The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 814: Photographing Wolf Kills, Underwater Beavers, and Other Impossible Shots

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Ronan Donovan. Topics discussed:  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Join today by Wildlife for T-E-E-E. photographer extraordinary ronan donovan if you ever oh man when a what if you ever look at that national geographic right or stuff like that or some super like amazing wildlife image 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 muskocks pictures which were everywhere for a while that's this guy so wildlife biologist turned photographer

filmmaker um did kingdom of the white wolf for nat a nat geo film series uh he's a national geographic explorer and storytelling fellow and um describes himself as a conservation photographer don't got that right yeah sounds great and what we're talking about is who introed us was one of our camera guys who's a visual who paints his pictures with visual imagery Rick Smith

and I was talking about how me Rick getting a lot of fights one of the biggest fights I've gotten to me about with Rick Smith was about a white t-shirt we were 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 in a 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? They can't do it. Yeah.

Rick, generally, everything that he puts out is very well thought out. And who thought the camera guy, we didn't write about the visuals, you know? Everything is not thought out. Sometimes Rick is wrong. Rick's often wrong. And then we have, there's a thing that'll happen where, uh, are our our we have another guy Seth who comes on the show all the time um and Seth and Rick aren't exactly aligned on certain political issues

say that 10 times for instance COVID response 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 he'd be like out in the woods, you know, camping or whatever. And just in the background, he just hear those two like, did, did, did, do, did, do, do, do, do. Yeah, me and Rick about came to blows over white t-shirts. But he introduced us, and here we are.

Here we are. We'll see how many fights we get in. Yeah, tell me, so, we're not going to, we're not going to be together long enough. We'd have to go spend a week or two together, and then we'll get a fight. Tell me about the, the, the, the, the beaver under the ice thing. It never occurred to me. You don't see pictures of beavers under the ice. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, that's like their whole winter world. Yeah. I'm always explaining that. I was explaining that to a guy the other day. Yeah. Where a guy had a problem with beavers that plugged up as a 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. Yeah. Because he's planning on for four months, whatever. Yeah. 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

his spot now he's in a tough position because he's got to strike off cross country in the winter side a beaver and winter without his food cash and a home is like he made a bad mistake probably not long for this world he made a bad mistake and then he's going to be like get killed by a yard dog yeah yeah cougars whatever it is yeah so yeah tell about that a little bit like you wanted to someone said hey get a picture of a beaver under the ice the assignment came through and it was it was with the writer ben goldfarb who's great we talked about having him on the show he wrote that book called eager you should totally have him on really he's really interesting he's presented bozum a few times um great science communicator funny easygoing guy and

very well researched on all things beaver and he's got a new book that was about crossroads yeah yeah which is also another interesting talk about ecology um but yeah he One of our colleagues, Mark Kenyon, had him on his show. Yeah. About the road stuff. Yeah. I've seen a present. He's great.

Oh, there he is with Dan Flores. Yes. Yep. There you go. I mean, there's a picture of it. Yeah, I'm sure there, buds. You can tell. Sounds like you're late to the...

He needs a haircut. Let me see that. Him and Dan both you there. All right? That's definitely Dan. You can see them. Oh, that's Dan. Yeah, I'm sure they're good friends.

Okay. So go on. So, yeah. story got pitched and it was you know it was kind of like a benefit of beavers on dry landscapes kind of the story to to make it succinct and they wanted a lot of livestock out culture kind of working lands with beavers 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 see them accessing their winter food cash no and it took it took like three winters of trying

Are you serious? Oh, yeah. There's, like, there's some pictures that are of the initial mistakes. Oh, let me, I just want to tell people. Yeah. If you're listening, you're, you're screwed. No, we're going to do our damn. We're going to do our dam.

