, I just want to tell people, if you’re listening your you’re screwed. No, we’re gonna do our. Damn, we’re gonna do our.

00:06:21
Speaker 4: It’ll be a rich.

00:06:23
Speaker 2: Yes, this is mostly the vast majority of our audience only listens. Okay, I’m sorry, and they’ll still have We’re gonna show a lot of imagery that if you want to check out and us talking about it, go to watch the show on YouTube.

00:06:40
Speaker 4: Yes, please do.

00:06:41
Speaker 2: You’ll see the imagery. You’ll see the imagery. We will do our best to try to tell you what’s going on.

00:06:47
Speaker 4: Your podcast network YouTube channel.

00:06:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, not the regular meat Eat.

00:06:51
Speaker 2: Media podcast network. If not, I’ll do my best to say what you’re seeing. Here is a beaver.

00:06:59
Speaker 3: This a beaver underwater.

00:07:01
Speaker 4: At the top of the screen. There’s a bit of ice.

00:07:03
Speaker 3: Yes.

00:07:03
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:07:04
Speaker 3: So the first few attempts were like, essentially I started too late one year, the first winter, tell me why, scheduling. Basically, I started too late. Like the ice is mark, yeah, March, so it’s like a warm March, and it was everything was starting to mountain, so you get run off, you get sediment build up in the water column basically. And I was at the site along the Rocky Mountain front in Depou year, just this cool little ranch that’s up against public and was putting this system under the ice. And it’s this whole elaborate setup where it’s like, I gotta drill test holes, just a small little chainsaw hole through the ice to put a GoPro under water with a light to be able to just like to see what’s going on, Like where, what’s the underwater world?

00:07:48
Speaker 2: Like do you mind if I real quick tell people something?

00:07:50
Speaker 3: Sure?

00:07:52
Speaker 2: Uh, I realized we kind of left something a little bit unsaid in the North. I’m gonna start with something. I’m gonna start with a different thing. If you take beavers from the North and transplant them down south, you know, it takes them a while to realize they don’t need to do all this. They’re like, old, we got to make a food cash. Yeah, the beaver’s down south.

00:08:12
Speaker 3: They no, you don’t.

00:08:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, but if you take a beer from the north and turn down south, it’ll be a while. So he realizes he doesn’t need to go through all this bullshit.

00:08:21
Speaker 4: Yeah, it’s like someone who grew up in the Great Depression.

00:08:23
Speaker 5: Yeah, just stuff and its stuff and cash in their mattress.

00:08:26
Speaker 2: Like why does my mom so a beaver? So this is this is about the North.

00:08:35
Speaker 3: Uh.

00:08:36
Speaker 2: A beaver needs to have deep water. They like deep water inis it’s where they escape. But they need to have deep water in the winter because everything’s going to freeze. So they’ll have a lodge or a bank den with a submarine entrance where they can come in a hole underwater and then go up into a cavity that they excavate out of a riverbank or the shore of a lake or whatever. Or they create a dome shaped lodge and they have a cavity in there that is somewhat insulated and they can live up in there for food because they can’t get out of the ice until they they’re very good at busting up through the ice. But when they can’t get out of the ice, they start collecting all kinds of twigs and small things, willow, whatever they can get to they like, and they weigh it down with big heavy logs so that it pins it all down. And then throughout the winter they can just go to this cash and then they usually have the cash right in front of their lodge or right in front of their bank den, and usually skirting in on the left or right side. They have a runway and the entrance up into their hut or bank den, and that’s their food pile. And a food pile can be the size.

00:09:51
Speaker 5: Of a parked truck, and it’s visually it’s like a raft essentially that they’re sinking to the bottom of the stream bed or the river bed.

00:09:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there’s a surface play like you can bottom yeah, until you get a couple of feet of snow. You can spot the food cash. But it’s like an iceberg for whatever’s sticking up. How what’s the formula with the iceberg, like ten percent of it or something.

00:10:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, thirty seventy something like that.

00:10:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, whatever sticking up that thing is probably packed with feed all the way down to the bottom, and they excavate all that mud out to keep it deep. And if you jump, like if you’re looking for a place to dive in a pond, if you jump off a beaver lodge, you might be hitting six eight feet of water because they excavate all that mud out to build that lodge and it creates this big deep pool and that’s their refuge if like under the ice where there are cash is so trying to get a picture one going about his business down there is what we’re talking about, Yeah, said state.

00:10:47
Speaker 3: It’s a good setup. Yeah, I think it is. I mean, it’s it’s like the one of the coolest things that an animal does in the way of like casing food for months and months. Like there aren’t many other animals that can do that, like you know a lot of carnivorous cash, but they get discovered pretty quickly by birds or other carnivores. But like the beavers have this thing where they’re able to just store yeah way north like in Alaska or edge of the Arctic. I mean it’s like, yeah, six months plus of food that they need to cash in this form of and it’s just a cambium, Like it’s just this little tiny bit and they’re mainly just I think a lot of it’s just maintenance, you know, where they’re just like feeding the micro gut biome in their stomach enough to like five versus like I don’t know if they necessarily are gaining weight. It’s just kind of like a maintenance thing. And so these beavers that I was focused on trying to get these pictures, like the beginning, it was just murky water sediment you get I was actually amazed. You get a little bit of runoff, even if it’s like teens temperature and you have sun, you’d start to see in the water column just a little waze coming in. Yeah, so the first one, like the next couple of pictures here, Phil, there’s so.

00:11:55
Speaker 2: That’s your setup.

00:11:56
Speaker 3: That’s the setup. Yeah, that’s kind of the crazy lights set up underwater, can camera, live feed to a laptop, and you know, beavers are mainly nocturnal, and that was what I was going on. So it’s basically a lot of cold nights doing that.

00:12:11
Speaker 2: So here you are, you just laid out on the ice with all this electronics.

00:12:15
Speaker 3: It looks like ice fishing set up without the shanty to.

00:12:19
Speaker 2: Keep you warm. Yeah, let me hit you with one thing about this, just because it’s coming up right away. They’re very like if you go in, if you’re trapping and you go in, set up a lodge and your axe and holes through the ice, and they’re already pretty lethargic. In the winter. You might not see activity three or four days because they spook so bad. Were you finding that they would take a while to get used to all that change.

00:12:42
Speaker 3: They were pretty curious even like they were. Yeah, the first time I set up, like next picture, you can see this like pea soup beaver coming by. That was the first night really. Yeah, Yeah, because they they’re basically that’s the.

00:12:55
Speaker 2: First night, the first year. Yep, oh shit, I’d be happy with that.

00:13:00
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, working on different.

00:13:05
Speaker 3: But the pose is cool, Like I love that image. It’s the beaver with a stick in his mouth and a curvetail, Like you can kind of tell it’s a beaver, but the people that are listening, it’s just like a You could just throw a whole bag of gravel and sand and mud into the frame and you can kind of see a beaver through it with the ice on top of it.

00:13:23
Speaker 4: It could also be a rat that had drowned, and.

00:13:25
Speaker 2: Yea, it’s clear.

00:13:27
Speaker 3: If you think it couldn’t be a rat or a beaver, then my editors are gonna be like, that’s not gonna work.

00:13:32
Speaker 2: So they’re like, so that’s like a dead rat and you’re tough.

00:13:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. You just made that up. You just created that. The next picture was getting a little bit closer. This is the same site you can see. So the other thing about starting too late was they’d pretty much gone through most of their food cash already and they were already getting access out of the ice. Yeah, because the stuff was melting on the edges and they’ll they will come out during the winter if if they so choose and there’s access.

00:13:55
Speaker 2: You know what, trappers will say, They’ll say that the feed pile sours okay, and they’ll say that they don’t like like after a couple of months, they really don’t want the feed pile. And that’s when they start doing like you know how that’s always the ice is a little thin along the damage. They’ll start going and pressing up with their head and body to start trying to find any way to bust out because they everybody says they get sick of it.

00:14:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you can see this is all like sediments on top of the sticks. And I was so this this was learning curve for me. It was like way too late. The beavers were already actually doing more excavation up creek. So I would literally be there watching at night, get through all that set up, be freezing my ass off, and then see like a brown wall come through the frame and realize that there was a beaver up creak just like excavating. Yeah, just doing a bunch of stuff. And then it’s done for the night. There’s like no settling at all.

00:14:50
Speaker 2: And you see like all kinds of trout blasting by.

00:14:53
Speaker 3: You’d see some trouts this site had some really good brook trout. Next picture you can see the same kind of site beaver coming by curious getting closer. So this was the first year. Are you manually yeah, this is all triggered.

00:15:06
Speaker 4: You’re like, oh, okay, yeah, yeah.

00:15:07
Speaker 3: So I’m like seeing it coming. It’s live live, but it’s like, no, it is, Yeah, it’s a live feed. So it’s not like a like a motion triggered camera system that are like camera traps that I use for photographing wolves or other things bears, where you’re not there at all for those pictures. But for this, yeah, I’m there. That laptop set up is I’m seeing what’s happening. I have ambient lights that are constant, that are low, so I have I can see what’s coming in the frame. I can see the beaver coming in, and then I trigger the actual camera.

00:15:38
Speaker 2: All these You’re like, you’re hit, You’re like wham.

00:15:40
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:15:41
Speaker 2: I just assumed when I saw the images, when when they came out, it was like, you know, I don’t know if in the wildlife photography world there was a little.

00:15:50
Speaker 3: Splash nice yea.

00:15:52
Speaker 2: I assumed it was all camera trap shit. I don’t know how that. I never thought how that would work underwater. I guess it doesn’t work underwater.

00:15:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean we, I say we. There’s some amazing photo engineers at National Geographic and some other companies that contract and worked on the system. They did develop an underwater camera trap system. I tried it out with this. It just wasn’t the right application. It was Maine for doing like submerging, diving down maybe like fifty meters, having a diver behind the system and then setting it up. But it is like a self contained lights underwater housing has a computer model AI trained live feed video camera that triggers based on what comes in front of it and for my purposes. I tried it out, but it was like a total pain, Like I had to deploy it down. I couldn’t see any live feed do it didn’t have any wiring coming up, so I couldn’t really control it from top side. So this was a whole system that developed with this guy Tom O’Brien at National Geographic Photo Engineering.

00:16:48
Speaker 2: Will be the longest steakout you ever did.

00:16:50
Speaker 3: The first one was for this. It was like a week and a half straight.

00:16:54
Speaker 2: I mean how many hours, sorry, how many hours I would do like steak out?

00:16:58
Speaker 3: I mean for the beaver one maybe like sixteen hours something like that single steakout. Yeah, yeah, it’s long sit. Yeah. I put up a tent for a few of them.

00:17:09
Speaker 2: Serious, Yeah, you’d make a good ice Wisconsin deer on their neck is standing up for six or seven pictures, then you go back. He’s wasting a lot of talent, yeah, because he could be a phenomenal ice fisher. How you been here sixteen hours?

00:17:24
Speaker 3: I’ve never I think I’ve been ice fishing once. It’s all I needed. Yeah, that picture here, This was like the three point zero setup. So I had like a little kind of like high tech hobo camp. Had a little bit of weather protection there.

00:17:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, he’s got uh this is two by fours. I see wall of aluminum beaver lodge. I see a ridge rest, a tarp, tent. Yeah, tons of.

00:17:48
Speaker 3: Tons of wires. I did two full nights here in the sleeping bag and like falling asleep and waking up like it’s tedious. And they didn’t come out once at this site. And at nine am they had another lodge up creek, and they would come to this one where they had their food cash at like nine am. The two of them, they’d chatter they’d have a conversation and then they’d start doing their feeding rounds coming out to the cash pile. So I didn’t have to do any nighttime work at this one anymore. And then you go back one photo and now you start to see like the clarity coming in like totally different situations.

00:18:25
Speaker 2: So you’re moving to You’re you’re picking your beaver ponds based on.

00:18:30
Speaker 3: Clear clarity only that basically, And I realized too.

00:18:33
Speaker 2: Like I need beaver’s in a clear spot and.

00:18:35
Speaker 3: The pond, Like initially was like I’m gonna start a pond. It’s gonna be great. They’re gonna be contained. I know where they are. You can see the cash, but the pond, the sediment of the pond is crazy, like it never settles and there’s all these tannins. There’s no water flow. Basically you think of like you know, Great Lakes area, those ponds are brown tea water essent. Sure.

00:18:53
Speaker 2: And then just the nature of a beaver pond, you could have like a crystal clear trout stream and then you get into the dam like like dams have, beaver ponds have a very short life cycle because they set, they load up with sediments so fast. They’re like they’re a sediment trap. Yeah, you know what I mean. It’s like a picture I never thought about. You know, a lot of times you get you chop a hole and you like put it around your eyes and you can kind of see what’s going on. Yeah, but yeah, I could picture now that that would be an that even that though you’re not happy with that, one would be an extraordinarily clear water.

00:19:26
Speaker 3: This was extraordinary clear water. And this was a section where they have I mean, the Beebles will have multiple you know, they have multiple dam structures, and so a lot of the times the upper dams will filter out a lot of sediment to begin and so you get this was like the perfect mix of a stream that had the right amount of flow. So if there was disturbance, you know, they do kick up dust or settment whenever they.

00:19:46
Speaker 2: Go by, and in some ways you take that as a bad sign. Like if you chop a hole and look down in there and you can see the runs, yeah have sediment, it’s a sign.

