Science Friday - Finding Purpose In A ‘Wild Life’

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Wildlife ecologist Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant has tracked bears through the mountains, lived with lions, been chased by elephants, and trekked after lemurs in a rainforest. Now, she co-hosts the renowned nature television show “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild.”Dr. Wynn-Grant’s new memoir, Wild Life: Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World, documents her many adventures as well as her experience navigating conservation as a Black woman and landing her dream job as a nature television host.Read an excerpt from Wild Life here.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

So far in her career, wildlife ecologist Dr. Ray Wynne Grant has tracked bears, chased after lemurs, even lived with lions. I, you know, come from a pretty urban working class black family. And we lived in a lot of big cities a lot of the time. I didn't fall in love with nature by being in it. I actually fell in love with nature by watching it on TV. It's Tuesday, May 14th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm SciFry producer Charles Bergquist. In her new memoir, Dr. Grant chronicles her childhood watching nature shows,

adventuring in the wild, and earning her dream job, hosting the nature TV show Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Protecting the Wild. Her book is called Wildlife, Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World. She talked about all that and more with guest host Sophie Bushwick. Ray, welcome to Science Friday. Oh, thank you. This is exactly where I want to be. Let's go back to the beginning. Were you one of those kids who was just chasing lizards and frogs outside or showing up at home with a jar of caterpillars?

You know what? Gosh, I was one of those kids at heart, I believe. But a lot of my upbringing was very urban. I, you know, come from a pretty urban working class black family. And we lived in a lot of big cities a lot of the time. So I did not explore nature necessarily as a kid. I didn't fall in love with nature by being in it. I actually fell in love with nature by watching it on TV. Tell me more about that. So my parents were super strict when I was a kid. And I was a kid in the like early 90s and they would not let my brother and I just watch anything. And you know, even like cartoons and stuff that were popular. We could only watch educational programming. And, you know, nature. programs fit into that, right? So everything that was David Attenborough or, you know, like Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, I mean, a lot of kind of the iconic nature shows of that era,

I was allowed to watch. And thank goodness, because I loved them. It was better than a cartoon to me. It was like where I belonged. And I mean, unfortunately, it caused me to think that, one, nature is very far away. You know, it is not anywhere near me. And two, that the only people who belong in nature or experience nature are these nature show hosts, which at the time were middle-aged white men, often from, you know, Australia or the UK, and people who are very, very different from me as a young black American girl. Did that make you feel that you didn't have a place doing that kind of work? It did. Yeah, it did. It made me feel that I wanted it, but I didn't believe I could become that person. You know, one thing that doesn't often show up in nature shows is the path that that host took to get to that career. And for me, that was just such a dream job that I figured like, they must have been born into it.

You know, maybe it's a monarchy in the nature show world. You just, you know, are born and your dad, you know, just talks about ecology around the dinner table. And it's just, it is your future. And you inherit it. And you inherit it, you know, because it was not clear to me like, how? How do you become a nature show host? how do you become an expert in these things? As a little kid, and I don't think it's so dissimilar from other little American kids, if you told me to name a scientist, probably say Albert Einstein.

But if you asked me to name like a living scientist, I would, I don't know, my dentist. I don't know, does that count? And so, you know, I went to kindergarten saying, I want to be a nature show host when I grow up. I don't know how, but that's really what I want. And I went to my freshman year of college, you know, to my advisor, I want to be a nature show host when I grow up. Like, help me get there. Yeah, let's talk about how you got there. Specifically, your college experience starting as an undergrad when you spent a semester doing fieldwork in Kenya, you were totally new to hiking and camping.

So this must have been really jumping into the deep end. It's true. Yeah, it absolutely was. So, you know, I went to college in Atlanta. So urban upbringing, you know, went to college in a really awesome, awesome big city. I signed up for a really intense. I looked for the most intense like environmental wildlife study abroad program. And they had one. It was through the school for field studies. And I signed up for a semester in Kenya, living in the bush in southern Kenya outside of Ambecelli National Park and in a Maasai community studying local East African wildlife. And at that point, I had not been on a hike. I had not pitched a tent. I had not lived in the doors. I had not seen a wild animal. And I was 20 years old when I traveled over to Kenya on that study abroad program and just mere hours after landing in Nairobi, I was in the bush and I was,

you know, lacing up those hiking boots and seeing wild animals. How did you spend your days on that program? It was, I'm smiling right now. You can't tell because it was just a magical, magical time for everybody, not just me. But for me, I was in this immersion space, right? Like kind of going from, you know, just dreaming this to like, oh my gosh, I'm living a nature show. There's no cameras, but I think this is it. So, you know, the days were filled with pretty rigorous field training. So we went on game drives. We went on lots of walks in the bush, you know, with armed guards to protect us from lions. We went on camping trips to national parks.

