60 Minutes - 1/19/2020: Great White, The Wolves of Yellowstone, The Photo Ark

Episode Date: January 20, 2020

More sharks are being spotted near beaches in the North Atlantic Ocean, some just feet from the shoreline. Why the sharks are swimming so close and how scientists are tracking them? The reintroduction of the predator has led to more visitors and a shift in the ecological makeup of Yellowstone Park. And, "National Geographic" photographer Joel Sartore shows us how his shots come together and why he started his Photo Ark project. Bill Whitaker will have these stories on this week's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. Tonight on this special edition of 60 Minutes presents a 60 Minutes wildlife tour. If you're standing there, you don't know that shark. You have no idea. You don't know that shark. No idea. She's like 10 feet offshore. That's a great white shark lurking just off the coast of a popular Cape Cod beach.

We wanted to know why these awe-inspiring animals are coming closer to our shores. So we went out into the North Atlantic with two groups of scientists. And yes, at some point, we actually needed a bigger boat to see what they are finding out about the great white shark. You fly up alongside that wolf and you shoot a tranquilizing dart into it. Five minutes, it goes down. We process the wolves, we take blood, and we attach a radio collar. And then we follow them for their life, hopefully. Yellowstone wolves are fierce and territorial. The leading cause of death is attacks from other wolves. And their look is uncontrollable.

That look says, I ain't going to conform to your rules, and I'll die before I do. To catch Joel Sartori in action, we flew halfway around the world. What makes a great picture? Emotion. We're looking for the eyes. We're primates, and we're really, really responsive to eyes, but you shoot them like they're models. We do, like they're going in for their high school senior portrait. He's trying to photograph every animal, bird, fish, reptile, and insect in captivity. He calls his project the photo arc. In the Bible, the arc saves all the creatures on earth. Yeah. Is that your goal? Giddy up. Every one of them. Good evening. I'm Bill Whitaker. Welcome to 60 Minutes Presents. Tonight, we embark on a wildlife tour. We'll roam with the wolves in the snows of Yellowstone, marvel at the diversity of the animal world through the lens of a National Geographic photographer.

But we begin with a dive into the lives of some of the ocean's most storied and feared predators. The book and movie Jaws introduced us to the great white shark more than 40 years ago and scared us out of our wits. Much of the film was shot in the waters off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The irony is that when it came out in the mid-1970s, there were very few white sharks around Cape Cod. The species was in the midst of a serious decline, and the movie made it worse, with fishermen hunting the few great whites that there were. White sharks were granted federal protection in 1997 and in the years since have made a comeback that has delighted conservationists and frightened swimmers and surfers. On Cape Cod this past summer, shark

sightings and beach closings were about as common as lobster rolls. As we first reported last September, the Atlantic great white shark is back. Look at this fish. Look at this fish. Yeah, look at this fish. On a Tuesday in mid-September, we are with Dr. Greg Skomal,

chief shark scientist for the Massachusetts Department of Marine Fisheries, following an 11-foot white shark swimming just feet off the beach near Truro on Cape Cod. And if you're standing there, you don't know that shark's here. You have no idea. You don't know that shark's here. No idea. She's like 10 feet offshore. Yeah, it's very close now. White sharks are so close to shore because that's where their favorite food is. Gray seals, thousands of which now call Cape Cod home. This is the restaurant right here. These sharks have found the restaurant and they're waiting for the doors to open. And when those seals begin to leave the beach, it's dinner time.

Skomo and his team from the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy are trying to attach electronic tracking tags to as many sharks as they can, 230 so far. The way they do it is fascinating. Pilot Wayne Davis locates sharks from his spotter plane, then guides boat captain John King onto them. Yeah, use a little gas, John. He's right on the shoal. It's about as good as it's going to get. Standing on a pulpit on the bow of a small boat, Greg Skomo wields a long pole that has a dart and a tag at the end. Wait there. Done. You got him? Tag. That was it.

There he goes. All right. My God. Beautiful, beautiful placement, Greg. Yeah, thank you, John. Nice work. You can see? You can see where it was?

Yeah, you can see it right at the base of the dorsal. You can see it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we're going to learn about that fish for the next nine, ten years. They will track the fish because the tag constantly emits a ping that is picked up when the shark swims close to acoustic receivers attached to buoys. And how many of these do you have up and down the coast? We have over a hundred out all over Massachusetts.