00:19:58
Speaker 3: That they’re in there. Yeah exactly. Yeah.

00:20:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, so if it’s too clear, you might be like, oh.

00:20:02
Speaker 3: Right, what’s no beaver? No activity? Yeah, So this site was great and that was the picture ended up being the one that we selected, and yeah, god, that’s awesome. Yeah, just trying to show because every stick in this picture beaver’s placed, and the idea that they engineered the landscape so profoundly that they create this, as you said, refugio for themselves throughout the winter where they can stay safe and fat and happy and warm. I mean, the structures of lodges are basically like Adobe’s. They mut them, they make them incredible.

00:20:33
Speaker 2: And as he choose the as he choose the cambium off, they’ll sticks sink down.

00:20:38
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, they’ll and they’ll come back like the ones under the beaver. Now in the picture, those are all discarded so that you can see they’ve been stripped and then they just sink to the bottom.

00:20:47
Speaker 2: So this beaver right here is he did you catch him drawing? Is he drawing that off the feed pile or is he still working on the feed.

00:20:56
Speaker 3: Pile drawing that off?

00:20:58
Speaker 2: So the feed pile, so he’s nabbing that.

00:21:00
Speaker 3: His piles on the left side of the frame, kind of in the back there, and then the darkness that this beaver’s headed into is the lodge entrance.

00:21:08
Speaker 2: So he’s taking that sucker up in there to take it in for a snack, and then he’ll boot it back out yep, exactly, and come and discard it. So that that big pile below him of all those sticks that have had the bark stripped off, that’s all stuff he’s kicked out of his lodge. But he’s going up in there because he’s got to get up into a thing you don’t think about. Yeah, he can’t eat underwater, right, he’s got to drag that stick up in somewhere and find a little pocket up in a bank down or lodge to chew it. And then he wouldn’t have any room in there if he never moved him back out, So then he’s got to clean it out and make a little just like a little uh, I guess you’d call it like a midden. Yep. Yeah, he’s got like a little trash midden outside his front.

00:21:49
Speaker 3: Door, yeah exactly. And that’s what piles up. I mean, like, the amount of maintenance they have to do in their territory is pretty impressive, not just the dams, but like everything around it.

00:21:58
Speaker 2: What’s cool too, is how if you catch one on the land, you know, he’s very vulnerable. Yeah, I mean you can pick him up by the tail. I don’t recommend it, but seen it done, done, seen it done. Don’t recommend it, but I mean they’re vulnerable. Like anything can catch a beaver, any predator if he catches them on land and gets between the water and the beaver, the beaver’s kind of his. But you look at that sucker in the water. It looks like a porpoise. I mean it’s so graceful.

00:22:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean they just hat a straight line on there.

00:22:32
Speaker 2: It’s just all curves.

00:22:33
Speaker 3: And yeah, they swim fast, and you know human olympian can swim underwater, and they just do it that little flick at the tail. It was amazing how fast they would because they’re they’re pretty slow, like generally under the water, they’re not unless they’re scared. They’re just kind of like cruising. And there’s no previous picture where they’re kind of like torpedoing where it just kind of like do a little tail flick and then just just talk. It just be perfectly buoyant in the middle of the water column.

00:22:57
Speaker 2: Let’s see cut more cruise.

00:22:59
Speaker 3: I think these all the yeah, those beaver ones, we have some.

00:23:02
Speaker 2: More of a I wanted to see more of your like total keepers.

00:23:06
Speaker 3: I mean I just showed two.

00:23:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, so in the end, you you you don’t have like twenty that you’re super happy with.

00:23:13
Speaker 3: No, I mean I have like so basically there’s like four frames previous to this where you’re getting like the beaver coming in. So I’m like taking a series of images beating up in and out. But I only had like I don’t know, five opportunities with this really water clarity.

00:23:28
Speaker 2: And yeah, so how many hours total if you had to just take a ballpark spent how many hours you spend on the ice.

00:23:35
Speaker 3: On the ice, it was probably probably over one hundred.

00:23:42
Speaker 2: How many times did you punch through the ice and get wet.

00:23:45
Speaker 3: Less than one hundred, but not too far away.

00:23:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s see, that’s that’s like a deadly we should do a public service announcement. Yes, beavers use their runs. This is kind of this is kind of trippy. Beavers use their runs so much. You can have eighteen inches of ice on each side of a run and the run has no ice or an inch of ice. They use them so much. I think they have to. Yeah, it’s to the point where a lot of times you can once you learn what you’re looking at. You can look at a frozen beaver pond and by the discolorations in the ice, see the runs. And also they’re exhaling underwater, they’re blowing bubbles, and all those bubbles freeze into the ice. But often I will tell like I’ll be out and messing around with my kids, I’ll be like, watch your ass in front of that lodge, because there’s gonna be bad ice. Yeah, it is a day, and it’s from them just whirling around there, whirling around.

00:24:38
Speaker 3: Just keeping it stirred up, just like a little agitation in the water column that keeps it like that. Yeah, I mean when you.

00:24:43
Speaker 2: See you were punching your boots, you fall in like.

00:24:45
Speaker 3: Up to your elbows like those times. And with chest waiters that gets sketchy too, and yeah, but yeah, most of the time I didn’t lose any gear, thankfully, which was the thing that I was kind of the most worried about, even stuff like melting through the ice. During that warmer section like that one that I was in in March. I went into April too, and it was like full on runoff. Was I was doomed.

00:25:10
Speaker 2: Growing up the Great Lakes, like we spent a lot of time on the ice. I would kind of categorize my head when someone said they fell through the ice, it would be did you get your hair wet? And there’s fell through the ice one time in my life where I got my hair wet. A lot of times it’s like knees down, waist down. One time and it was at a beaver lodge. Did I get my hair wet? That’s a big fall through. That’s because most of them are like in the end, you know, it’s scary for a minute, but then it’s like fairly minor.

00:25:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, usually like your chest up is still out of the water, like okay, I’m okay, but.

00:25:52
Speaker 2: Complete and total collapse. That’s great, man. So what uh, let’s talk about background bit? Oh where I heard it’s in Krin’s notes. You were like trouble maker when you’re a little kid. Yeah, I was a trouble maker.

00:26:07
Speaker 3: How bad? I got a couple of felonies when I was Yeah, when I was thirteen.

00:26:12
Speaker 2: Is there such a thing?

00:26:13
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, they can charge you and then doesn’t miss No.

00:26:16
Speaker 2: Real bad troublemaker. Yeah.

00:26:17
Speaker 3: It was thieves, Like I was just like stealing stuff.

00:26:20
Speaker 2: Were you brought up poor?

00:26:22
Speaker 3: Not poor? No?

00:26:23
Speaker 2: No, we just a rebel.

00:26:25
Speaker 3: We were probably I don’t know, lower middle class when my dad built a house I grew up in. My parents were kind of like back of the Landers, but not hippies. Mom had her master’s in teaching and dad was in Vietnam combat and then came home.

00:26:41
Speaker 2: And yeah, so did he have a hard time coming home and dealing with all that he did.

00:26:46
Speaker 3: I mean he’s he’s very well adjusted with it now. I think in a lot of ways, it’s very open and talked about anything. But for a long time, no, he just bottled it up. I mean, he drank a lot coming back. It was hard for him coming back. You wouldn’t say Francisco. He’s driving cabs, kind of like sleeping out of the cab and just a hard time coming home. And people were just like they didn’t want to hear about it.

00:27:07
Speaker 2: Man, I grew up around my dad was World War two guy, But I grew up around so many Vietnam guys. I don’t know why there’s such a I don’t know. Just like, but even if I just think about in my area around our lake, like it’d be like Vietnam goy, Vietnam got Vietnam and not knowing it now, not not or sorry, not knowing it then, but thinking back now and be like, oh yeah, man, there was a lot of Like I was born, I was born in seventy four, dude, there was a lot of tension about that shit when I was a kid that you just you know, you kid, you don’t conceptualize everything. I even remember my dad saying it’s different for them. My dad’d be like, we came home, we were heroes. If you wanted when I came home, if you wanted a job, the right thing to do was someone else would step aside to make a job for you when you came home from World War Two. He says, these guys, is not that way, and it was alive and well you know at that time.

00:28:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think it’s still it’s still like a palpable memory for that generation and those of us. Yeah, raised by that. I mean, my dad’s definitely I think has pts.

00:28:12
Speaker 2: What year were you born?

00:28:14
Speaker 3: I was born in eighty three.

00:28:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, So he’s like, it wasn’t old, Like the war wasn’t old.

00:28:20
Speaker 3: No, no, no, I mean, and it wasn’t something that he didn’t start talking about until he went back. Actually he has like a beautiful relationship now with Vietnam, and he’s been back maybe like fifteen times.

00:28:30
Speaker 2: Kid.

00:28:30
Speaker 3: He has started an NGO or yeah, contribute to an NGO and started his own branch of it to help build homes like two thousand dollars homes for veterans in Vietnam, specifically in the southern end where he was in the Mekong Delta. Oh really, he was on those river patrol boats like the apocalyst now boats.

00:28:45
Speaker 5: Yeah, my father in law was the worked on one of the barges that serviced those boats, and he went back like two years ago to the village where they were anchored.

00:28:55
Speaker 3: Yep. Yeah, I went back with my dad for a visit in two I was ten. There was a translator ming that my dad worked with, who was this like badass little dude who went on to work with the seals after my dad left, and he was my dad thought he was killed. He heard some story of the Via Kong. Afterwards, I put him interm camp and then got caught up to him afterwards in a bar or something, and then he died. And then my dad was reading a book and found out that he was still alive. So really we went and met him, and yeah, it was cool. The guy’s great. He passed away just a few years ago, and but my dad supports his family a lot, and yeah, just a cool relationship that it was very healing. It’s been healing from my dad a lot in that world to go back and have that relationship.

00:29:37
Speaker 2: But you ran pretty wild, ran.

00:29:39
Speaker 3: Pretty wild, and yeah, some of that ‘s probably like a repercussion of maybe some of the trauma that my dad brought home with him. He was gone a lot, you know. The the impetus for what I was doing stealing stuff was all about like how to fit in, like how to be cool, how to try to get friends. And I just I was bigger than most kids when I was younger, just tall, kind of fell into like a bully roll and started to just like act out as a way of getting attention. It was like a negative feedback loop. And there was trouble at home. My parents got divorced, you know, there was some abuse, and I would act out in school and then like stealing stuff just became like an easy progression. And my brother’s older, and so I kind of like would run a little harder because I had him in front of me. And it was literally just like a few months of realizing you could steal stuff like people where I grew up. I grew up in Roal, Vermont, and people don’t lock their car doors good. And it was like middle school spring break, walking around the town near where I grew up and just like stealing stuff and then started stealing bigger things. The two felonies were I broke into a truck and stole someone’s shotgun. God at some guy’s like antique. It was like his grandfather’s shotgun. Feel bad about that, still he got it back. I treated it pretty well for being thirteen and not knowing what I was doing. And then another one was breaking entering into like a golf course maintenance shed, like messing around stuff, and like breaking entering is like an automatic automatic felony.

00:31:11
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, it feels like yeah yeah.

00:31:15
Speaker 3: And so much of it was like this this idea around.

00:31:18
Speaker 2: Stealing Brian harm and stuff, whatever, this.

00:31:21
Speaker 3: Idea around like young men, like teenagers, we don’t really have like initiations anymore, like rights of passage, which is a thing that seems to be kind of built into the human psyche to have these stages of life that we are accepted that we have to go through. And testosterone is one of those things where like, if it’s not in service, it’s like a big it’s a big problem. If like men aren’t in service to creating and protecting more life in communities, then it’s just going to become this dangerous thing. And I think that this was like a in the absence of those initiations. I’ve come to understand now that like men, especially boys will do rough initiations themselves where they’ll just like they’ll build push the boundaries because they’re not given those guardrails necessarily. And so I was thankfully my parents stepped in. My dad was now a bound instructor for years, like an outdoor experiential learning program, and was like, all right, we just got to send run into the wild again. And I grew up rural kid, you know, run around and we didn’t have grown up I didn’t want to have guns around the house. But we didn’t eat meat either, and all grow vegetarian. We had fished sometimes, but my parents sent me out to Oregon to this like wilderness therapy camp. This after you got in trouble is after I got in trouble. We got the courts, like I had enough. I had the four mister meters and two felonies, And there’s like a point system around if you, you know, do a certain number of things, you can have to go to jumail attention center. If you do a certain amount, it could be the judge’s discretion. And I was in that judge’s discretion realm God, and my parents didn’t want me to go to juvie, and so they found this camp. It was like I was still in the court sys judge satisfied. Was judge satisfied with that? We won’t send him a juvie, send him here and we’ll reevalue when he gets back. And so yeah, I went out when I was thirteen. I had my fourteenth birthday under like a tarp tent. Like it’s kind of like a hoods in the woods idea where you’re stripped down of like all your identifying possessions were wearing like fatigues, army surplus store stuff, and you’re sleeping under just like a tarp tent. And I was the youngest kid. The rest were yeah, fifteen, sixteen, eighteen year olds and a lot of like hard There were some hard dudes, and there was co ed too. There were some women too that were just from inner city world and just like somehow found some way to get to this camp. And it basically it was like putting you through a series of trials. You do like a week long physical intensive where there’s fourteen of us and we would carry like a we had two stretchers of wilderness stretchers we had to carry that had like two hundred and fifty pounds of our gear and water and community supplies, and so seven of us would have to carry one and the other seven would carry the other. And you do I think the first day we did like less than a mile in like flat prairie of southern southeast Oregon, and then you know, kind of got our stride a little bit and we could do like, you know, six miles maybe in a day. And then you did a week long solo.