It'll be a rich. Yes. This is mostly, the vast majority of our audience only listens. Okay. I'm sorry. And they'll still have a wonderful experience. We're going to show a lot of imagery that if you want to check out and, and, and, us talking about it go to watch the show on youtube yes please do you'll see the imagery you'll see

the imagery um we will do our best to try to tell you what's going on mediator podcast network youtube channel yeah so the regular mediator yeah media your podcast network if not i'll do my best to say what you're seeing here is a beaver this is a beaver at the top of the screen there's a bit of ice yes yeah so the first few attempts um were like essentially I started too late one year the first winter tell me why um scheduling basically i started in oh no no too late like the ice was wrong yeah march okay so it was like a warm march and it was everything was starting to melt and so you get runoff and you get sediment build up in the water column basically and i was at the site uh along the rocky mountain front in

uh du puyre just this cool little ranch that's up against public and uh was putting this system under the ice and it's this whole elaborate setup where it's like I got to 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 periscope around to see what's going on like what's the underwater world like do you mind if I real quick tell people something sure uh I realized we kind of left something a little bit unsaid in the north I'm going to start with something I'm going to start with 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 home we got to make a food

cash yeah yeah the beavers down south like no you don't yeah but if you take a beer from the north and turn him down south it'll be a while so he realizes he doesn't need to go through all this bullshit yeah it's like someone who grew up in the great depression yeah just stuffing that takes a long stuff in cash in their mattress you know like why does my mom clip cord yeah hoarding so a beaver so this is this is about the north a beaver needs to have deep water they like deep water anyways because 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 whole underwater and then go up into a cavity that they excavate out of a river bank 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, 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 that they like, and they weighed 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 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 bend Yeah, and there's a surface plate. Like, you can spot them until you get a couple feet of snow.

You can spot the food cache, but it's like an iceberg. For whatever's sticking up, what's the formula with an iceberg? Like 10% of it or something? Yeah, 3070, something like that. Yeah, whatever's 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, 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 refugia like under the ice where they're caches. So trying to get a picture one going about his business down there is what we're talking about. Yeah, it's a good state. It's a good setup. Yeah, I think it is. I mean, it's like one of the coolest things that an animal does in the way of like cashing food for months and months. Like there aren't very many other animals that can do that like you know a lot of carnivores 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 just maintenance you know where they're just like feeding the micro gut biome in their stomach enough to like keep alive 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 haze coming in yeah so the first one like yeah maybe the picture now yeah the next couple pictures here Phil there's so that's your set

That's a setup. Yep. That's kind of the crazy light setup, underwater 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. So here you are. You're just laid out on the ice with all this electronics. Yep. It's great idea. It looks like an ice fishing setup. Set up without the shanty that keep you warm. Yep. Let me hit you with one thing about this just because it's coming up right away. They're very... Uh, like if you go in, if you're trapping and you go in and set up a lodge and your ax and holes through the ice. Yeah. And they're already pretty lethargic in the winter. Mm-hmm. You might not see activity three or four days because they spook so bad.

Yeah. Were you finding that they would take a while to get used to all that change? They were pretty curious even. Oh, 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. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah.

Because they, they're basically. That's the first night. the first year? Yep. Oh, shit. I'd be happy with that. Well, yeah. Working on different sets of standards here, Steve.

The pose is cool. Like, I love that image. It's the beaver with a stick in its mouth and a curved tail. Like, you can kind of tell it's a beaver. But for 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. It could also be a rat that had drowned in pieces.

If it's not clear, if you think it could be a rat or a beaver, then my editors are going to be like, now's not going to work. So that's like a dead rat in your tub? Yeah, exactly. You just made that out. 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 cache already. And they were already getting access out of the ice. Yeah. Because stuff was melting on the edges. And they will come out during the winter if they so choose and there's access. 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 months, they really don't want the feed pile. Uh-huh. And that's when they start doing like, you know how that's always the ice is a little thin along the damage? Yeah. Yeah. They'll start going and pressing up with their head and body to start trying to find any way to bust out. Yeah. Because everybody says they get sick of it.