And that's just you? Other people have others? Yeah, so we can actually track the movements of our white sharks when they leave here. The tags also help Skomal and his research colleague Megan Winton figure out just how many sharks there are and have established that Cape Cod is now one of the world's white shark hot spots. They regularly haul buoys out of the water and download data from them to a tablet that displays each time a tagged shark swims by. Lots of white shark detections. This tells them a lot about individuals. They have confirmed that they are loners and that the same one will often come back to precisely the same

hunting ground year after year. A white shark seemed to be hunting Greg Skomal in 2018 when it came up, jaws open, right under the pulpit. Whoa! Holy crap! Came right up and opened his mouth right at my feet. That shook him up for a bit, but he insists it shouldn't shake up the public. All I can tell them is that the probability of them being bitten is incredibly low, but there's not much more I can say. Because that fear is primal.

I think that fear is primal. I think it's innate. I think it's in them. It's in us. It's in all of us. Five days after our day on the water off Cape Cod, we needed a bigger boat for a very different shark tagging expedition 600 miles to the northeast, just off Hay Island in Nova Scotia. Good morning. Good morning. How are you? We boarded a 125-foot research ship called OCEARCH, which has been tagging Atlantic white sharks from Florida to Canada since 2012. Founder Chris Fisher invited us to join the first day of his 2019 Nova Scotia expedition. And we come up here, we've been here 24 hours, we've seen two or three sharks,

and no one ever even knew to come look here before. O-Search launches a team on a small boat to hook white sharks much as fishermen would, using long lines, bait, and floats to keep them near the surface. O-Search is a converted Alaskan crab boat equipped with a platform that's lowered into the water off one side. As the small boat tows the shark alongside, O-Search fishing master Brett McBride leaps onto the submerged platform into water that's 49 degrees. With the line in his hand, he guides an 1,100-pound male white shark onto the cradle. Whoa, whoa, look at that. The platform is raised out of the water, effectively beaching the shark.

It offers no resistance, worn out after being hooked and towed for nearly an hour. McBride gets right in its face to insert a hose between its giant jaws. Keeping the clean seawater from flowing over its gills. I'm making sure it's getting good oxygen. A team member starts a clock. They don't want to keep the shark out of the water for more than 15 minutes. And OCEARCH chief scientist, Dr. Robert Huter, gives me an opportunity I'm not quite sure I want. So Bill, just go ahead. Go ahead and take your time. Just feel how beautiful that is. Oh my God. How smooth. Then go this way. Rub your hand the other way and you feel it's kind of bumpy. Yeah. My God. The OCESearch team swarms the shark,

drawing blood and tissue samples, picking off parasites to be analyzed, and measuring its girth and length. 371 total. That's 371 centimeters, or 12 feet 2 inches. The biggest Atlantic great white they've caught was a 16-foot female who weighed 3,500 pounds. As Chris Fisher measures this one, Bob Huter inserts an acoustic tag, like the one Greg Skomal attaches with a dart. That doesn't harm the shark? No. It's just, it floats in the body cavity. Let's roll the shark. Everybody step back. After the shark is rolled onto its belly, Chris Fisher drills through the dorsal fin.

He insists it's no more painful than piercing an ear. He's attaching the tag that really sets OCEARCH apart in the world of white shark tracking. This spot tag allows us to track this animal in real time for up to five years. The spot tag will send a signal to a satellite each time this shark's dorsal fin comes above the surface of the water. OCEARCH has put more than 50 of them on Atlantic white sharks and displays their tracks on its website. And that's how you learn not only where they are, but what they're doing where they are, which is what you need to know to manage, right?

Where's the mating? Where's the birthing? Where's the foraging? Where's the gestating? While some scientists criticize the OCEARCH techniques as too invasive, they are gathering a lot of data. 17 different research projects will get samples and information from a single shark. It doesn't take much to make everybody happy. Still, there are a lot of unknowns. No white shark has ever been kept in captivity and no one has ever seen them mate or give birth anywhere. But there are also discoveries.