00:34:11
Speaker 2: What’s the So I don’t want to stay too long at this camp here, but what do they what’s the repercussion if you don’t move the stretcher? Like if you got all these if you got all these kids that are trying to like push against authority and you say, hey move, move, go, go go, what why do they why can they not say it? No?

00:34:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean a lot of that was part of it. Like that happened the first day where people were just like we’re not doing this, like this is dumb.

00:34:36
Speaker 2: But then what happens when you don’t.

00:34:38
Speaker 3: Well there’s like like your your food and your kind of like the other group supplies are still ahead of you as well, so like you do kind of need there is a motivation there God, and then eventually the other like the kind of peer pressure comes in where like some of the kids are like just do it, just let’s just do this, pick it up, do it, like so let’s get it over with. And some kids ran away and they yeah, they would basically just like call the cops and be like, all right, this kid’s running and we all knew what the consequences were if we ran all then you go to the next step. But yeah, yeah, and the next step up is like they wanted their recommendation. I was there for a month for kind of the main program, and then I was there for an extended because I didn’t they felt like I didn’t get the work done. I just kind of like coasted through, and they recommended to go to like the next step is these like private jails essentially for youth. They’re called lockdowns. They’re all over the country and they’re you know, they require certain level of affluence or money to be able to go to these things because it’s basically a boarding school, but you’re start at the lowest level and you work way up based on behavior to more freedom. And there’s some of these programs that like if you graduate from them, you can go to any college in the US because it means that you’ve run the gauntlet and you’re like a very formed young person, a teenager. So yeah, so I I was one of the best things for me was just going to this and.

00:35:56
Speaker 2: That fixed that fixed it.

00:35:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I didn’t no more failing, went to No More felonies. Yeah, and I went to like a it was a reform school essentially, like a second chance school in Northern Vermont. Afterwards, and like skip eighth grade went there. There’s one other kid in my freshman class and my best friend there at the time. He had stolen cars. He grew up kind inner city and he was still in cars while we were there, and so I had all these opportunities. There were kids doing heroin in their rooms. It was stuff that I hadn’t been exposed to, and I yeah, that change of being in the wild. Essentially, it was like realizing that I had no freedom. I was sent to this place and I was in trouble all the time, and all I wanted was freedom. I was like a super rowdy kid, didn’t want to be indoors, didn’t sit still, and so it was like, yeah, just realizing that I had to conform in some ways or at least like work within it versus like just being held against my will, which is how it was a lot of times. So yeah, that did. That absolutely fixed me.

00:36:57
Speaker 2: At what point you decide you’re going to study biology?

00:37:00
Speaker 3: That was.

00:37:02
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:37:02
Speaker 3: I went to college and decided I started out wildlife management. I switched actually graduated a business degree in like a minor and environmental conservation, and then went into wildlife biology after that.

00:37:12
Speaker 2: So what was your first gig in biology?

00:37:14
Speaker 3: First gig was doing a spotted owl surveys in Yosemite National Park. So there was a fire ecology study. Basically it was like how well the owls do in areas of burned versus unburned areas? Showed basically that there wasn’t much of a change that the owls or fire adapted. But the actual work was amazing. I mean I grew up in Vermont, didn’t have experience really in like the West. My dad brought me out to maybe a couple of weeks I had in the Bear twos and then win Rivers, which was amazing. So I knew, I knew what wildness and like the idea of an intact ecosystem and old growth forests and grizzlies and these places where wildness doesn’t exist in New England in that way, and so being in Yosemite is like a it’s a dream for that you have giants to is you have huge, unbelievable landscapes, and we were we would catch owls and ban them and monitor them throughout the throughout the summer and basically decide how many chicks they had. And that was kind of like the scope of the work. And so it would be out camping back back in for ten days on four days off.

00:38:17
Speaker 2: And were you into were you getting into photography at that point?

00:38:20
Speaker 3: That was when I bought a camera. Yeah. I bought like a used like a film camera on eBay, like a couple hundred bucks for everything, and had the idea that I would be interested in photography. I took a black and white class when I was in high school, but didn’t really take to it. And it was mainly a vehicle to like photograph the wildlife and the landscapes that I was like photographed the beauty like I would if there was like a telephone pole or like a person or a car, I’d be like, there’s no picture Like that was that was like I was super strict about it.

00:38:49
Speaker 2: You didn’t want any photos touched by man. No.

00:38:52
Speaker 3: I just thought, Yeah, I got just enamored with with these like the idea, and I think we all experienced it, this idea of like being in a ecosystem. It’s almost like being around people that have a regulated nervous system, like we have these you know, elders, I think basically people who are like you can’t flap them, like they’re just like solid. I think about, like, I don’t know any of these old timers you’ve been around, who’ve seen the world and have been through hardships and are I think of I mean some of these religious figures or like elders that I’ve spent time with around Indian communities around here where they’re just they speak wisdom and that’s their role in life. And I think that people are drawn to that, you know, you just like when you’re around that kind of a human that kind of a nervous system, you’re just you’re at ease, you’re curious, you want to learn from them. And that’s how I feel around like ecosystems that are that are intact, that haven’t been changed. When I say intact, hasn’t been changed by like the modern expansion of yah capitalism and machines and cutting and this idea, you know, these things where they’ve existed in some sort of relationship for tens of thousands of years, and that was what I wanted a photograph that’s where I wanted to be and spend time in Yosemite. Was that that first introduction to that.

00:40:12
Speaker 2: So what was the work you did with chimps?

00:40:15
Speaker 3: Chimps? Yeah, there’s picture we could pull up kind of towards the end, but it’s a canopy photo of chimps in a in trees in Uganda.

00:40:25
Speaker 2: So I had a radu in one lie because there’s a picture of some chimps outside of the house.

00:40:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, what’s the lie?

00:40:32
Speaker 2: Because the man made Oh, well that was early.

00:40:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, yeah, early I was still experimenting. Yeah, I mean it showed you my high tech hobo camp. Yeah. Oh. My relationship to photography has changed a lot.

00:40:45
Speaker 2: Around what is that?

00:40:46
Speaker 3: That is a picture of chimps up in a canopy?

00:40:50
Speaker 2: So what country were in here?

00:40:52
Speaker 3: This is Uganda. So twenty eleven I had an opportunity to work as a field researcher for Kibali Chimpanzee Project and they wanted me to use photography as the tool of photo video to basically create imagery around behaviors and so capturing from behaviors to create a catalog to better understand chimp behavior.

00:41:13
Speaker 2: And so we’re looking here at a picture. We’re kind of up in the canopy over I can’t tell if we’re in rainforest, but over a heavy forest. We’re upping the canopy and it’s like a tree of very convoluted crotches and limbs. And if you kind of look throughout the tree, you’re looking at not quite a dozen, but a lot of chimps scattered around. What are they doing up there? Grabbing something to eat?

00:41:36
Speaker 3: Yeah? This is a cool tree. Is a big fig tree. We’re on the equator. It’s temperate, but it’s rainforest at about a little over four thousand feet so it’s a beautiful one of the most productive forests in the world. There’s huge volcanic activity around here, and the soil is unbelievably fertile.

00:41:52
Speaker 2: And this tree, this fig tree, well, now that I’m looking, I see it’s just that.

00:41:57
Speaker 4: Isn’t that crazy?

00:41:59
Speaker 3: This is a called Ficus capensus And for the listeners, a lot of fig trees and fruiting trees. They’ll grow like kind of apple trees oranges, where the fruits are at the end of the canopy, the extension of the crown where the leaves are. This fig tree, the lea figs grow in bunches like grapes like, and they’re huge. And so this tree would fruit for maybe three weeks once or twice a year, and it would just be mecca for this group of chimps. And this was part of what I was asked to do, was climb the trees and photograph them from the chimps with tree climbing gear. Tree climbing gear. Yea, I had that pictures set not in this deck, but it I was there, yeah physically there. Yeah, So that was all. Yeah, so these chimps, well, that’s an incredible picture there. Yeah, what’s that dude got in his hand? This picture is of a group of female chimps in the process of tearing apart the remains of a call up his monkey God. So this is stepping into some of the cool similarities that we share with with chimps. Chimps are territorial social apes, just like we are. We are territorial social apes, and we hunt and it’s cultural, so you know, we are. I like to think of every human as born as a hunter, and it’s just a matter of how their nature is nurtured. Do we get nurtured into hunting or not? And chimps are the same way. So certain groups of chimps hunt a lot and certain groups don’t. This community that I was with, they’re habituated. They’ve been studied for thirty years, so I could follow them. Your question earlier about them being easeful in the canopy is because they’re studied and most of the chimps have been around humans pretty much their whole life.

00:43:42
Speaker 2: So is what they’re holding on to there that’s a dead monkey.

00:43:44
Speaker 3: That’s a dead monkey, and the part.

00:43:46
Speaker 2: Of him that looks all gnawed on. Yeah, what’s that part.

00:43:51
Speaker 3: That’s the part of the vertebrae poking through So it’s been broken.

00:43:54
Speaker 2: Well, so you happen to just catch it where you can’t see where he’s ripped apart.

00:43:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is this went on for maybe thirty minutes. I saw the initial hunt they kill. It’s it’s super coordinated, really interesting. So they’ll be they will go hunting like they will like me and Randall, you and Randall head. Now I’ve heard you speak to it too, Like when you’re in the natural world, you like to speak quietly. You like to move like we move, You move differently when you’re hunting. The chimps will do that too, so you’ll suddenly realize that, like, oh, they’re in hunting mode. And they do that either to go hunt monkeys or they do that when they go border patrolling to the edge of their territory where they could bump into another community.

00:44:34
Speaker 2: Border patrol quiet.

00:44:35
Speaker 3: They border patrol quiet. Yeah, And they do stuff where they you know, they knuckle walk and they walk on the back pads of their feet and they’ll be walking and you’ll see them do like the like pause where like one foots up, one hands up where they’re like, yeah, were they listening, and the other chimps know like, oh, I gotta listen. Yeah. It’s just like a pointer where they’re trying to just basically like key into something and pay attention and listen.

00:44:58
Speaker 2: And so when they go, let’s take the border patrol thing, Yeah, it is a certain time a day. What’s the cadence to it?

00:45:09
Speaker 3: It’s not so the community that I was with they I’d only been border patrolling with them a few times, and one of the times was they were going to their to their border, and this border was the border with like the human world. It’s the edge of their National Park range where they live, this community of chimps national park on three sides. There’s a next picture here that does show like the actual border, and we don’t have to talk to the bottom picture where we can speak to the top picture there. So you see just a very hard line between the So I’m with this group of chimps and they’re going out on this So.

00:45:45
Speaker 2: What we’re looking at is like a big block of forest with a very hard line where it goes into open cut.

00:45:52
Speaker 4: Looks like you’re flying over the Midwest.

00:45:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, looking at where the woodlot butts up to the hayfield. Yeah.

00:45:58
Speaker 3: I have actually a picture of this that I just made weeks ago in Wisconsin. That’s like the same idea, but it’s the Monominee Indian reservation and agriculture next time of it. This idea of these lines between like the wild world and quote human dominated world. So they’re going to patrol that, they’re going to the edge of that, and they’re going to the edge of that to look for crops. They’re going to crop rate. But it’s the same behavior where they don’t want to be seen. They know they’re doing something kind of naughty God, and they don’t want to get seen by people. And so we’re going out. It’s three males that I’m with. They were all named It was Johnny, Big Brown and Stout. Stout was like in his sixties. He was like this legendary old in his sixties. Chimp’s gonna live to be the sixties in the wild. They can live to the eighties in captivity. And so they’re out moving. Johnny’s up front and they just run a trail and it’s just me, the only human with them, and they veer into the thick brush and I’m confused why they’re doing that, and I my job is to follow them to see what they’re up to. So I’m on my hands and he’s crawling in trying to get close to them and see what they’re doing. I get up to them. The three of them are just sitting next to each other, just like just chilling. They’re not doing anything, which is confusing. Like it’s mid morning, and I sit with them. A couple minutes go by, and then I hear human voices.

00:47:07
Speaker 2: How close can you sit with them?

00:47:09
Speaker 3: Met you? What do you wear a little further, just like crappy clothes. I got out of market in town because they’re gonna get torn up by vines and jungle, so I got pants and just like a long sleeve shirt and a backpack just like food and water.

00:47:22
Speaker 4: For that, they’ve like accepted you as yeah, I mean the presence in their.

00:47:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, they’ve accepted me because they’ve been habituated by researchers for the thirty years prior.

00:47:32
Speaker 2: They ignore you or there they acknowledge you.

00:47:35
Speaker 3: I mean, that’s the interesting thing about this situation where I’ve only been there for like a month, and so they didn’t really know me, but I came with people that they know, and they recognize faces better than we do. Like chimp facial recognition is it’s better than our essentially, but you know, they that’s because again territorial social animals, we need to be able to recognize very quickly friend or foe, and chims do that instantly too, and so they recognize human faces. And so they why I was cool, just because I came with the other guys who were cool, and so I’m with them, and I realized that they’re hiding from these people. And now I’m also hiding from these people, not intentionally, but these chimps are essentially like, Okay, you’re cool, but these guys we don’t know. We don’t know who these people are. And so I’m in the bushes and.