Yeah. I mean, you can see this is all like sediments on top. of the sticks. And I was, so this is, this was learning curve for me. It was like way too late. The bevers 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 creek just like digging, excavating. Yeah, just do it a bunch of stuff. And then it's done for the night. There's like no settling at all. And you see like all kind of trout blast and by there? Yeah, you'd see some trouts. This site had some

really good brook trout um next picture you can see same kind of site beaver coming by being curious you're getting closer getting closer so this was the first year are you manually yeah this is all trigger you're like oh okay yeah yeah so i'm like seeing it coming oh really it's live yeah it's live but it's like no it is yeah it's a live feed so it's not like um 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 lap setup is I'm seeing what's happening. I have ambient lights that are constant, that are low.

Okay. So I have a, I can see what's coming in the frame. I can see the beaver coming in. And then I trigger the actual camera with the flash. So for all these, you're like, you're hit, you're like, wham. Yeah. I just assumed when I saw the images. Yeah.

When they came out. Yeah. It was like, you know, in the wildlife photography world, there was a little splash. Nice. Yeah. I assumed it was all camera trap shit. I never thought how that would work underwater. I guess it doesn't work underwater.

Yeah, I mean, we, I say we, there's some amazing photo engineers at National Geographic and some other companies at 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 made for doing like submerging, diving down, maybe like 50 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. What was the longest stakeout you ever did? The first one was for this, it was like a week and a half straight. No, I mean, how many hours, sorry? How many hours would be a long stakeout? I mean, for the Beaver one, maybe like 16 hours, something like that. Single steakout?

Yeah. Yeah. It's long sit. Yeah. These were long, quote, sits. Yeah. I put up a tent for a few of them. Are you serious?

Yeah. There's a bunch of like, God, you'd make a good ice fish. There's a bunch of Wisconsin deer hunters. Where on their neck is standing up right now. Six or seven pictures, Philly and go back. He's wasting a lot of talent. Yeah. Because he could be a phenomenal ice fisher.

How long have been here? 16 hours. Oh. I think I've been ice fishing once. That's all I needed. Yeah. That picture here, this was like the 3.0 setup. So I had like a little kind of like high tech hobo camp, had a little bit of weather protection there.

I see yeah, he's got, I see two by fours. I see walled aluminum. I see a beaver lodge. I see a ridge rest, a tarp tent. Yep. Tons of wires. Tons of wires. I did two full nights here in the sleeping bag.

Wow. Like falling asleep and wake up. up like it's tedious and they didn't come out once at this site and at nine a m they had another lodge up creek and they would come to this one where they had their food cache at like nine a m 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 um and then you go back one photo and now you start to see like the clarity coming in like totally different situation. So you're moving to, you're, you're picking your beaver ponds based on

clarity. Only that, basically. And I realized, you're like, I need beavers in a clear spot. And the pond, like, I initially was like, I'm going to start a pond. It's going to be great. They're going to be contained. I know what they are. You can see the cash. But the pond, the sediment in the pond is crazy. Like, it never settles. And there's all these tannins. There's no water flow, basically. Like you think of like, you know, Great Lakes area. Those ponds are brown tea water, essentially. Sure. And then just the nature of it. a beaver pond. Yeah.

You could have like a crystal clear trout stream. And then you get into the dam. Like like dams have, Bieber ponds have a very short life cycle. Because they set, they load up with sediment so fast. They're like, they're a sediment trap.

Yeah. Do 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. Yeah.

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 extreme. Extraordinarily clear water. This was extraordinary clear water.

And this was a section where they have, I mean, the beavers will have multiple, you know, they'll have multiple dam structures. And so a lot of the times the upper dams will filter out a lot of sediment to begin with. 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 and sediment whenever they 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 that they're in there yeah exactly yeah yeah so if it's too clear you might be like oh right well it's no fever's been happening yeah so this site

was great and that was a picture that 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 engineer 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 uh and warm i mean the the structures of lodges are basically like adobies they mud them they make them incredible and as he choose the as he choose the cambium off those sticks sink down yeah yeah yeah they'll come back like the ones under the beaver now in the picture those are all discarded so you can see they've been stripped and then they just sink to the bottom 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 pile? Drawing that off So the feed pile. So he's nabbing that out of his pile. Feed pile's 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.