The O-Search team has confirmed that the waters off Long Island are an important nursery for baby whites like these called pups. Did you get him? Yeah, got him. And back on Cape Cod, acoustic tags are teaching Greg Skomal about just how far adult sharks travel. So what's the most interesting thing you have learned about them? We now know, based on the tagging work we've done the last 10 years,

is that when they leave Cape Cod, they go down to Florida, and they spend the time in the Gulf of Mexico, and they overwinter in these southern climates. But then some of these sharks move out into the open Atlantic Ocean. And when they're out in the middle of the Atlantic, they dive down to depths as great as 3,000 feet every day. And there's not a scientist on Earth that can tell you why they do that. Scientists have learned how long-lived they are. White sharks, we now know, live over 70 years.

70 years. 70 years. They don't start hunting seals until they're late teens. But when they do, watch out. In this footage Greg Skomal shot, you see a seal leap out of the water with a shark right on its tail. Have you ever seen that before? Here, the shark catches a seal, and the ocean water explodes in blood red in an instant.

The shark then swims away with half a seal in its jaws. Seals have been protected by federal law since 1972, and some 25,000 now live near Cape Cod. More seals means more sharks, and that's what worries the swimmers and surfers sharing the water with them. This photo was taken at the Cape in September 2019. Great white sharks very rarely attack people. The one that killed a swimmer named Arthur Medici just off this beach last September was the first fatal attack on Cape Cod since 1936. But it triggered a fear of attacks that can hardly be measured.

Scary warning signs on every beach. Stop bleed kits at lifeguard stands. A phone app called Sharktivity that reports sightings in real time, with local news doing much the same, and community meetings packed with frightened citizens. And no sharks or seals are worth a young man's life. They're just not. You're the scientist, but you also live here, and you know people are afraid. We can't bury our heads in the sand when it comes to shark attacks. And so that's in my face every day now. And then it always falls back on the question of, well, what do you tell your kids to do? What do you tell your kids to do?

You know, I tell my kids, don't go out past waist deep. That's chilling advice for swimmers, for surfers, and for the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce. I mean, we basically got to undo everything Jaws did. I mean, we got half the people on the eastern seaboard terrified about something that almost never happens. I saw the teeth on this character here. People who are swimming nearby should not be afraid of that?

No, they're clever. Like, even though we dress up like they're food and try to fool them, they very rarely get fooled. What do you mean dress up like they're food? You ever seen what someone in a wetsuit looks like compared to a seal? He's got a point. When this white shark's 15 minutes on the O-Search platform ran out, we were ordered off.

That was amazing. They gave him a name. Sydney. For the nearest Nova Scotia town and began lowering him back into the water. And what you guys have done to him, this does not harm or hurt the shark at all? No, because we're monitoring the stress of the animal throughout. After a couple of minutes, he perked up, especially when he

noticed the O-Search photographer in the water around the corner. Finally, with fishmaster Brett McBride helping steer him by the tail, off went Sidney. There he goes. Do your thing. Good luck, old boy. Sydney. Sydney. Yeah. Sydney has been busy in the months since we met him in Nova Scotia. He migrated as far south as Florida, and as of early January, his spot tag showed him off the North Carolina coast. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard.

When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over deliver. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade.

Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. It's safe to say that wolves have an image problem. Since ancient times, they've been portrayed in fables and legends and the Bible as fearsome, voracious predators. The story of the big bad wolf may be the most memorable and frightening of all the fairy tales told by the Brothers Grimm. That Grimm reputation actually produced a very real result in America in the early 20th century.

Wolves were wiped off the landscape, trapped, poisoned, and hunted until there was not a single one left in the American West. The National Park Service brought wolves back to Yellowstone Park almost exactly 25 years ago, following a bitter debate between wildlife groups who wanted them restored and ranchers who most definitely didn't. Even today, the wolves of Yellowstone stir strong emotions. But as we first reported in 2018, they've also had an impact that almost no one saw coming. In the dead of winter, Yellowstone Park is a beautiful but

forbidding place. Howling wind, sub-zero temperatures, six feet of snow. Just finding enough food to survive is a profound struggle for every animal. Waterfowl. Bison. Elk. Foxes. They all have to work for every morsel. Yellowstone was the world's first national park, founded in 1872. And it remains one of the most visited.