00:48:20
Speaker 2: They had heard them, they heard them before I did, and they’re just waiting their more key out.

00:48:23
Speaker 3: There’s waiting it out. And so these guys come into view. They have no idea where they’re They passed by completely unaware the whole time, and I’m just sitting there next to the chimps.

00:48:30
Speaker 2: Do the chimps hold tight when they’re hiding.

00:48:32
Speaker 3: Yep, they hold tight. They just watched they knew what they were doing.

00:48:34
Speaker 2: Yep, not turning their heads real fast or no.

00:48:37
Speaker 3: No, And they’re chill about it, like they they know they can get up a tree and move if they needed to. God, oh yeah, that’s a good point. But it was very much like they’re on.

00:48:45
Speaker 2: It doesn’t feel life or death to them.

00:48:46
Speaker 3: They they just rather go unnoticed. They just didn’t want to like they want to carry on their day and not get scolded for potentially going the crop rating is what seemed like they were doing, so that that border patrol mentality, that was kind of what they were up to. And then they got to the edge of the floor forest looked out across mainly there’s a tea plantation in this photo that you can see, which is a big, kind of lighter green patch of cash crop that they use. And they walked along that border for maybe a quarter mile, realizing that it’s not a food for them, and they went back into the forest.

00:49:14
Speaker 2: If you got in a fight war them, he’s gonna beat your ass.

00:49:17
Speaker 3: M oh Man, Yeah, I mean chimps. Roughly it’s like five times our strength. Their bone density is roughly like twice as dense. Their skin is much tougher, so cool. In fact, we’re the only apes that float.

00:49:33
Speaker 2: They’ll sink.

00:49:34
Speaker 3: The rest of the apes flow sink, and so that tells you a lot about like density strength, muscle, fiber density, like all this. We traded kind of that robust ability to climb trees and be super burly for locomotion and so like one of these chimps people watched him. I wasn’t there for it. He fell eighty feet to the deck out of a tree and like ran off into the woods and then came back a couple of days later and was like like a little limp or something, but was all right. Yeah, they would mess you up. There’s there’s stories I read about of like I don’t on the twenties and gonna have these like weird like traveling shows side show things that would go to like county fairs and things, and they’d be like the pin the Chimp game. Oh yeah, and they have a chimp where they’re like I think that they took they trim the clawsway down or like yeah, basically file them way off and then take the canines out.

00:50:25
Speaker 2: And then you got and they mix it up with him.

00:50:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then there’d be a dude I think they probably must. They probably have to take his all of his teeth out, because chimps their move is they they do they just take they glove you, they take your fingers off, and for men, they rip off your balls.

00:50:39
Speaker 5: Yeah, I’ve seen footage of the uh, just let that one slide. I’ve seen footage of like a border patrol where they encounter another group of chimps and they rip they rip the males genitals off and they basically rip them limb from lim yeap, and it’s like it’s like something it’s like a monster out of a movie. Like you think about the strength that would require to just pull the limb off of another animal of your same south, to pull the sack off a guy that.

00:51:10
Speaker 2: I mean, that would help us like you know, breaking down deer and stuff in the field.

00:51:15
Speaker 3: Like chip strength.

00:51:20
Speaker 2: So let’s talk about when they set out to go hunt. They there’s a there’s a there’s a there’s a hunt leader I’m assuming, and he strikes off he knows where he’s going.

00:51:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, it they will. So the group that I was with, they didn’t hunt that much, maybe like once a month. There’s and that’s all based on like it’s culturally based it’s based, so it’s a learned behavior that’s passed down. It’s not something that like all chimp groups don’t necessarily hunt just because they can. And then it’s around like energy, So how much fruit are they getting outside of their diet, because makes a lot of energy to hunt for the meat takes a lot of like physical energy to move and to catch the monkeys that are fast. And so there’s another community south of the one that I was spent most of my time in called in Gogo and it’s this famous community. There’s a documentary called Chimp Empire Fantastic on Netflix. It focuses on that site. These researchers have spent forty years studying that. And to your question around like hunt Leader, there was these like couple guys, a couple of chimps who are They just love to hunt. They like to go border but they like to hunt monkeys or chimps. That was like their deal. They didn’t really care much about socializing in the hierarchy of other chimps. They were just like, when we get together, we’re going to do some stuff. And they that community was the biggest known chimp community.

00:52:44
Speaker 2: It was like and it could have been just driven by the personality of a couple of the animals.

00:52:49
Speaker 3: Personality a couple of animals built like abundance too. So there’s a lot of monkeys in their home range. It’s worthwhile, so it’s worthwhile, and there’s opportunity, and there’s opportunity to learn, and so they they do these like coordinated hunts where yeah, you got the leader. They head out, they’re going, they start to look up. They’re trying to like listen, and the monkeys know, and so they’ll they’ll often get quiet, the monkeys will, but then they’ll be they’ll send up kind of these like beaters, let’s call them. They’re like little smaller chimps. Maybe they’ll go up, younger chimps that still know what to do, and they’ll kind of try to flush them. Some of the big males that go up too.

00:53:23
Speaker 2: So they hear they hear or see another monkey aet working in a tree yep. And not the big dudes, but some other dudes.

00:53:32
Speaker 3: Sometimes the big dudes will go up and they would.

00:53:35
Speaker 2: Like, how would do you have any idea how they how to be conveyed? Like, hey, you go up there?

00:53:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s just I think it’s just instinctual. I think it’s like I think it’s lost on us, and I think that there’s I think it’s like in those moments where when you’re working in group, like there is some of that intuition that comes through where you’re like, oh, this is I’m going to take this lead on this situation here.

00:53:59
Speaker 2: So you’re never able to detect a decision. You wouldn’t know what to look for.

00:54:05
Speaker 3: Decisions get made. I mean they look to each other, you know, it’s kind of like like they gaze fall, they look to each other, they look up. If one’s looking up, they’ll look too. Like think of like dogs that look to you really quickly to make a decision. That happens. I’ve seen it in all social mammals where it’s like they look quickly to the more experienced ones and they make a decision. In trouble with wolves, seen it with chimps with gorillas, And in this situation, you know, it gets pretty crazy quick where you have chimps going up the trees. You have monkeys screaming and running and through the trees that break neck speed, and they often try to get to like the ends of the branch that are thinner you have you have chimps that are breaking and lunging. I mean it’s like these guys are chimps are unbelievable athletes of course, and they can jump and fly through the trees in a way that is just kind of terrifying to watch.

00:54:55
Speaker 2: And sometimes those little monkeys would know get out where there’s they’ll try on something that they can support.

00:55:01
Speaker 3: But the chimps will even just jump jump and like jump these big gaps. And a lot of times I saw where the chimps would grab a monkey and then chuck them down and then there’d be other chimps below, and then it’s like then they would they would deal with them then, and really, yeah, so they would like because the monkeys are formidable, you know, like they have pretty big teeth of males, and they’ll defend females as well the male yep, throw them down. Yep. Yeah, I love this so much.

00:55:30
Speaker 2: The primate guy, big ape guy guy, Oh yeah, never told me that it can’t be that big ape guy.

00:55:36
Speaker 3: Well, it just doesn’t come up with you.

00:55:38
Speaker 2: Listen, if you were a big ape guy. I’d heard about it.

00:55:41
Speaker 3: Phil, I I can support Phil.

00:55:44
Speaker 2: Had dinner with Phil, Had dinner with hit Listen. Here’s what I know.

00:55:48
Speaker 3: You’re lying.

00:55:49
Speaker 2: I heard you guys had lunch, yes so I come to Phil yesterday. Uh huh, I said, Phil, what’d you guys talk about lunch? Guess what he said wasn’t apes? Said, you guys talked about the TV program we did about chairs the chair company.

00:56:05
Speaker 3: Just check it out.

00:56:06
Speaker 2: So apes didn’t come up during yesterday’s lunch, Steve.

00:56:11
Speaker 3: But they have come up multiple I can show you.

00:56:13
Speaker 4: I can show you tons of ape images on my phone.

00:56:16
Speaker 5: Big granitang guy, Big gorilla guy, big chimp guy, give me not so much?

00:56:22
Speaker 2: Monkeys rint you were? I don’t know if i’d heard that.

00:56:26
Speaker 4: I’ve got pictures. They’re buying glass of course, but real big ape guy. Yeah, no, I love this guy, Ape guy, steak guy.

00:56:36
Speaker 5: One of my dreams, Guy, one of my dreams is to go watch apes in the wild. One of my wildest dreams. You’re sitting next to the right guys.

00:56:43
Speaker 4: I know, I know that’s what I’m saying. I’m I’m all fired up about this. I love it. Okay, amazing Chimp Vmpire, Chimp crazy.

00:56:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, you see so good.

00:56:53
Speaker 2: You’ve got a shirt with a big monkey on it. Rantal or a big.

00:56:57
Speaker 4: Monkeys have tails. Sorry, I have several sits like.

00:57:02
Speaker 2: Entry level ape information.

00:57:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have several shirts.

00:57:05
Speaker 5: I have one with a big male orangutan, I have one with a juvenile orangutan, and then I have another one that’s a gorilla.

00:57:12
Speaker 4: But it’s more cartoonish. It’s less photorealistic than my rangutan shirts.

00:57:15
Speaker 2: Sound like an ape, Yeah, sounds like he’s the biggest state sale guy.

00:57:19
Speaker 3: Okay, renaissance man. Some people say.

00:57:23
Speaker 2: Dogs the state sales and apes.

00:57:28
Speaker 4: Life is meant to be enjoyed.

00:57:29
Speaker 5: Why shy away from your childish and you know, impulses and attractions.

00:57:34
Speaker 4: I think apes are fascinating.

00:57:36
Speaker 2: I want to get to white wolves and muskox’s. Let’s talk them about the chimps when they catch it. Well, here’s another question I got about this. Is it partially competition the desire for them to kill the monkeys, Like you know how wolves they run into coyot. If they can get them, they’re going to get them, because why have him running around, you know, like, why have another guy out there killing stuff?

00:58:02
Speaker 3: I think it’s I think it’s taste, Like I think it is both like the taste for meat and also they go for like the intestines and the undigested plant matter, like kind of like neon green plant matter.

00:58:14
Speaker 2: So they kind of relish it.

00:58:16
Speaker 3: I think they Yeah, I think that they seek it out. I think it is like a preference thing.

00:58:20
Speaker 2: I think, now, how to what degree do they do they eat it?

00:58:24
Speaker 3: Because like the competition thing, just to button that up. I think it’s like there’s so much food, Like equatorial jungle monkeys eat leaves and also fruits, but it’s like chimps can dominate the fruiting tree all day long. God, and like that tree that I was in in the previous picture, almost no monkeys came to it. Like a few they.

00:58:44
Speaker 2: Want it, they get it, they get it.

00:58:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, And I think it’s kind of like maybe you can think of it as like grizzly bears around here versus brown bears up in coastal Alaska, where it’s like they don’t fight too much about territory. There’s so much abundance. I think it was so I think the hunting that to do is mostly around preference for meat. And I mean it is obviously a great source of nutrients and protein and fats, and so the breakdown of like the animal you’re asking, like what they do.

00:59:12
Speaker 2: So they’ll really just bone.

00:59:14
Speaker 3: No, they’ll they’ll kind of be scraps, like hide scraps. That that female monkey that was in the picture, she was pretty well cleaned up. And so this is the female chimps that got this. Afterwards, and the males they go for the choice meets the organs, they’ll go for the intestines like I mentioned, lungs, liver, brain, to they’ll crack open the skull.

00:59:36
Speaker 2: How did they get into that school? They just they can bite their way into it.

00:59:40
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, So like that’s the cool thing about chimps, like human evolution. I don’t know. There’s a book called Catching Fire. Richard Rangan, who’s the man that I was doing this research for. He was at Harvard for his career. He studied energy and goodall. He has a great book called Catching Fire that is about like how cooking made us that work, yeah, and that the softness of our food now allows us to we gave up all this bite force basically. So like chimps, a lot of predators, you know, have like sagital crest that you know, ridge on the top of their skull that muscles attached to so they can have a massive bite force. Chimps have that. A lot of apes have that. We don’t. Our jaw muscles go up just kind of like around our temple if you just like clench your jaw, you can just feel it abovey temple. Chimps john amost to go up top so they can just like, yeah, they can mau a skull if they need to go and chewing for you know, six hours a day or something like that. And so they will pull out organs and you know, monkeys are alive for a lot of it. Not a lot of it, but like the beginning to be a couple of minutes in and this scene was. I photographed a bunch of images leading up to this, but this is the one that kind of shows a lot about the behavior and the intensity of it.

01:00:51
Speaker 2: Now that they use that image because you can’t see that he’s all ripped up.

01:00:58
Speaker 3: No, this was in like a wild Lifetography the year competition that it won one of the commended awards a few years ago.

01:01:04
Speaker 4: This is a surreal image and.

01:01:07
Speaker 3: No, I think it’s like the other images are kind of it’s a group of chimps sitting around. There’s a monkey in the middle, and it’s like a little more like quieter of a scene. This one has some of that energy. There’s a motion, there’s obviously like hands touching the monkey hands in a way. That female on the right is obviously warning and having a conversation with the chimp on the other side there. So I think that this image to me, just brings a lot of the energy to the scene in a way that some of the other images didn’t necessarily.