We met with communities. We'd sit and just listen to Maasai community members talk about their history, their culture, their relationship with the land, what they would like to see in the future, how conservation has affected them in negative and positive ways. And it made me feel at the time, like, well, this is also where I belong. I'd just to just be a wildlife ecologist in Kenya for the rest of my life, so much so that I actually wrote my parents a letter because we had to use snail mail back then. There was no electricity so we couldn't, you know, send emails or anything. And I told them, hey, please change my flight.

I'm just going to stay here forever. I'm going to drop out of school and I'm just going to live in Kenya. How did they react to that? Leave it to say they did not change my flight. You're coming home. We know you're having the time of your life, but you can't stay. You can just return. How about that? But you did go back to field work during grad school. You told the story about how you went to Tanzania and there was this incident where a giraffe had been killed by poachers. And then afterward, the community shows up to collect the draft's meat. And you were just a student at the time, but what do you feel like you learned from that? Did it make you think about conservation differently?

It did. You know, I spent a couple summers living in central Tanzania and working with some research teams and thinking, kind of that I like knew it all. And then this one day I was with my team. We were studying lions like we did every day. And we got a call that poachers were afoot. And they had killed a big giraffe. And I write about this in my memoir. And I write about it kind of poetically because that's how I remember it actually is just this huge awakening for me. Because I was afraid of the poachers. Right. I knew they had guns and they were criminals. Oh, yeah. It was so devastated by the death. of this big female giraffe.

And yet when we showed up to the giraffe, nobody was really sad. Like not the Tanzanian researchers, not the park service. What happened was that everyone kind of got to work. The community, the local Mossai community came from, you know, miles away with baskets and buckets and everyone took giraffe meat. Even my research team, you know, and I was very much guided by. them because they both represented the local Tanzanian population and, you know, like highly educated ecologists. They cooked giraffe meat for dinner and I ate it. And what it taught me was that I had

been miseducated about like really complex topics like poaching. It was seen as just very straightforward, very, you know, black and white even. Like this is bad. Anyone who kills an animal is a criminal, the reasons that they do it don't matter, we have to stop it and lock them up. And by being a part of this community that didn't celebrate, they did not at all celebrate this tragedy, but they made use of this meat, and it helped people. I realized, oh, I need to really kind of question what kind of miseducation I'm receiving in my kind of traditional Western science education. And let's pivot to your work in the U.S.

You study large carnivores and a lot of your work has been on black bears. So what does a day of tracking and collaring bears look like? Oh my gosh. So bears are the best. I started studying black bears with this team in Nevada. You know, we would be out in the arid wilderness of Nevada and we would have this big pickup truck and we'd drive the truck as far as we could up these mountains and we'd jump off and jump off and jump off. and jump onto an ATV and buzz up the rest of these mountains or canyons as far as we could go. Then we'd jump off the ATV and hike in to these very wild areas to set camera traps to see if we could find bears.

And if we did find evidence of a black bear, if a bear walked past our camera trap one of those days, we'd then set a cage trap for it so that we could trap the bear for just a few hours, sedate it and attach a GPS collar to that bear, let it go again, and then track its movements for a couple of years. And all of that data, if we did it across several bears, in an ecosystem, it would tell us about the patterns of these bears, the habitats that they choose, which means the habitats are very important to them, the habitats that they avoid, and how frequently they might kind of get in trouble with people. And I wanted to ask you about one particular bear that you tell the story of. You found it, it was no longer alive, and it had this ketchupy

surprise in its stomach. Can you tell that story and what you learned from it about our human existence with bears? Yeah, and I'm realizing I have all of these stories of dead animals, which has not been, you know, kind of defining my life. Most of them are alive. But one day, my research partner and I were out and about doing our work. and we got a call that someone had found a dead bear. And that was just very suspicious. And my research partner who had been, you know, doing bear work for 20 years thought probably was shot and it's not hunting season right now. So this might be a crime.