Millions of people come here every summer, but they used to pretty much leave it to the wildlife in the winter until the wolves came back. Oh, they're behind the tree. Now, reports of a wolf sighting can produce a traffic jam along the 150-mile stretch of road the Park Service keeps open in the winter. Oh, we got a wolf up in the lead. Visitors with spotting scopes gather in absolutely frigid weather for a momentary, long-distance view. Bill, these folks came from Germany to see wolves. Doug Smith runs the Yellowstone Wolf Research Program for the Park Service. And no one predicted this would happen.

Actually, you know, we... The appeal of coming in to see the wolves? Yes. And it truly has been amazing. And hundreds of thousands of people a year, we estimate, come here just to see wolves. Wolf tourism pumps $35 million a year into the local economy, much of it spent in the winter, which is prime wolf-watching time. We've seen wolves all three days that we've been out. Glenn Mai is a retired FBI agent from Arlington, Virginia. Kathy Lombard is a retired cop from New Hampshire. They both paid an outfitter thousands of dollars to take them wolf watching.

So what is it about wolves that bring you all the way out here from New Hampshire to sit out here and just hope for the chance to see them? They've been able to bring wolves back into Yellowstone, and they've thrived. So that's just an awesome thing to see. It was January 12, 1995, when the first gray wolves captured in Canada were carried into Yellowstone Park. It drew both national attention and fierce opposition, so much that armed guards were posted to protect those wolves. So the first wolves released into Yellowstone Park

were released right back here in this thicket? Yes. So a total of 41 over three years. How many are in the park now? We've got 96 in 10 packs, and it's been roughly 100 wolves the last 10 years. Very stable. Those 10 packs of about 10 wolves each are without a doubt the most closely observed and studied wolves on Earth.

Our goal is to keep touch with each pack. That's our goal. They do that by trying to attach radio collars to at least two wolves in each of the park's packs. So you fly out in the airplane, find wolves in the open. That airplane radios a waiting helicopter on the ground. That helicopter flies out with a gunner in the back seat. That gunner is almost always Smith himself.

Loaded. And you fly up alongside that wolf and you shoot a tranquilizing dart into it. Five minutes it goes down. We process the wolves. We take blood. We measure them. We look at their health and we attach a radio collar and then we follow them for their life, hopefully. That life, by the way, typically lasts about five years. Yellowstone wolves are fierce and territorial. The leading cause of death is attacks from other wolves. And their look is uncontrollable.

That look says, I ain't going to conform to your rules and I'll die before I do. And that's powerful. That is a location of a wolf. Data from the radio callers has helped Smith's team to learn volumes about wolf behavior. It also helps all those wolf watchers find them. Park Service volunteer Rick McIntyre is out every day listening for signals. So that is from a black male wolf 1107. And then spreading the word. Would you like to see a gray wolf? I would love to. Okay, there you go. So it's a little bit right of center. Oh, yeah. Oh, look, here comes the whole pack. Wow. So see if you can count them all, there would be two grays and six blacks.

Four, five, six black ones and the white one that went by. And there should be a second gray. How about that? We had spotted the Junction Butte Pack along a ridgeline about two miles away. Like most packs, it's led by an alpha male and an alpha female, the only two wolves in a pack who mate with each other. The gray alpha female is still leading to the right. Oh, yeah. And you see how the ones behind her are playing. Uh-huh. She's determined to lead them to the west. They're running along the top. Right along the ridge. Yeah. That's magnificent. We can see these wolves from the ground,

and it's been a sensation. So we've learned a lot about pack dynamics and personalities and how social they are. What do you mean? Describe that for me. They want to be together. They're a pack animal. So the power of the wolf is the pack. Nowhere is that power more evident than when a wolf pack is on the hunt for elk, its favorite prey. They work together because they have to. Your average wolf weighs 100 pounds or so, but your average prey animal is much bigger.

A bull elk's 750 pounds. A cowlick's 500. So how's a roughly 100 to 120-pound animal going to take that down? They do it, Doug Smith says, both by coordinating their attack and by zeroing in on vulnerable prey. They're going to take the week. So they're making their living off of calf elk, old elk, injured elk. Without wolves, there was an overpopulation of elk in Yellowstone. As wolves have cut the size of those herds, there's been an unexpected side effect.