01:01:36
Speaker 4: The canines on that oh yeah, the chimps.

01:01:39
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:01:40
Speaker 2: So is that that monkey’s tail sticking out?

01:01:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s flapping down almost like it’s just like it’s sighing it together, and they tore it apart after this, like it was in two pieces pretty quickly.

01:01:54
Speaker 5: Is the bottom right like guts or a prolapsed anus?

01:02:00
Speaker 4: Yeah?

01:02:01
Speaker 3: On the female yeah, and the she’s in a swelling state, so she’s like an estuous. I think it’s like a little it’s not not part of that perfect, not part of that. No, No, that’s just they get a visual sign. A lot of apes get a visual sign and primates in general of when females are in estrous.

01:02:19
Speaker 2: Did you ever hear that argument? This is a good one.

01:02:21
Speaker 3: Man.

01:02:21
Speaker 2: Did you ever hear the argument that one of the things that leads to human monogamy and permanent occupation between a breeding male and female human is that there’s no outward display. There’s no outward display, so you have to always be around interesting. You can’t time a male can’t time is comings and goings like you got to stick around, be there, present. There’s no outward display. Other and other males can’t wouldn’t look and know they can’t look at a human female and know that she’s an estress. Does it make you uncomfortably talked about like a beast? No? Okay, good, those things don’t bother me, you know me.

01:03:07
Speaker 4: Like a beast.

01:03:09
Speaker 3: That’s a good book, Sex at Dawn that just analyzes like the human sexual relationship.

01:03:15
Speaker 2: From like why that’s a favorite Rick. We talked about Rick Smith earlier. Remember one day we were talking about all this and Rick Smith said human, he was he was talking about humans. Rick Alay likes talking about humans like he’s describing a wild animal. And he said, we’re monogamous mostly, we’re a monogamous species mostly. Yeah, we strive toward it. There’s a strong pull toward it. Yeah, you know, yeah, I think with chimps. I mean it’s like they’re not at all.

01:03:49
Speaker 3: I mean most not monogamous. No, most apes aren’t, and most primates aren’t, but they will do they’ll do these things called like concertships where they’re like male hiring fe male not even always hiring, but he’ll try to like build a relationship with a female and then when she’s at her peak cycle esteris, they’ll like move out and go kind of like hide for a couple of weeks, huh, and just be gone from the rest of the group. And then the rest of the males kind of lose their mind and try to find them. But most of the times you do, yeah, yep, they’ll go on patrol.

01:04:23
Speaker 2: And why do they want to find.

01:04:24
Speaker 3: Him because they want to breathe, they want to read her. Yeah, I mean the females, they want to be with every male possible, like a.

01:04:32
Speaker 2: Oh home, I got mixed up. I thought you said the male takes off.

01:04:36
Speaker 3: Yes, he’ll take off with the female.

01:04:38
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, and head out throwing me off. He splits and leaves the female.

01:04:44
Speaker 3: No, No, he’ll he’ll convince her coercor either by her will or sometimes not necessarily, to like go off and be just with him for how far off a mile or something like that, like Jim Homemane is not that big. But that’s that’s rare. Most of the time, it’s like, yeah, it’s the top males, but they’ll share. It’s not like the male will dominated the reading.

01:05:08
Speaker 2: So they don’t have a lot of certainty about parentage.

01:05:10
Speaker 3: They have no known paternity. Okay, yeah, yeah.

01:05:16
Speaker 2: This so this picture, which is stunning. You did not take this as a professional photographer. You took this as a researcher.

01:05:23
Speaker 3: Yes, correct.

01:05:24
Speaker 2: And then when you finished this, did you say, I’m not a researcher, I’m now a photographer.

01:05:30
Speaker 3: No, I I I mean I always had aspiration to be a photographer.

01:05:35
Speaker 2: You did, Okay, yeah, so you at this time you recognized photography as a thing.

01:05:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, I did. I want it, and I didn’t know I didn’t know what my like, I didn’t know how to tell stories like I would just go for like one off pictures. You know. I got obsessed with obsessed with photograph and waterfowl and build like a floating blind and like get at their level and just photograph all kinds of cool waterfowl around Montana. But didn’t ever do anything with those images and with this after this project, the research that I was working for Richard Rangham, he knew a photographer named Tim Layman who was also a researcher turned photographer. He also did canopy work. He worked for National Geographic and sent Tim some of these pictures and Tim was like, yeah, you should show these National Geographic. Here’s the name of the editor, Kathy Moran. Here’s an email, here’s like two sentences attached to pictures, and then a gallery linked to maybe like thirty images. And then wait, so that was yeah, that was like twenty eleven. And so when I spent the year living in Uganda photographing the chimps for research, and then there was a couple of years in between. I worked for like a production company out of the Midwest with a guy named Jeff Simpson who’s like a he was like a white tail hunter for a long time, like a Sitka athlete whatever whatever they call them, and.

01:06:48
Speaker 2: You took pictures of deer.

01:06:50
Speaker 3: I did like such like sponsored content videos with like Corey Jacobson and like Jim Old Junior and Jonathan Hart who was one of the co founders of Sitka, and so just go and film. It was like big game archery, hunts god, and that was my first like actual paid kind of like film wildlife job. It was both to learn huntings. I didn’t grow up with it and I was curious, and then it was also to kind of hone my chops with So that was after this, after this, Yeah, they had to seem pretty like pretty tame the people.

01:07:21
Speaker 2: No, I mean just the whole get up after coming out of Uganda a year and Uganda, yeah, chasing shimps.

01:07:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was hard to come home in a lot of ways. Like the life there was pretty it was pretty amazing. I mean I lived in a research camp. You hear elephants at night. Then you would just put on your backpack and go out for the day and like follow chimps and see new things every day. I’m super into birds, and it’s just like a magical place for birds and reptiles, amphibians, you know, like see these cool snakes. And it was amazing. Yeah, I loved it.

01:07:51
Speaker 2: Let’s talk about the the Arctic stuff, Phil, you jump us to the Arctic stuff. Yeah, running word is that at the beginning of.

01:08:00
Speaker 3: The end here, Yeah, towards the end, we could do maybe that like silhouetted wolfbox.

01:08:06
Speaker 2: Oh scene, So where are we at here? What’s going on? Like where are we at in your career? And where are we at and on the earth?

01:08:13
Speaker 4: I mean, first of all, visually, we could be in the in the Paleolithic.

01:08:16
Speaker 2: Because that could be a mammoth. Yeah, the way that horn sticking out, it could be a mammoth.

01:08:21
Speaker 4: I mean it’s just striking im.

01:08:22
Speaker 5: It’s like this could be anywhere across thousands of years of time.

01:08:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, we’re looking at is three canine figures, silhouetted. There’s heavy cloud cover that’s black, the earth is black. Sandwich between the black of the cloud cover and the black of the earth is a narrow band occupied by three black canine figures and a very wooly tusky horny looking.

01:08:51
Speaker 3: Uh not that kind.

01:08:55
Speaker 2: Horned shape, nondescript shape of hair and horn. That was some great descriptive narration there. I think the audio only listeners will be please.

01:09:06
Speaker 5: Yeah, they might be getting the better end of the deal.

01:09:10
Speaker 2: I made it sound better.

01:09:15
Speaker 3: So we are. We’re at eighty degrees north. We are on the furthest northern land mass in Canada. It’s called Elosmere. Island and this photos from twenty eighteen, So this is, yeah, a couple of years into my career. I think I officially started working for National Geographic in twenty fourteen on the Yellowstone Project. And this place, as Randall mentioned, it is it is like stuck in time, like you can go there and it’s the closest feeling that I’ve ever had to like being on a place of scene, landscape, place that hasn’t changed very much at all since the glacier is receded. And the draw to this place, and it was covered National Geographic in the late eighties by photographer Jim Brandenberg and researcher David Meach And so cover image of National Geographic is a like a white wolf kind of jumping between two ice floes that was in the eighties if you remember that one, and there are a couple other articles on it. And the draw of this place is that it is stepping back into that relationship where wolves aren’t scared of people. And the allowance for that is basically like the same principle that I there habituated not necessarily because they’re habituated there is they do see human settlement. There’s like a weather station nearby that they can go visit if they decide to and like peon stuff, and it’s kind of just like a recreational outing for the wolves to go there. But it’s mostly kind of the My understanding of the wolf world from time here and reading is is like this is how wolves were even around here, Like they were curious. I mean Lewis and Clark journals and Autumn journals that Dan Flores talked about it and his podcast.

01:10:57
Speaker 2: He Died for You, Louis Clark the killed one with a stick.

01:11:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, Clark Bay and edited one. They would just be like laying on the sandbars when they’re going up the river and like, bitch, be curious. They’d be around camp all the time and be curious. And here it’s that same deal where they were just like come up, they’ll sniff your boots. They want to steal stuff. That’s like their main really, that’s their main deal is they want to play keep away with you, like straight up, they like come in hot, they want to steal something. If there’s anything on the ground that they can pick up it’s gone, they’re.

01:11:26
Speaker 2: Just curious what it is, if it’s edible, whatever.

01:11:28
Speaker 3: Mostly like they picked up a camera, like one of the first meetings, so not even something smells good now, it smells like me, Like one of the first meetings was for me with this pack. I call them the Polygon Pack because of these cool polygon tundra formations that are that far north and they’re den was close to that and has a camera on the ground. The wolves they do the surrounding thing, which is what freaks people out, and they’re just catching scent. They’re just being curious. So they’re just like there’s three wolves just satelliting me at like twenty feet and I’m photographing them. And I’d been there before and kind of knew a little bit about what was up with the wolves and had an understanding of it. And this one female darts in and grabs one of my other cameras. It’s like a big, big bodied camera, it’s like a ten thousand dollars thing and grabs it. How just grab the handle with her teeth like the with the grip and just goes so it’s just like a little rubber kind of handles the cannon.

01:12:19
Speaker 2: One kind of sneak attack like in and out, just darts.

01:12:22
Speaker 3: In quick and it’s and gone, And I find myself foolishly like running after it, like as if I’m gonna catch wolf, and I got big boots on, and it’s like on the tundra, it’s all hummocky, and and then the other wolves start kind of running with me because they’re like, oh, this is like, this is it. We’re playing the game. And I realized quickly we’ve all played keep Away with dogs probably or with kids at some point, and realize it’s only fun while you’re chasing. And so I stop, do the kind of like walk away, look over the shoulder, and she starts following me. I let her get maybe like five feet away, and then I like turn around, jump and clap and yell and she startles and drops the camera and come back. Then you understand what that relationship is.

01:13:01
Speaker 2: But yeah, this place is so you don’t need to go look for him because they’ll come find you.

01:13:05
Speaker 3: They’ll come find Yeah. Yeah, you basically like set camp there and they’ll come check you out.

01:13:10
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:13:11
Speaker 2: You don’t place a bait for him.

01:13:12
Speaker 3: There’s no bait. There’s no lure.

01:13:14
Speaker 2: I mean as part of the work. You don’t like it wouldn’t be that you’d place a bait.

01:13:18
Speaker 3: No, And there’s no need, you know, it’s like this basically the wolves. It’s kind of like the chimp world where you’re like, I can follow them we when I’m up there. So I’ve been up there for like productions. This was during that series Kingdom of the White Wolf that you mentioned early on film from that geo also an assignment from the magazine in that same time, and you’re you’re bringing up a ton of stuff. It’s expedition style. It’s like four wheelers. So you’re following the wolves. So once you start down the road of like I want to be in a place where I can have a camera and be in front of wolves at close proximity every day for three months, then you then behind that, once you’ve made that decision, then behind that comes like ten thousand pounds of stuff. I see of food. I’m up there with a couple of people, we have a base camp, you have five pounds of fuel, you have four wheelers. It’s daylight all summer until like August thirtieth, then you get the first little dip of sunset, and so you’re just you’re doing sometimes twenty thirty forty hour days and you’re just following the wolves.

01:14:20
Speaker 2: Following them hunting, setting up camp or always coming back to base camp.

01:14:23
Speaker 3: So the first time went up there was with a team that they had a base camp all the time and these little dinky like two fifty ATVs, and I just saw that there was this amazing opportunity where like you bring up bigger ATVs five hundreds or seven hundreds, and you camp off your ATVs for extented period of time and then you can follow the wolves like.

01:14:41
Speaker 2: Have to do big round trips.

01:14:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I have do big round trips, and like they go hunting and they can do like sixty miles over the course of two days.

01:14:47
Speaker 2: You’re gonna miss stuff.

01:14:48
Speaker 3: That’s what I wanted. I want to I mean, I want to see all of their life. You don’t want to miss anything. But the hunting is like, that’s the behavior that made wolves essentially what they are is they had to solve that problem of how do we as a smaller predator take down bigger things. We have to do it together. We have to defend territory from other wolves, and we have to hunt together.

01:15:11
Speaker 2: How many wolves are on Elsmere in how many muskogs?

01:15:16
Speaker 3: There was an estimate maybe fifteen years ago or So that was two hundred Arctic wolves for the entire Canadian Arctic for the entire Arctic period, which I think is.

01:15:28
Speaker 2: Low two hundred white phase wolves.

01:15:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, because they’re all through none of it. They’re in greenland. This is not this is a Yellowstone wolf. But yeah, there you get a view of.

01:15:42
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, look at that place.

01:15:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s a cool landscape. This is a this is a story.