So he's taking that sucker up in there to take it in for a snack. A little brush. And then he'll boot it back out. Yep, exactly. 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 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.

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 den 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, I guess you'd call it like a midden. Yep, yeah. He's got like a little trash midden outside his front 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. What's cool, too, is, um, how, uh, if you catch one on the land, you know, he's very vulnerable. Yeah. I mean, you can pick him up by the tail. Mm-hmm. I don't recommend it, but seen it done, done it done. Don't recommend it.

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 yeah i mean so graceful yeah yeah i mean there's a straight line on there just all curves 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 tuck and just be perfectly buoyant in the middle of the water column let's see a couple more cruise I think are these all the beaver ones yeah those are made beaver ones we have some more of a I wanted to see more of your like total keepers

I mean I just showed too yeah so in the end you you don't have like 20 that you're super happy with 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

leading up in and out but I only had like I don't know five opportunities with this water clarity and yeah so how many hours total if you had to just take a ballpark spent how many hours you spent on the ice on the ice it was probably probably over a hundred how many times did you punch through the ice and get wet less than a hundred but not too far away yeah that's a that's a 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. Bevers use their runs so much. You can have 18 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.

It's to the point where a lot of times once you learn what you're looking at, you can look at a frozen beaver pond and by the discolourations in the ice, see the runs. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And also they're exhaling underwater. They're blowing bubbles and all those bubbles freeze into the ice.

Mm-hmm. But often I will, like, I'll be out messing around my kids. I'll be like, watch your ass in front of that lodge because there's going to be bad ice. Yeah. It is a dangerous thing. And it's from them just whirling around there, whirling around there. Yeah. Just keeping it stirred up, just like a little agitation in the water column that keeps it like that. Yeah. I mean, when you see, you were punching your boots.

When you fall in like up to your elbows, like those times and, uh, with chess 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 uh even stuff like melting through the ice oh during that 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 yeah it was i was doomed growing up the great lakes like we spent a lot of time on the ice and i would kind of categorize my head when someone said they fell through the ice it would be did you get your hair wet? Yeah, that's a good. And there's only, I only felt 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 spooky. That's a big fall through. That's a big fall. Because most of them are like, in the end, you know, it's scary for a minute. But then it's like fairly minor. Yeah. Usually like your chest up is still out of the water. You're like, okay, I'm okay. But yeah, Hairwet. A complete and total collapse.

That's great, man. So what, uh, let's talk about background a little bit. Um, I don't know where I heard this. It's in Corinz notes. You were like troublemaker when you were a little kid? Yeah. Like, what kind of troublemaker? How bad?

Um, I got a couple of felonies when I was, yeah, when I was 13. Um. Is there such a thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they can charge you and then doesn't necessarily mean. So a real bad troublemaker. Yeah, it was thieves.

Like, I was just. like stealing stuff. Were you brought up poor? Not poor, no. No, we... Just a rebel. We were probably, I don't know, lower middle class. My dad built a house I grew up in.

My parents were kind of like back to the landers, but not hippies. Mom had her master's in teaching, and dad was in Vietnam combat. Oh, your dad was a Vietnam veteran? And then came home and, yeah, so did he have a hard time coming home and dealing with all that? He did. I mean, he's very well... adjusted with it now, I think, in a lot of ways. He's very open.