Plants that elk feed on have made a comeback, which has in turn produced benefits for other species. All the little trees have come back since wolf recovery. This gully filled with shrubs has all come back since wolf recovery. And the wolves are a factor in all of that. Very simply put, wolves eat elk, elk eat this. When the elk get reduced, they eat less. So beavers and songbirds can respond to the growth in that vegetation. Doug Smith is quick to say that it's not as simple as he just made it sound. But that hasn't stopped some environmentalists from declaring wolves the saviors of Yellowstone's ecology. There's some people who will try to convince you that wolves could probably solve

Mideast peace and world hunger. Randy Newberg is a Montana hunter who hosts a TV show and podcast for hunters. He remembers how emotional the debate over reintroduction was between wolf haters and wolf lovers. Wolves are wolves. They aren't the big bad wolf and they don't have a rainbow shooting out their ass like everyone would think they do. There's something romantic about a wolf, right? Unless you've seen it chewing on a live cow. Eric Costa's family has been raising cattle and sheep on this Montana ranch for 100 years. He says he was worried from the moment the first wolves were brought back to Yellowstone, which is about 100 miles to the south. You know, they weren't going to stay in the park.

They're a wild animal. They'd go where they want to go. I'm sure you knew it was only a matter of time before they were going to get here. Oh, yes. There was no doubt. And there was a set of tracks. Eric Colston knew that wolves would follow migrating elk out of Yellowstone and onto his ranch, and that they'd attack his livestock if given the chance. He started hiring range riders to watch over his

cattle, and he bought guard dogs to help keep wolves away from his sheep. Live sheep pay for things, live cattle pay for things, dead ones don't. His defensive measures have kept wolves away from his livestock, but neighboring ranchers have lost both cattle and sheep to wolves. The thing that's never monitored when I talk to these people is the lost nights of sleep, the nervousness. I saw a wolf track on my place today, or I actually saw a wolf. Wolves are around. You can't measure or compensate for that. Are wolf attacks on livestock a serious problem? No. It's rare that it happens, but if it's happening

to you, it's a serious problem. It was that fear of wolf attacks that drove ranchers and settlers to eradicate them in the early 20th century. After the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, wolves were among the first to be listed, and a campaign began to restore them to Yellowstone Park. After that happened in the 90s, wolves quickly spread out of Yellowstone and into neighboring states, so many that there are now nearly 2,000 in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. After a long and bitter legal battle, those states finally won the authority to manage and sometimes kill wolves outside the national park. Has this management of the wolves helped to lessen some of those passions,

to calm some of those emotions? I think so. So to have wolves, you have to kill the wolves? In some situations, yes. The first situation is cut and dried. Any wolves that attack livestock are immediately killed themselves. I think that's helped a lot, at least with the ranching community. People feel better if they're not powerless to deal with something. And then wolves are hunted. There's a hunting season on wolves. All three states have them. So having wolves be hunted has probably increased people's willingness to share the landscape with them.

Randy Newberg is living proof of that. He filmed a wolf hunt a few years ago for his TV show. It took him 11 days and 100 miles of trudging and tracking through the snow. You went out looking for a wolf and saw how smart they are, how cunning they are, how athletic they are. Yeah. If you want to increase your respect for wolves, go and chase them out on their landscape.

Hunters and ranchers and avid wolf watchers rarely see eye to eye, but they now agree on at least one thing. We've got a gray. Wolves are back in Yellowstone for good. Oh, my God, yes. People love this. You know, we live in an artificial world. It's stores and cars and roads and buildings.

Wolves are real. And people crave it. They love it. We almost have this thirst for something real now. Joel Sartori, an acclaimed National Geographic photographer, is a man on a mission. He's trying to photograph every species, every animal, bird, fish, reptile, and insect in captivity. As we first reported back in 2018, Joel Sartori sides with scientists who estimate that half the species alive today could be extinct by the end of this century. So he travels to zoos all around the world to take pictures of what we're losing and to ignite conservation efforts to prevent extinctions. He calls his project the photo arc.

On this arc, the animals go in one by one. He's beautiful, isn't he? To catch Joel Sartori in action, we flew halfway around the world to the Philippines, home to hundreds of unique species. Flew 20 hours to get here. And you came all this way to take a picture of a Palawan stink badger. Absolutely. Absolutely. Boy, is he stinky. He's smaller than a skunk, but smells worse. He's part badger, part skunk, and he fired a reeking rocket after he entered the photo cage. How could something that cute be that stinky?