01:15:47
Speaker 2: So here we’re like, we’re just looking at an Arctic landscape and there’s one wolf in the foreground and another half dozens scooting along. Kind of dirty white. It almost looks like blood on got blood on his foot.

01:15:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, its kind of breaks territory. Does remind me of some of that bad lands. You know, it’s very well eroded.

01:16:05
Speaker 2: What an incredible picture.

01:16:07
Speaker 3: He’s wet, he’s gone through, yeah, a little creek earlier, but he’s got a little bit on him. He’s got a little blood from a hare, Arctic hare that he had hunted earlier. They coordinated try to hunt this big. The hairs up there will group in like groups of one hundred, like pure white hairs. Pretty cool to see on the landscape. But yeah, this scene was one where you know, I was up there with teams for multiple years, film for Planet or three, a couple other productions over the years, and then was up there with a research team that was researching we’ll get into this, but this disease that’s affecting muscos and big die offs in the north climate change related. And I went up and spent two weeks just by myself with the wolves and no ATV is just on foot and set up a little spike camp and wasn’t producing anything. Was just up there to walk around with them as much as I could, which didn’t think of me very much, but ended up being every day it’s been with them. They had their pups nearby the rendezvous site, and there were fourteen adults and five pups, and there was this one kind of midnight I got woken up light was getting good, woken up by some fox kits, and I see the wolves are starting to get ready. They were a mile down and they’re starting to get ready to kind of go out to go hunt. And I saw some Muskox herds in the distance, and so I went down to the wolves, and then I went straight to the muskos and was trying to like run between and fill the gap and get there before the wolves did. And this wolf I’ve known for years called him Gray Mane. He’s got the little gray coat. This is when he’s a yearling. And I’m running ahead of them, and gray Maine’s leading. He was kind of the alpha at this time. And I look behind me. He’s common and the other wolves are coming behind him. And I realized that this one day is that Gray Mane and he’s running next to me. We’re both running towards Muskox. And it was this very quick realization of like, oh, this is what we’ve done for a long time. This is how this would have started domestication. You’d have wolves that were curious, unafraid of humans. You’d be out hunting the same exact animals and you’d bump into them like this, and you build a relationship. Probably and the wolves realized quickly that, oh, these guys throw projectiles because intu it still that they hunt muscos in like that. They’ll use dogs, bay up, get a whole group of muscos into rosette, just create that defensive circle, and then they’ll just lob projectiles in to the herd and get food. And the wolves would realize quickly that was an amazing relationship.

01:18:30
Speaker 2: So well, how is how is this island? How is the island administered?

01:18:36
Speaker 3: It is a mix, so like the colonial Canadian government controls and own some of it. There’s also like Intuit the province of nunav which is self governed.

01:18:51
Speaker 2: As part of Elsmere.

01:18:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean they like technically it’s all within nune of it, but the Canadian government still like there’s a military base in the north, there’s a weather station, and there’s one habitation on the southern end that’s maybe like one hundred and fifty people called Greece. Fior Is the furthest habitation in Canada. But they were moved through a colonial imperialism idea of having like people being born on all your sovereign lands or whatever they call it by colonialism. So they brought people from mainland Quebec and just like drop them off on this pretty rough part of the island on the southern end, and basically we’re like good like good luck. Didn’t tell them how long they were going to be there, and it’s kind of like a nightmare scene. But they’ve survived and some people went back home maybe years later. They were given the opportunity, but a lot of people stayed, so they were initially like caribou mainland hunters there. Now kind of there’s some caribou up there, but the caribon population subspecies of periy cariboo is like totally tanked in the north and in Nune of it, and muscock’s in and marine mammals to what they hunt now, But those guys don’t make forays up here to hunt. There’s a nine dollars bounty on wolves and none of it.

01:20:06
Speaker 2: They hunt wolves down where they’re at.

01:20:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, got it, Yeah, got it?

01:20:10
Speaker 4: Oh wow.

01:20:12
Speaker 2: Yeah. So now we’re looking at a very distressed young muskos, his nose tipped up to the sky. He’s bleeding out of his mouth or his mouth’s been mauled up, and he’s got uh, i don’t know, three four wolves ripping them all, kind of tearing them up.

01:20:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, these are what an image?

01:20:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, feel bad for watching stuff get killed like that.

01:20:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, it doesn’t feel good. Yeah, I mean I feel bad for anything that doesn’t die quickly.

01:20:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, even animals that I’ve got, they don’t the wolves, Yeah.

01:20:52
Speaker 3: Why would you? I mean it’s like I’ve been haveing professional hunters and it takes two hours for animals to die. Yea, So it’s yeah, it’s it’s usually twenty minutes for wolves from when they engage, even if it’s a big adult. Sometimes a little longer with the adults.

01:21:08
Speaker 2: But you know in in uh the Wood Buffalo National Park, I think that they they did. They did the study is a long time ago. How long it takes them to bring one down. It was about six hours for a buffalo.

01:21:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.

01:21:25
Speaker 2: But it’s a whole dance.

01:21:26
Speaker 3: It’s a dance, and it’s a lot of like preamble, it’s motion. It’s not all like melee.

01:21:31
Speaker 2: No, not a lot of like sitting watch and seeing what’s going. And that’s how isolating.

01:21:36
Speaker 3: That’s how these unfold too. Okay, you could technically be hunting for I’ve seen six to ten hour hunts, but they’re sleeping for half of that and then just see and watch up. They’ll pressure them, disengage, pressure, disengage, and do that whole deal because they selecting who they want, they need them to They either need to startle them and get them to scatter, so they’ll hunt the wind a lot and hunt. Like one of the first times I saw it was I with the wolves traveling I’m on the four wheeler. They’re heading off. They’re in hunt mode, and they suddenly I can see the landscape in front of me, but it is it’s kind of like Central Montana breaks. There’s little dips and swells and koolies, and suddenly the wolves are at full tilt and I can’t see anything ahead of them. And then we get over this little depression and then there’s like a muskox in there. They yeah, there are two balls in there. So they were hitting speed to try to create chaos first, but the bulls are too big and nothing. They didn’t.

01:22:34
Speaker 2: So if they pull up on those bulls, yeah, do they see it and see what they’re dealing with, like in terms of demographics so to speak, and just call it off or do they still go kind of tests?

01:22:46
Speaker 3: They test?

01:22:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, they want they want to anybody injure what’s going on.

01:22:50
Speaker 3: They want to see them move, so like he’s playing on a bad ankle, you know, totally. Yeah, Yeah, you’ll get up to them. They’ll be like laying down. Let’s say there’s like a bull that’s ruminating, laying down, and they’ll get them to stand up, okay, and get them.

01:23:02
Speaker 2: To whirl if they want to see what they want to get them.

01:23:04
Speaker 3: To see, because they I mean they they catalog I mean, I’m sure they have like this landscape map and based on prey as well, and they’ll know if there’s an old bowl that’s like on his last got.

01:23:15
Speaker 2: It and and they like that that image we looked at they’re on a calf.

01:23:20
Speaker 3: Yep, that’s their preferred Okay, that’s their I mean, it’s they. So they’re trying to siphon them off. They they want the muskos and to stampede. I’ve never seen buffalo do it a little bit, you know, Kate Buffalo do it where they actually stand their ground against lions. Buffalo a little bit with wolves here where they gather up the group together. But the muskos in are real good at that. I mean, that’s their move is not breaking the group, not breaking the group. If they can hold it, then like the wolves can’t do it. They basically can’t do anything. And especially yeah, especially this time of year. You can see there’s little bit of foliage change, a little bit of orange on the ground. That’s the Arctic willow that’s changing. And this is the breeding season, the running season for the muscles, like August and so you’ll have a herd of let’s say, you know, ten cows and calf pairs, and then you have a herd bowl with them, and so the cow calf pairs group up in the rosette, and then the herd bull is just he’s just throwing wolves if need be. But the wolves can’t do anything, and they can’t do anything against him, but they want to get them to move. They want to get the back end exposed and they can pull on a calf and then get to them.

01:24:24
Speaker 2: When you’re staking out with these guys and hanging out with these wolves, how how how many days pass between an event like this? Between like from successful hunt to successful hunt?

01:24:39
Speaker 3: How much time goes by and you get three or four days depending on like how big the animals did they take down? I mean once they killed this animal, it was basically like hide in twelve hours with there were six adult wolves, but then they chilled for four pups. They’ll still go on walkabouts, but yeah, they chilled. They chilled for except for like fifteen hours they chilled out, but then they go on, like they go walk around for fun. They’ll do border patrols too.

01:25:06
Speaker 2: H m hmm. Yeah, So here we got a pop and I’m assuming a female.

01:25:14
Speaker 3: That’s that’s Gray Maine still when he was a yearling. Yeah, just big brother.

01:25:18
Speaker 5: And he’s he’s got his paws and his nose resting on a hoof.

01:25:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, muscock’s leg.

01:25:24
Speaker 4: Like the way that my dog will do to my crocs at home.

01:25:27
Speaker 3: Yep, exactly. Yeah, just these scenes that and I’m there.

01:25:31
Speaker 2: I’m just like, how close are you there?

01:25:32
Speaker 3: Closer to than med to you like half of the stream media. There’s like a wide angle lens.

01:25:37
Speaker 2: I don’t care.

01:25:38
Speaker 3: Spend a month with them. I mean the beginn took It takes time, like the beginning. I was interesting that the pups were actually the most scared of the group, all the six adults in this pack. During this time, all the six adults were fine. There was the three that came up when I stole my camera. The other three adults are back with the pops. They were giving zero sign of fear about me. But the pups were like, we got it, this is we gotta get out of here.

01:26:01
Speaker 2: Would they draw the line at you touching them?

01:26:04
Speaker 3: So I would set boundaries like I would bop them like nose, like hey, you gotta give some space. You know, I’d stand up and walk towards them or push them a few times like this the previous photo here, there’s another hunt scene where this is in the dark. I had a little flash trying to light it. But they have another calf as a separate hunt scene. Three of the wolves working this calf, and one of the wolves I’ve known for a long time, Bright Eyes. I’m again just kind of me to you to this whole actual, the whole thing happening, them hunting and killing, and they’re obviously not worried. But one time in that melee, the Musko’s calf bucked, Bright Eyes, and I’m kneeling down and she comes and she just falls on my lap. She’s just like fully in my lap and I just push her back in. She didn’t even bother look back. She just like went back in the system and started to hunt again.

01:26:54
Speaker 2: You ever grab any that meat and eat it yourself?

01:26:57
Speaker 3: This one I did. It was the only time I did it. Yeah, I cut off some backstrap. They were away, the wolves, the other three members and the pups were just over the hill and they were howling after they killed a muskox calf, So they were gone. I didn’t really want to have them see me taking it. I felt like there was some like, yeah, some like betrayal around dynamic. Yeah, but yeah it was a yeah, pretty pretty beautiful scene to be able to have some easy meat.

01:27:26
Speaker 2: Man.

01:27:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, these are just incredible photos. Man.

01:27:30
Speaker 2: And then how much time total with the body work we’re looking at, how much time total did you spend in this spot.

01:27:37
Speaker 3: I’ve been there, like it spans ten years basically of time, and then I’ve been there for like a year cumulative like three month trips.

01:27:46
Speaker 2: You know, And how often is a photographer trailing after these wolves?

01:27:52
Speaker 3: So now, and some of this is because of the work that I’ve done, Like there are people that are starting to go up there and do like tours. I’ve been asked a bunch and don’t really have any desire.

01:28:04
Speaker 2: To do that, like because people want to go camp and just check it out.

01:28:08
Speaker 3: They want to photography tours get close to wolves. And and then there’s film crews that go up there. And so then like there was a crew up there just this past year, the big like Disney project, and so there’s yeah, there’s still people that go there.

01:28:25
Speaker 2: So it’s kind of will get it’ll get like a little yellow stony where it’s just like people hanging out film and stuff.

01:28:30
Speaker 3: It’s so expensive to get there. That’s the thing that prevents human presence is it’s just like you know, it’s astronomical, and so it just becomes a thing where people just don’t got it.

01:28:40
Speaker 2: Logistically tough.

01:28:41
Speaker 3: Logistically tough, Yeah, you gotta be really Yeah, it’s just a place that thankfully you can’t drive to.

01:28:47
Speaker 2: So if you’re a professional wildlife photographer and it takes so long to get the good images, like, walk me through the economics? What is it? Also new? Like click the show and it’s there’s the money do you? I mean like how like what do you how do you get paid?

01:29:07
Speaker 3: Yeah? So pretty much all my work is either assignment based. So that’s a national geographic magazine assignment.

01:29:16
Speaker 2: But it’s not a day rate. They want an image.

01:29:19
Speaker 3: No, it’s it’s gonna be a day rate. Yeah. Yeah, so it can be. It’ll be like a budget. They’ll be like all right, Like the Beaver story is like, okay, we have like fifty thousand dollars. Here’s kind of our rough timeline. Fifty thousand dollars is like you choose.

01:29:33
Speaker 2: I’m on and you give exact figures.

01:29:35
Speaker 3: You don’t need to do that, Oh I don’t mind doing that, okay, and that you can just do it.

01:29:38
Speaker 2: All as one hundred dollars for all care go ahead.

01:29:41
Speaker 3: So that includes like all your expenses. I mean, that’s that’s stretched out over three years. It’s not like a full time job for that period of time. So it’s like a week here, a week here, day rates including that, if you have an assistant, if you have travel, if you have expenses, all that’s including that. That’s just like that’s a fee let’s say for the whole story and then the other story. The other way I do things is through great.