You 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. He was in San 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. Man, I grew up around. My dad was World War II 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 a, you know, if I just think about in my area around our lake like it'd be like Vietnam guy Vietnam guy Vietnam guy 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 like I was born in seven I was born in 74 dude mm-hmm 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 yeah I remember my dad saying it's different for them but my dad be like we came home we're 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 II he says these guys is not that way no and it was alive and well you know at that time 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's I mean my dad's definitely I think has PTSD what do you were you born I was born in 83 yeah so he's like yeah it wasn't old like the war wasn't old no no no i mean and it wasn't something he didn't start talking about until he went back actually i mean he has like a beautiful relationship now with vietnam and he's been back maybe like 15 times he's kidding he has started NGO or yeah contribute to an NGO and started his own branch of it to help build homes like two thousand dollar homes for veterans in vietnam specifically in the southern end where he was in the maykong delta oh really he was on those river patrol boats like the apocalypse now boats yeah my 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 yeah i went back with my dad for a visit in 2010 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 vietnam afterwards like put him in intern camp and then uh yeah caught up to 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 oh really we went and met him and yeah it was cool the guy was guy's great he passed away just a few years ago and um 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 but you ran pretty wild ran pretty wild and yeah some of that's probably like repercussion of maybe some of the trauma that my dad brought home with him um he was gone a lot You know, 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 taller, kind of fell into like a bully role 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. 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 Rovermont and people don't lock their car doors. 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 and bigger things. The two felonies were, I broke into a truck and stole someone's shotgun. God. Some guy's antique was like his grandfather's shotgun.

Feel bad about that still. He got it back. Oh, that's good. I treated it pretty well for being 13 and not knowing what I was doing. And then another one was breaking entering into like a golf course

maintenance shed and like messing around and doing stuff. And like breaking entering is like an automatic automatic felony. Yeah. That feels misdemeanor like. Yeah. And so much of it was like this

this idea around stealing brian harm and stuff whatever yeah this 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. Got it. Where they'll just like, they'll build, push the

boundaries because they're not given those guardrails necessarily. Um, and so I was, thankfully, my parents stepped in. My dad was now a bound instructor for years and like an outdoor experiential learning program and was like all right we just got to send Ronin to the wild again and I grew up rural kid you know run around and we didn't hunt growing up my dead and want to have guns around the house but um we didn't eat meat either and I'll grow a vegetarian we eat fish sometimes but my parents sent me out to um Oregon to this like wilderness therapy camp this is after you got trouble is after I got in trouble yeah the courts like I had enough had the four misdemeaters 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 juvenile attention center. If you do a certain amount, it can be the judge's discretion. And I was in that judge's discretion realm. Got it. 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 system. The judge was satisfied with it.

Judge is satisfied with that. We won't send him to juvie. Send him here and we'll reeval it when he gets back. And so, yeah, I went out when I was 13. I had my 14th 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. We're 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, 15, 16, 18 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 basically it was like putting you through a series of trials.

You do like a week long physical intensive where there's, 14 of us and we would carry like a we had two stretchers the wilderness stretchers we had to carry that had like 250 pounds of our gear and water and community supplies and so seven of us would have to carry one 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 of southern southeast in 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 what's the so I don't want to stay too long at this camp here,

but what are 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 to say it no? 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. But then what happens when you don't? 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. Got it. 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, 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. Oh, then you go to the next step up. 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 go and they recommended to go to like the next step is these like private jails essentially for for youth they're called lockdowns they're all over the country and they're you know they require a certain level of affluence or money to be able to go to these things because it's basically a boarding school but you 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 u.s because it means that you've run the gauntlet and you're like a very formed young person god a teenager so yeah so i was one of the best things for me was just going to this and that fixed it yeah i mean i didn't no more felonies i went to no more felonies um no yeah and i went to like a it was a reform school essentially like a second chance school in northern vermont afterwards and And like skipped eighth grade went there. There's one other kid in my freshman class. And my best friend there at the time, he, he had stolen cars.

He grew up kind of inner city and he was stealing cars where 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 when I was younger. 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 want it 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 fix me. At what point did you decide you're going to study biology? That was, um, yeah, I went to college and decided I started out wildlife management. I switched. I actually graduated with a business degree in like a minor in environmental conservation. and then went into wildlife biology after that. Now what was your first gig in biology?