It smelled so terrible that the next animal to leave the red carpet and head into the photo cage, a rare Palauan binturon, took one whiff, smelled stink badger stink, and backed out. Sartori said he should have photographed the stink badger last, but the little stinker is a pungent prize. There's nobody else coming along to photograph a stink badger last, but the little stinker is a pungent prize. There's nobody else coming along to photograph a stink badger. I'm the only one. And that's the case for 90% of the species I photograph, maybe 95%. These are things that nobody will ever know existed if it weren't for the photo arc. If they could just see how beautiful this thing is, they would care. Get that other light. Joel cares so much, he spends half the year traveling the world.

We saw him work 12-hour days in stifling, humid, 100-degree heat. Okay, let's switch to white. It was tough for us just watching him build pop-up studios, switching between backdrops of black and white. Why did you decide to use either black or white backgrounds? There are no distractions in these pictures. It's just the animal and you, and that animal's often looking you in the eye. That's when it all works.

Here's what happened years ago when Joel tried to photograph a chimp. He spent more than an hour taping up the white background. So now doesn't this look nice? More than an hour for this. Animals can be frustrating and dangerous, like this fierce Luzon warty pig found only on a few Philippine islands. Handlers had herded him into a makeshift photo pen. Joel got as close as he dared, lying in a trough usually used for pig waste. The tusks are sharp. The hooves are sharp. You know what? I'm concentrating. I got a lot to

do. Beyond the tusks and hooves, this pig packs a mean temper. You've heard the expression, when pigs fly, watch. Like a cow jumping over the moon, except it was a pig. Let's see if I got it. I've never had that happen, ever. He's sharp. You can see him. We're done. That's good. We got our picture. We don't ever need to photograph the species again. All right. Yeah, let's get in here. But then there was Trixie, perhaps the world's sweetest orangutan.

We met her not far from the mean-spirited pig at the Avalon Zoo outside Manila. We're just going to let her see the flash. So far, so good. The key question, would Trixie move in front of the white background? Do you think she would want to stand over there and get a picture? She's amazing. Awesome. Look at that. Oh, sweet girl.

It's like a cover girl. If she lays down to look at you, you get down with her. You just lay down on the ground and eye level. She was completely calm. Later, Sartori showed us his favorite Trixie shots at National Geographic headquarters in Washington. So what do you think she's thinking? I think she was just thinking, you know,

is there a banana in this somewhere for me? A mango? Let's go in there and get her on black. Very nice, very nice. I like the one on white better, I think. It's more direct. It's more like she's involved. She's a partner in the process. Hold, hold. I put my hand out. I wasn't quite sure she was going to take it but she did and it was soft that was an amazing experience

what makes a great picture? emotion that's what you look for in any great photograph what's emotion in an animal? a moment we're looking for the eyes humans are primates and we're really responsive to eyes we're all about eye contact.

But you shoot them like they're models. We do, like they're going in for their high school senior portrait. Sartori shoots birds in tents so they won't fly away. This white crowned hornbill posed like a preening pro. Completely different from Joel's first attempt to shoot this species back in the States. Man, ready? Yeah. So this lady, her name is Jen. Not a bashful bird at all. Ow! What she didn't tell me is that bird is such a badass, he attacks her when he goes in to feed him. This is going to be one of those things where I'm back here. So I said, can you put that bird in my tent? She went, sure I can. This is like a $6,000 camera. Doesn't he know my tent? She went, sure I can. This is like a $6,000 camera.

Doesn't he know that? Hey, hey, hey, hey. Ow. God, that's my blood right there. That's why he wanted to shoot a calm hornbill in the Philippines. Very nice bird. But here, the red rat snake kept attacking. God, they're real lungy, aren't they? Fortunately, he's not venomous, since he bit our cameraman, Mark Laganga.

Enjoy seeing a 60-minute cameraman get bit instead of me. But the next snake was extremely venomous. Is that the spitter? Yeah. The Palawan spitting cobra can blind you if it spits in your eye, and it can spit 10 feet. Okay. That's why Joel wore goggles. But watch how close he gets to this cobra. I always thought when they had their hood out like that, that that meant danger. Well, he's reacting to us. We're like skyscrapers to this guy. So he's going to stand up and look as big as he can.