01:30:05
Speaker 2: But the problem, here’s what I don’t get about it. If we hire a camera guy and we’re going to do something, we know there will be footage, yes, right, So if you’re doing something that like the beaver thing, they’re they’re rolling the dice, yeah, because you could come back and say it’s all mucky.

01:30:28
Speaker 3: Yep, yeah, got it.

01:30:30
Speaker 4: That’s why I won’t ever get an assignment for National Geographic.

01:30:33
Speaker 2: You need a body of work, right, So you’re like, that’s what I’m saying, Like when you click the shutter, it’s not like there’s the money, Like you might make an arrangement where you’re saying, I’m gonna spend blank days and you’re gonna get what you get and I’m gonna try my hardest and if I don’t deliver, then I don’t get work in the future.

01:30:51
Speaker 3: But that’s the that’s the cooker with it is it’s like you have to deliver. You have to deliver, and it’s kind of like there’s that notion of I’m a freelancer, I’m not an employees so it’s kind of like you’re only as good as your last story kind of idea. If you bomb multiple stories, it’s like, yeah, though.

01:31:08
Speaker 2: You don’t g Yeah, you know, you’re not the guy that gets it.

01:31:10
Speaker 3: And for a while, it’s like being a hunting guide.

01:31:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, you charge X for your your heart, charge X for.

01:31:15
Speaker 5: Your hunt, and whatever sort of nice or shitty accommodations you put together for the clients comes out of that money. And then if you don’t kill you know, animals with your clients, eventually stuff getting clients.

01:31:28
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:31:29
Speaker 2: Do you get easy assignments?

01:31:32
Speaker 3: Uh? Yeah, I mean some some ways, Like the beaver assignment in a way was easier in the sense that like beavers aren’t hard to find. It’s not like I have to go someplace like Uganda and try to find a bird or go to Lsmere it’s hard to get to. So it’s kind of like there was a mix where it was pretty easy. Yeah, I’ve had like one of the easy assignments I had was it was like a commercial assignment for a cell phone company and Kenya Safari Cam and they wanted a series of wildlife images of like a danger species in Kenya and also like a video compilation to go with it, and so they came to me with it. I hired a good friend named Bob Poole who grew up in Kenya, was one of the premiere wildlife cameramen in the world, does a lot of work in East Africa. And it’s basically Bob and I cruising around to these amazing spots in Kenya in this like amazing film land rover platform that he designed, and it was awesome and there was no pressure, no pressure. It was just like knew we were going to get amazing things, get to see everything that you’d be excited about. Saw my first wild dog hanging out with Cheata, hanging out with them with hyenas. It was like socializing with hyenas. This lone female wild dog I sent At the research They’re like, we don’t ever see this. That was just a fun assignment because there’s not any pressure.

01:32:54
Speaker 2: And do you ever get a call where you’d say, I’m gonna save us both the trouble and no, because it’s just not You’re not gonna be happy with it.

01:33:04
Speaker 4: The sasquatch photos aren’t.

01:33:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, the sas squatch photos where we want a snow leopard.

01:33:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know I had one. I had one that was I did say yes to. It was learning. It was like my first assignment with Audubon magazine and a writer pitched it. And you know, writers have the luxury if they can write about things that happened one time, or they can write about it don’t don’t happen. They can write about it. I tried to like, but they can write about tall tales. Yeah, they can write about like yeah, myth and all these things. So this writer pitched the story about It’s basically like a like a beaver keystone species story around beavers in Gradi els In area, and it hings around this guy named Billy Burton, who the writer thoughts swam with beavers, Like Billy told him a story from when he was a kid one time. This is what came out afterwards, that like he checked out a beaver lodge when he was a kid, just kind of like swam up into it and like checked out the beaver to buddies with just you just like looked. I think it was like maybe one or two times it happened when he was a kid, and Billy’s an adult and maybe relaying the story to this guy in a social setting, and.

01:34:08
Speaker 2: The writer pitches it, and so the man who swam with beavers.

01:34:12
Speaker 3: The editors like, I want opening spread double page Billy swimming with beavers, And I was like, okay, cool, Like cool, there’s a guy outside of Bozman and swims with beavers, Like I didn’t know about that, but he’s got habituated beavers. I’ll go check it out. So show up. Billy showed me around with the writer walking around. He showed me where the beavers are and all this stuff. The writer leaves and I’m kind of just casual. I’m like, so, Billy, when do you swim with the beavers? Let me know what to get to my camera, and he yeah, he looks at me and it’s just like, well, what are you talking about? Like, we don’t. I don’t swim with beavers. They’re wild animals, Like they’re they’re scared of me, Like what do you mean? I was like wow, the writer said, he’s like, oh, maybe I told him that when I was younger, I did a thing. So then I had this whole kind of afternoon of like what do I do? I gotta tell the editor this story is not possible. And Billy became a dear friend and I it just talked to him yesterday and I actually used his late father’s bo to hunt my first archery elk this year, And so Billy’s he’s a good friend. Yeah, he’s a really interesting guy. He’s a lot of habitat restoration and huge ranches around the West, and he’s a very interesting guy. Like him a lot. But yeah, that was a funny assignment where I had a call and actually told the editor. I was like that this thing isn’t true at all.

01:35:26
Speaker 4: That’s not really on you though it wasn’t on me.

01:35:29
Speaker 3: No, But I took the burden of like can I’m yeah, yeah, can I make this a story? Can I salvage it. But yeah, I’ve had some other projects where it’ll be like a you know, fashion something they’ll want me to do.

01:35:40
Speaker 2: Yeah. So for years I traveled with photographers for magazine features as always a strange relationship we got along.

01:35:48
Speaker 3: H Yeah, Yeah, it was rather i’d be in the field phtographer. I did amazing three weeks with David Kwalman wrote the history on human chimp collision in Uganda and he wrote the story on that and we did three weeks in the field together. It was a dream.

01:36:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, what kind of wild stuff you got coming up? Like for what kind of pictures you’re trying to get?

01:36:07
Speaker 4: Now?

01:36:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, I’ve shifted a bit in kind of the relationship of how I’m working And what does that mean. Well, it means like I’ve stopped going to the Arctic in ways that I don’t enjoy, like going on the kind of the drive of you’re there to do one thing and it’s to like film. And I’ve started to try to understand more about like the reason I get in this was around conservation. The reason is to try to educate people about wild spaces and to hopefully have them be around for generations to come. And a lot of what I realize now is so much of it is just around like human health, Like how well are humans in an area, whether it’s adjacent to national parks or even like in a country, Like how connected are we as an American nation to the natural world in a way that allows it to sustain itself for a long time? So what that looks like to me is like being more on the land with people being more around, Like yeah, reconnecting nature in a relational way in like a sacred way, like what is sacred to humans now in the natural setting? A lot of that is I think it’s kind of lost in a way, but people are trying to rekindle it. There’s cool work going on by like Bill Plockingh as an author Martine Precto is kind of this interesting thinker around like how do we rekindle our innate relationship natural worlds as like the human animal, like our psyches are totally honed for it to be to learn from Like essentially animism. Every culture in the world came from like an animism relationship. I must try to explain animism my kids, are you try to explain how do you approach it?

01:37:49
Speaker 2: What’s that?

01:37:49
Speaker 3: How do you approach it Like what do you say.

01:37:52
Speaker 2: Well, we we it’s hard to get there because we get there from a Judeo Christian understanding and then try.

01:37:57
Speaker 3: To walk backwards.

01:38:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s in there still, Like yeah, they would they would tell you if you ask them, does your dad lecture you buy animism?

01:38:07
Speaker 3: And they would say, yes, he does. That’s great. I mean I think it is, like I think that is like one of the pass forward for like sustaining long term this idea of conservation, which is kind of just a yeah, what people understand around saving wild places and wild things, you.

01:38:24
Speaker 2: Know, a good way to get into animism. It’s not really it’s it’s a roundabout way to get into it. But you formiar with this idea. Imagine that you imagine the earth. You imagine the earth as an organism in the river’s arts, arteries. The atmosphere is its lungs. You follow me, yes, and then you can kind of get to through that, you can get to an idea like well, let’s say we imagine like that the mountains. The mountains alive. You know, it’s got heat, it’s alive, it’s got it’s got things living on it, parasitic things live on it. You know.

01:39:00
Speaker 4: I mean there’s all sorts of functional relationships.

01:39:03
Speaker 2: It’s got things going on, makes weather, harvests the weather.

01:39:08
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, that’s stuff like that. Yeah. And then and then that that is like there’s a relationship there that’s essentially always waiting for humans to step into. Like the book Bringing Sweetcraft speaks to that. Every indigenous land based community that I spent time with, that is how it works. And oftentimes that looks like you go on to land you fast. You do these experiences where you’re actually in conversation, you’re listening, you’re asking, you’re speaking things things that we can’t speak to each other.

01:39:38
Speaker 2: You know.

01:39:38
Speaker 3: We talk about modern day therapy and it’s wonderful that it’s available and that people are accessing it, and it’s a conversation that has had in time Like when my dad grew up, it wasn’t even available. But there’s also things that people don’t speak to other people about ever, but you can speak to the natural world about.

01:39:57
Speaker 2: So where is the work in this for you? I mean, this seems like this seems like retirement thing.

01:40:04
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, ultimately it’s like the thing that I am most excited about now is this idea of like how do you reconnect people to the human animals that we all are in like a holistic way, Like I think the modern wellness movement is just tapping into all these things that makes a healthy animal, like get a lot of sleep, eat whole foods, exercise, don’t have chemicals, don’t spend a lot of time sitting around, socialize. Like this is just like if you break down the human animals, those are things that feed us. Like there’s the psychologist Francis Weller who talks about that you have primary versus secondary satisfactions related to the human psyche. Primary satisfactions are like storytelling, ceremony, ritual connection to food, dance, song, like the creative expression of humans, and those feed communities and have for tens of thousand of years. And then you have secondary satisfactions, which is what a lot of modern behavior is stuck in where it’s like ambition, materialism, these things that are not rooted in like long term human health of like communities and societies. And for me, it’s like again like getting back to like the reason I got in this work was a trigenerate change some way towards like healthy futures for everybody, for all life essentially and the work in this For me, a lot of it is like personal, like trying to understand what that my relationship is the natural world, going on the land and doing doing a four day fast in a wild place and being in one place doing essentially like a vigil and seeing what comes out of that. Like our brain shifts into a different way of being. You start to think differently, experience differently. Sensory experience becomes differently, going into katosis where burning fat instead of ingesting calories, and then spending time with being invited into communities, going to Sundance for the first time last year with the crow being part of sweats where you’re like the whole idea around ceremony. For me, I didn’t I wasn’t engaged in that at all. As a kid, we didn’t have any form of organized religion or spirituality other than like being a naturalist, like being outside, being curious.

01:42:15
Speaker 2: Mom.

01:42:15
Speaker 3: We would do like nature journals or we would draw again. There was no hunting. I was curious about it. I would I would kill things. I would borrow buy Buddy’s BB gun and shoot things. But I was like out of curiosity without having like an actual guidance around it. And then as an adult, I’ve always kind of thought about like ceremony is like taboo is a bad thing, Like the idea of like religion is this thing that’s done wrong to the world. That was kind of like an idea. And again I don’t come from an organized religion background, but animism is this thing that’s like available to all humans, Like it is like a kind of like a human right, and I think ceremony is as well, And like now is this time where I’m trying to bring that into life in a way that with hunting this year, for the first time, I hunted an animal in a way that was new to me and saying to him while he died, decorated him, adorned him, and then went through a practice of yeah, in a way of trying to honor him in that way versus yeah, the last four years of learning to hunt and doing it just kind of however it came. And like there’s this idea around yeah. Robin rol Kimer has a quote around ceremonies, how we remember to remember, how we remember the important things in life, and whether it can be anything, it can be these like yeah, marking graduation or a step into a different place. It’s like, how do we spend some more time with it to make it like an actual life changing event to our to our community and to ourselves.

01:43:41
Speaker 2: You know, you’re still gonna take.

01:43:46
Speaker 3: Pictures, Still take yeah, still taking pictures.

01:43:50
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:43:50
Speaker 3: I mean I was just on the Monomine Reservation a couple weeks ago, and they’re doing some cool stuff with getting buffalo back on the land. Call it homecoming.

01:43:58
Speaker 2: So that kind of ties in the what you talking about, though it exactly what I’m talking about, So it’s you kind of That’s when I said the work of it, meaning like you can photo document. Yeah, I think places where this is happening in interesting ways, or places where humans are re engaging or continuing to engage around wild wild spaces and wildlife.

01:44:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, because I think like these places, these like very far off wild places are like they hold again that idea of like a regulated nervous system landscape, the idea of going back in time. It’s amazing to be able to walk around with wolves in a place that you don’t have to worry about it, Like I I can’t do that in Yellowstone anywhere around here. I wouldn’t want to do it. Ethically because those wolves will get hammered during hunting season and they do around Yellowstone every year, these wolves that kind of get a little used to people get shot. And ultimately it’s like coming back to, Yeah, how do I use the skills that I have and I’ve created through photography and storytelling to like elevate some of these interesting stories. And yeah, the Monomine story is amazing. There’s a group called Medicine Fish there. It’s will nonprofit that uses youth work and empowerment basically like rekindling their animism relationship to the natural world through song and ceremony and a buffalo heard now that they have from the Nature Conservancy and I was there to help them film. They invited me on to help film that and yeah, beautiful. Hundreds of people show up and it’s like that’s what’s like, that’s it to me in a lot of ways, what’s happening where it’s like there’s this feeling now in the modern world that I certainly get caught up in where we’re like rushing away from this past that none of us fully understand, like we never lived what it would be like to you know, be on on the planes here inanimate relationship. You know, we can read about it. And I brought some books for y’all that maybe you’ve heard of them or read them, but like Pretty Shield and Ego Voice Remembers. There are these ethnographic interviews with elders in the nineteenths.