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 are 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 weeks I had in the Bairtoos and the wind rivers, which was amazing. So 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 giant sequoias. You have huge, unbelievable landscapes. And 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 go the scope of the work and so it would be out camping back back in for 10 days on four days off and were you into were you getting into photography at that point that was when i bought a camera yeah about 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 that didn't really take to it and it was mainly a vehicle to like photograph wildlife and the landscapes that I was like photograph 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 like I was like super strict about you didn't want any photos touched by man no 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 you know 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 and have been through hardships and are i think of i mean some of these religious figures uh or like elders that i 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 that's how I feel around like ecosystems that are that are intact that haven't been changed and when I say intact hasn't been changed by like the modern

expansion of yeah capitalism and machines and cutting and this idea of you know these things where they've existed in some sort of a relationship for tens of thousands of years. Yeah. And that was what I wanted to photograph. That's where I wanted to be and spend time in and Yosemite was that first introduction to that. So what was the work you did with chimps? Chimps, yeah, there's a picture we could pull up. It's kind of towards the end, but it's a canopy photo of chimps in trees in, in Uganda.

So I had a ran you in one lie because there's a picture of some chimps outside the house. Yeah. What's the lie? Because it's man-made. Duh. Oh, well, that was early. Yeah. I mean, yeah, early on.

I was still experimenting. Yeah. I'm going to show you my high-tech hobo camp. Yeah. Oh, wow. My relationship to photography has changed a lot around. What is that? That is a picture of chimps up in a canopy.

So what country are we in here? This is Uganda. So 2011, I had an opportunity to work as a field researcher for Kabali Chimpanzee project. Okay. And they wanted me to use photography as the tool of photo video to basically create imagery around behaviors. And so capturing different behaviors to create a catalog to better understand. Okay.

Chimp behavior. 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 up in 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 yeah this is a cool tree is a big fig tree okay we're on the equator um it's temperate but it's rainforest at about a little over 4,000 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 and this tree this tree well now that i'm looking i see it's just great yes see all that isn't that crazy yeah this is a called the phicus capensis and for the listeners a lot of fig trees and fruiting trees they'll grow like kind of apple trees or oranges where the fruits are at the end of the canopy the extension of the crown where the leaves are this fig tree the 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, yeah. I had that experience. Do you got any pictures of that setup? Not in this deck, but it's... You left the camera or you were physically there. I was there, yeah, physically there, yeah, so that was all...

Yeah, so these chimps... Wow, 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 red columbus monkey. Got it. 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 is 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 30 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. So is what they're holding on to there, that's a dead monkey? That's a dead monkey. And the part of him that looks all gnawed on. Yeah. What's that part? That's the part of the vertebrae poking through.

So it's been broken up. So you happen to just catch it where you can't see where he's ripped apart. yeah so this is this went on for maybe 30 minutes i saw the initial hunt okay how they kill them it's it's super coordinated really interesting um 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 of chimps they border patrol quiet they border patrol quiet yep 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 foot's up one hands up where they're like a pointing yeah were they listening and the other chimps know like oh i got to listen yeah it's just like a pointer where they're trying to just basically like key into something and pay attention and listen and when they go let's take the border patrol thing yeah is it um is a certain time a day what's the cadence to it 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 the edge of their border and this border was the border with like the human world is the edge of their national park range where they live this community of chimps national park on three sides um there's a next picture here that does show like the actual border and we don't have talked to the bottom picture but we can speak to the top picture there so you see just a very hard line between yeah yeah so i'm with this group of chimps and they're going out on this so what we're looking at is like a big block of forest with a very hard line where it goes into open cut areas looks like you're flying over the midwest yeah yeah yes looking at where the woodlot butts up to the hayfield yep i have actually

a picture of this that i just made a couple weeks ago in wisconsin that's like the same idea but it's the monominy indian reservation and agriculture next to it but um this idea of this these lines between like the the wild world and quote human you know dominated world so they're going to patrol that they're going to the edge of that and they're going to the the edge of that to look for crops they're going to crop raid 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 60s he was like this legendary old in his 60s

chimps can live to be the 60s in the wild they can live to the 80s in captivity and so they're out moving johnny's up front and they just run run a trail and it's just me the only human with him and they veer into the thick brush and I'm confused why they're doing that and I my job is to follow them and 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 how close can you sit with them uh me to you what do you wear a little further just like crappy clothes I got at a market in