They have a space prepped already. In zoos, Sartori can shoot more than 20 species in one day. In the wild, it could take several days to get one good shot. Now, with natural habitats vanishing, some species can only be found in zoos. A lot of them only exist in zoos. They have these captive breeding programs for some of the rarest animals in the world. So when people say, well, they're down on zoos, well, they haven't seen a good zoo, and they don't know the conservation effect of good zoos. Sartori spent his first 16 years at National Geographic taking pictures in the field. He scored numerous magazine covers and endured various hardships. Yeah, that's me. That's on Alaska's North Slope. I wanted to show the insect load up there. And also, I hadn't made a good picture in three days. And so the editors here will say, Joel, we can't publish your excuses.

The mosquitoes, though, my God. Yeah, there's a lot. Yeah, my feet itched for a long time. He came up with the photo arc idea after his wife developed breast cancer. That's my son Cole and my wife Kathy. She went on chemo for nine months, and I was grounded. I was home for a year. So I was really worried she was not going to make it,

but we all made it through. She's fine today. It's been 13 years, which is great. It really does make you appreciate how limited our time is. So the cancer changed all of your lives. Yeah, and started the photo arc. It was a desperate last-ditch effort to use my life for something that's worthwhile, something that could save nature.

In the Bible, the ark saves all the creatures on Earth. Yeah. Is that your goal? Giddy up. You bet. What makes you think you can save them with a photo? We can reach more people now than ever, because we can post to National Geographic Instagram and Facebook and reach over a hundred million people and do it

again and again and again. His latest pictures are published periodically and they've appeared on the Empire State Building and the Vatican. Yeah, the site of St. Peter's Basilica. The Pope was sitting there watching, which was awesome. We flew with Joel to the Philippine island of Negros. Here, vast forests were cut for timber, robbing wildlife of vital habitat. Now there's hardly any lowland forests left, less than 5% here. Negros has its own type of critically endangered warty pig. This mother was saved from a hunter's snare.

In the zoo, she's helping to save her species. She's got her babies. You can see that bridal marking on her snout. That's really definitive. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's beautiful. I think these are going to be on the ground. Joel, who spends so much time away from home, brought his daughter Ellen on this trip.

So what do you think of what he's doing? I think it's extraordinary what you're doing. Really? Oh, you're gonna make me cry. Don't cry. I've never heard you say that. You do? Yeah. But he is gone all the time. He hasn't been to the last seven of my birthdays, just because my birthday is in migration season. So he's gone. So that's a birthday buster. Yeah. The next day, Sartori showed us a beetle he had spotted. I think he'd be worth putting in the photo arc. A species he hadn't shot before. So there's nothing too small for you, huh? Nothing too small. If you can see it with your eyes, we'll photograph it. How big is this guy? That guy is the size of a grain of rice. Tiny. Yeah, tiny. So every animal fills up your frame. That's right. Small or large. He's as big as a

polar bear. Why do you do that? Because it gives them all equal say, equal voice. The big charismatic mammals get all the ink. They get all the press. The gorillas and the rhinos and the tigers. Nobody's thinking about these little guys. I am. Sartori shot another little guy, believed to be the very last member of a now extinct species. That's the last Rab's fringe limb frog. What's that like, knowing that this animal will not exist anymore shortly after you take the picture. Well, does it make me sad? Sure. But does it inspire me to go out and keep working like I do? Absolutely. We put this together in my office. This just shows you what rodents can look like and what parrots look like.

Biodiversity in a glance. Just primates. Wow. And we've done a lot more since then. We can go out farther and farther and farther. Hundreds of species, thousands of species, just amphibians. There's so much diversity, but you'd never know it. You'd never know it. So you've been doing this how long now? 12 years. How many species have you photographed? 8,255, but who's counting? You're about halfway through.

Yeah. And you're how old now? 55, almost 56. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Just as loud as that 60-minute stopwatch, baby. Time's running out. It is. But, you know, at least my life will be spent doing something that's hopefully mattered to the world.

Joel tells us he's photographed another 1,000 species since we traveled with him almost two years ago. His total now of species pictured preserved for posterity? Just under 10,000. I'm Bill Whitaker. The Grammy Awards are on CBS next Sunday night. We'll be back in two weeks with another edition of 60 Minutes.