01:45:57
Speaker 2: We’ve read a lot of those, but I haven’t read those ones.

01:45:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, they’re great, and it’s just the stories of like pre contact. You know, I liked in Hide Hunters how you touched on like you painted the picture for the listener around like what the buffalo meant to the planes people, and so so like we’re rushing away from that in a lot of ways as a collective, modern dominant culture. This idea of like that was primitive. There was you know, there’s a negative connotation around this older ways of living, that it was dangerous, that it was unpredictable, that it was you know, unhealthy, And so then we’re rushing towards like the technological world. You know that like none of us know what’s going to happen, but that’s it.

01:46:38
Speaker 2: But in some ways that is humanity. You can’t find that many experience. You can’t find that many case examples, case studies where people are held out advancement and rejected. There are some yeah, like Sentinel Island, there are some Yeah. Typically people accept it.

01:47:03
Speaker 3: They want it.

01:47:05
Speaker 2: It’s like to go and say to go and say it. Somehow we become we’ve become like that. It’s a shame that we walked away from these things when again and again and again, cultures all around the world, you say to them, would you like food is like a guaranteed food supply, yes, we would. Would you like cellular service, yes we would. Would you like I remember reading this thing, even from the seventies. I was looking at cash expenditures and into it communities, those white gas, white gas. So I think number two cash expensures, canned food. Right, it’s just people. I don’t think you can go and look. It’s just people again and again and again want the stuff. They’re like, oh, you can make my life easier. You can make it more likely that I’ll live to be in my seventies or eighties. You can make it less likely that my baby will die. I’m in yeah. Always Yeah, it’s a little bit like like I get it, and I spend a lot of time existing, and I spent a lot of time exploring skill sets and and exploring things in the past. But I always remind myself that it was a very very deliberate decision around the world to move away from that lifestyle. It was imposed here and there, but typically people wanted it. It typically wanted it, and they will continue to typically want it.

01:48:36
Speaker 3: I think I think a lot of times it was it was forced. Like I don’t think they were necessarily a choice.

01:48:42
Speaker 2: Man, if we’d have to do whole the show, I’ll take you, I’ll take you on on that one.

01:48:47
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:48:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think a lot of times there was a little bit of a bait and switch. But typically you can show up on the shore and you can lay out the goods and initially people come.

01:49:02
Speaker 3: But but I also think what you’re saying, I think we’re kind of sitting in a way, like they’re interested in the tools. Yeah, yeah, they want to maintain the material. They want to Yeah, they want to maintain their their way of life. Perhaps well in a way, yeah, but I think they want yeah, they want guns.

01:49:18
Speaker 2: They don’t foresee they want at the beginning of they want metal.

01:49:22
Speaker 3: Right, I don’t. I don’t think that they see it initially. I think it is like a natural thing, like and we see that anything. You see like someone with a cool system or whatever, they got some cool new tool that they are using to do the thing that we also like doing. And it’s like instantly, you can’t forget that. You can’t know that there’s a better way of doing it in a way or a more quote efficient way of doing something, and forget that. I think that is like human nature, Like we do want that. But I think I think I’m.

01:49:48
Speaker 2: Trying to counter what you’re saying. I’m just saying this is something I’ve wrestled with. Definitely, I’ve intellectually wrestled with this whole bunch.

01:49:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the tools specifically, but I think like the way of life, I don’t necessarily think that everybody wants like if they.

01:50:02
Speaker 2: There’s probably a baked there’s a baked in. Let’s say there was a baked in nostalgia. But later you’re like, man, should we have done that?

01:50:08
Speaker 5: Yeah, you’re also not necessarily talking about material culture. You’re talking about in that transformation or transition, you’re talking about losing intangible, intangible things. And it’s not that you like are working to go back the other way along this arc. But look over your shoulder and remember some of the core like human experiences and that that that have been lost in some ways.

01:50:38
Speaker 2: But even if even if the product we’re getting so far out, even if the product is religion, people initially are curious. They’re initially curious just it happens again and again and again all around the world. They’re initially curious. Everybody was animist, virtually everyone was animistic. They became they became monotheistic. We’ll say this for the next show. I got one last question for you. It’s a business question. If we look at this is this is going to sound insulting, but it comes from me being a writer. Like oftentimes the way that it moves is is like it moves a that there’s sort of like a writer is going to do a thing, let’s find a photographer to go along with it. Do you get to Are you at a point in your career where the where you’re the dog and the writer’s the tail.

01:51:34
Speaker 3: Do you follow me?

01:51:35
Speaker 2: Can you do you have do you wield that power as sort of like a premier wildlife photographer where you could say, there’s an image I’d like to get, it’s so good you ought to find a writer.

01:51:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that happens. I don’t claim to be to be anything of that, like powis prowess or level. But I think that like the not geo stories, all pitch something in an they’ll sign a writer. I’ll come with the writer.

01:52:01
Speaker 2: So what will be that the image leads.

01:52:05
Speaker 3: I mean National Graphic is I mean, it’s definitely an image magazine. I say, it’s like they like, you hook people with the cover. If they don’t say on the newstands anymore, but if you hook people to cover, they’ll they’ll go through it. This is what they you know, that’s what they say. People do with it, like look at the pictures and the picture interesting, then they’ll read the article more. That’s kind of how they speak to Yeah.

01:52:23
Speaker 2: It’s like, uh, yeah, the photographer is the dog, the writer’s the tale, because I would always imagine the writer as the dog and the photographer is the tale, and you need both.

01:52:31
Speaker 3: I mean it’s like you need both.

01:52:32
Speaker 2: I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think it should be the way it was when I was doing that. I think that in some ways, like looking at the wolf stuff, if someone said to me, hey, you can look at these pictures or you can read what this guy wrote, I’m like, I’ll go with the pictures please, like on that ship.

01:52:47
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you could take an eighth grade essay and attach it to that and somebody be like, the best thing I ever read.

01:52:53
Speaker 4: It’s a transformative piece.

01:52:54
Speaker 2: Yeah. If I was an editor and someone came and said, look, man, I don’t get all these photos of all this crazy stuff, I’d be like, we should probably find a rider to go with.

01:53:05
Speaker 3: I mean, definitely has changed a lot, I think in that way. But yeah, I mean I we would need both. I mean need the dog in the tail, you need it all. No, but who gets to be the tail?

01:53:15
Speaker 2: And it gets to be the dog? Who gets to be the tail?

01:53:18
Speaker 3: Yeah? Well, so I likes.

01:53:19
Speaker 2: I got one last question. If okay, I think of the whole world, the depths, of the oceans, whatever, the whole world. If you could get a picture of one thing that you know to be a thing that happens right, like a sperm whale grabbing a giant squid, Like one thing that you know occurs, what would you get the picture next?

01:53:42
Speaker 4: Beaver under the ice?

01:53:43
Speaker 2: Yeah?

01:53:48
Speaker 3: What comes to mind. I was yels In just a couple weeks ago and read through the scene like found a big bowl carcass of elk with some research out they knew was there, the tom Mountain had been feeding on it, collared one they knew was there, and I ended up like tracing back the whole scene. And I would love just to get a cool, like a good image of like a mountain lion ambush, like coming in from the tree, jumping on the back of a bull elk and going through that world.

01:54:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s a tough one.

01:54:25
Speaker 3: That’d be a tough one to get, but it’s not impossible. This morning, the first hunge in this deck, we didn’t get to it yet. I saw a family of cougars this morning on a walk are six miles from here. They just killed a mule deer.

01:54:40
Speaker 2: Uh, my neighbor’s kid. They got a bull and when they went back up to get they left some meat hanging in a tree. Yeah, And they got up there and there’s a lion sitting there nowing on it. They got a bunch of pictures of it. Yeah. Then they had to go in there and get their meat, spook it off, but had the gut pile.

01:54:56
Speaker 3: Yep. Yeah, that’s when I walked in on. Initially it was confused and there was a raven that had been calling. She’s a little bed there on the on the right. There they had just been there.

01:55:06
Speaker 2: And then well that’s where the lions have been laying.

01:55:08
Speaker 3: Yeah that’s cool. Wow.

01:55:09
Speaker 2: Oh there you go, the poor thing.

01:55:11
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:55:13
Speaker 2: God, you take nice pictures.

01:55:14
Speaker 3: All the time. There are cell phone images. You can hear mom just in the back there there they are.

01:55:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, excellent, man.

01:55:24
Speaker 4: Yeah, don’t tell you honest where that was.

01:55:26
Speaker 2: No, he won’t mess with them, kind he won’t mess them. He did.

01:55:30
Speaker 3: He just let him go.

01:55:32
Speaker 4: Yeah, like everyone’s going to be growing up.

01:55:35
Speaker 2: I tell you what. I was cutting Christmas trees. We were hunting trees in my family on Sunday, hunting trees. I’m sitting her with my kids. I’m not kidding, man, like park my daughter broke her foot, so she waits. She I was like, you gotta wait the truck. She’s got a broken foot. My wife said, I’m not gonna leave from the truck, so I’ll just sit in the truck with her two. So me and the boys strike off up the hill. We don’t go one hundred yards. And I could get into how it was terrible Christmas tree hunting, but you can see it right there. All that frozen ice and snow makes Christmas tree hunting impossible. To every tree. You gotta tell the boys, get some sticks and whoop the tree. You can’t judge them, you can’t feel judge, like looking at a deer from the back.

01:56:16
Speaker 4: They all look, you know how it looks.

01:56:18
Speaker 2: So we had to beat we like beat three trees clean, and we were just sick of it, and we just decided to take one. Anyway. I look at one point, I look at the ground and our dogs running all over. Hell. I look at the ground and there’s the brand newest, cleanest lion track, and I realized we kicked that sucker out of this little cluster of Christmas trees, beautiful track, and our dogs like all our dog doesn’t notice anything, you know, but not even not even like like any sort of acknowledgment whatsoever that this has happened. Like never sticks or nose in the track, just nothing, not even there. It just doesn’t register. It doesn’t register that dog. If we weren’t there, that dog probably not alive. Be a cat snack at coming on the show man.

01:57:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, I appreciate you having me on fascinating world.

01:57:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can’t take a picture, dude. I took black and white photography one and to college.

01:57:18
Speaker 3: That’s good thing.

01:57:19
Speaker 4: You can see he’s more formally trained.

01:57:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, I realized all I had to do was take black and white photography. Wanted to to realize that was not a visual artist.

01:57:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don’t have it. You don’t have it.

01:57:33
Speaker 4: You don’t have it.

01:57:35
Speaker 3: I mean, you’ve done. I should just get the audio from my captions next time for this. Yeah.

01:57:43
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, your stuff’s gorgeous, man, and and I love seeing it. And I got so excited about that beaver stuff.

01:57:48
Speaker 3: That was cool. Nice. Yeah, cool, I’m glad you called me in.

01:57:51
Speaker 2: So tell people how people want to go kind of what’s the best way to go. If people want to just go see a lot of your work, where do they go?

01:57:59
Speaker 3: You can see it on my website running Donovan dot com, Instagrams, on other place I have a lot of presents. But yeah, also check out the Animus Valley Institute. Oh not my work, but oh not okay, But people that want to rewild themselves and rekindle that relationship to the animate world God, they offer experiences.

01:58:16
Speaker 2: And but on your website they can just go peruse all these.

01:58:20
Speaker 3: Years to crew’s images and all that.

01:58:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do stuff we talked about today. They’d find on there some.

01:58:25
Speaker 3: Of it, some of it I haven’t really showed people, Yeah, but some of it’s available. Yeah. I have a museum exhibit that’s traveling around.

01:58:32
Speaker 2: That was the country I forgot to ask, but one to ask about that.

01:58:35
Speaker 3: Oh that’s right, Yeah, yeah, thanks, it’s it’ll be in Saint Petersburg, Florida next opens up in late March early April. But going down for the program for that, it was an Mmarillo, Texas just a couple of months ago in San Diego and after the museum.

01:58:50
Speaker 2: And what’s the what’s the called?

01:58:51
Speaker 3: Well, it’s called wolves. It’s comparison especially images of Yellowstone and Arctic wolves. God. Yeah, big, big of it. And yeah, lots of text with it as well, there is, yeah, yeah, lots of maps and some because.

01:59:06
Speaker 2: They had the image.

01:59:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, I had the images. Yeah, need some texts to go with it. Yeah. Yeah. It’ll come through museum and the Rockies maybe in a couple of years, yeah, which I’m excited about.

01:59:15
Speaker 2: Yeah. Man, Yeah, that’d be real popular around here.

01:59:18
Speaker 3: I’m excited for it. Yeah. I want to go to Colorado too.

01:59:20
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, you do some work.

01:59:21
Speaker 3: Down there with wolves, some help. Yeah. All right man, Well, thank you very much, Thanks Steve, thank you, thank you all.

01:59:27
Speaker 2: Yeah.