We decided to go out there to investigate. We got, you know, a GPS point from this hiker. And we found the bear. And it was very mysterious what was going on. This bear was in this stream. and we hauled the bear out and we checked its body for, you know, a bullet wound. And we couldn't find anything. And so my research partner said, we're going to take it into the lab to be necropsy,

but we can do a little of the field necropsy here. So we ended up, you know, getting our little knives out and essentially dissecting this bear to try to figure out what was wrong with it. And we were mostly looking for a bullet on the inside, you know, some kind of evidence that it had been shot. And we couldn't find anything until we got to the stomach. And we opened up the stomach, which was just like bulging. It was so full. And as we pierced to the stomach, just hundreds of ketchup packets spilled out of this little bear's stomach. Like the little packets you get for free at the restaurant? A little aluminum packets that you get at any, you know, fast food restaurant. Wow. And we realized this bear that was, you know, fairly young, had traveled close enough to a town,

gotten into a dumpster that was not locked up properly, probably pierced through one ketchup packet and said, oh, this is delicious, ate so many of them. I mean, hundreds of them, went back, you know, into the forest, probably found this little stream to get some water being so uncomfortable and eventually died from the blockage in its system. And it was the tragic story. I sometimes even cry when I just recount it. And it made me feel furious because as triumphant as bear conservation has been in the United States, there are these human-caused problems that just constantly show up. And it's so unfair to these animals. So in some ways, it reinvigorated me, you know, in the conservation space that we have so much human education to do. But it also reminded me of these very, very

nuanced ways that we're impacting wildlife everywhere. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with wildlife ecologist Dr. Ray Wynne Grant about her new memoir. You are now a nature TV host yourself. You co-host Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Protecting the Wild. Congratulations. Oh, thank you. Thank you.

It is so awesome and also completely surreal. You know, even when I wrote my memoir, I wrote all about my dream to host a nature show and where that came from. And I, you know, turned in my book. And a couple of months later, I got the call from Wild Kingdom that they were revamping the show. They were bringing it back to NBC on Saturday mornings, you know, where it debuted 60 plus years ago. And they asked if I'd be interested in hosting. And I called my editor for my book and said, you will never believe this. That thing that I wrote about throughout every chapter of my book, it's actually finally happening.

And I, you know, spoiler, there is now an epilogue in my book where I talk about getting that call and how this new chapter of my life is unfolding. That must have been particularly sweet because you say there was a point where you were explicitly told by TV folks that, no, you can't host a show, right? That's right. I didn't just hold this desire in my heart, you know, and kind of stay quiet about it. Once I emerged from graduate school, having lived around the world, studied wild animals for, you know, decades, just really gotten all the chops, I started, you know, trying to shoot my shot, you know, and I pitched myself. The furthest I ever got, I was speaking to a real executive at a network. And this man said to me, hey, you are the real deal. You're so impressive. It's pretty amazing.

But you'll never host a nature show. You're not a white guy with a beard. Just look around. Those are the only people who host shows. That's what America wants to see, and you'll never have it. So I suggest you give up. Do you have any advice for other people who've been made to feel like nature and conservation or being a TV host just isn't for them? Yeah. You know, it's a lie. But I would also say, you know, when it comes to a job or a career that you really want that maybe you've been told isn't for you, I have to say, you know, push on. But I would also say, you know, push on. But. also really, really make sure that your mental health comes first, you know, your self-worth, your dignity, you know, you don't need to beg for a job. And sometimes there are real barriers that

you need society to break for you. You know, like I don't think that I'm the first black woman to host a wildlife show on network TV because black women have never wanted to do that until now. I think that there are real societal barriers that have just now changed. And then when it comes to nature and the outdoors, you know, again, society needs to step up and make this change. I mean, there's been so much violence, genocide, just absolute horrors that have taken place in American nature spaces. You know, even our national park system was largely based on the removal of people from those lands. So there are historic reasons why some people, you know, mostly people of color or from other target groups, have been excluded from nature conversations, the conservation movement. But that's changing. And I think that having representation on TV is one way to make that change. But there are movements being led by all different intersectional groups. And it gives me so much hope for the future.

Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. This is awesome. Dr. Ray Wynne Grant is a wildlife ecologist and co-host of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Protecting the Wild. She's also the author of Wild Life, Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World. To read an excerpt, head to sciencefriiday.com slash wildlife. That's it for today's episode. Lots of folks out make this show happen, including Emma Gomez, Sandy Roberts, Robin Casmer. On tomorrow's episode, why tinnitus is so hard to treat, and what treatments have the potential?

to help. I'm SciFri producer Charles Burgquist. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.