because they're going to get torn up by vines and jungle. Okay. So I got pants and just like a long sleeve shirt and a backpack, just like food and water for the day. But they've, like, accepted you as a presence in their. Yeah. They've accepted me because they've been habituated by researchers for the 30 years prior. But they ignore you or they're, they acknowledge you. I mean, that's the interesting thing about this situation where I 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 ours essentially but you know they that's because again territorial social animals we need to be able to recognize very quickly friend or foe yeah and chimps do that instantly too and so they recognize human faces and so they knew I was cool just because I came with the other guys who were cool yeah 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 yeah 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 they had heard them they heard them before i did and there's waiting they're more keyed out there's waiting it out and so these guys come into view they have no idea we're there they passed by completely unaware the whole time and i'm just sitting there next to the chimps hold tight when they're hiding yep they hold tight they just watched they knew what they were doing yep not turning their heads real fast no no and they're chill about it like they know 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 it doesn't feel life or death to them they just rather go unnoticed 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 though crop rating is what seemed like they were doing so that that that border patrol mentality that was kind of what they were up to and then they got to the edge of the 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 used 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. If you got in a fight war with them, he's going to beat your ass, huh? Oh, man.

Yeah, I mean, chimps, roughly, it's like five times our strength. Um, their bone density is roughly like twice as dense. Um, their skin is much tougher. So cool fact, we're the only apes that float. They'll sink. The rest of the apes, uh, sink. And so that tells you a lot about like density, strength, muscle fiber density, like all this. We traded kind of that robust, a

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 80 feet to the deck out of a tree and, like, ran off into the woods. And then, like, came back a couple days later and was like, had like a little limp or something, but it was all right. Yeah, they would mess you up. There's, there's stories I read about of, like, I don't know, in the 20s and have these, like, traveling shows, sideshow things and would go to, like, county fairs and things.

And there'd be like the pin the chimp game. Oh, yeah. And they'd have a chimp where they like, I think that they took, they trim the claws way down or like, yeah, basically file them way off and then take the canines out. And then you got and then mix it up with him. Yeah. And then there'd be a dude. I think they probably must, they probably have take all of his teeth out.

Because chimps, their move is they, they de, they just take, they'd glove you. They take your fingers off. And for men, they rip off your balls. Yeah. Is that right? I've seen. That's like, so having a randle. 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 male's genitals off and they basically rip them limb from limb yeah 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 size to pull the sack off a guy yeah takes some force do that no i mean that would help us like you know breaking down deer and stuff in the field. Yeah.

Like chimp strength? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about when they set out to go hunting. Hmm. They, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a hunt leader, I'm, I'm assuming. And he strikes off.

He knows where he's going. Yeah. It they will, so the group that I was with, they didn't hunt that much, maybe like once a month. Oh. 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, they can. And then it's around like energy. So how much fruit are they getting outside of their diet? Because it takes a lot

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 and called in Go Go. And it's this famous community. There's a, documentary called chimp empire because fantastic is on netflix it focuses on that site these researchers have spent yeah 40 years studying that and to your question around like hunt leader there was these like couple guys a couple chimps who were 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. It was like. And it could have been just driven by the personality of a couple of the animals. Personality of the animals, a built like abundance too. So there's a lot of monkeys in their own range. So 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 and the monkeys will. Got it, got it. But then they'll be, they'll send up kind of these like beaters, let's call them, that'll like little smaller chimps, maybe that'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 will go up to. So they hear, they hear or see another monkey up working in a tree. Yep. And not the big dudes, but some other dudes. Sometimes the big dudes would go up. Um, and they would like, how would, do you have any idea how they, how would it be conveyed? like hey you go up there yeah I think it's just I think it's just instinctual I think it's like I

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's some of that intuition that comes through where you're like a situation like oh this is I'm going to take this lead on this situation here so you're never able to detect a decision you just you wouldn't know what to look for decisions get made I mean they look to each other you know it's kind of like like they gaze follow, they look to each other, they look up. If one's looking up, they'll look to, like, think of like dogs that look to you really quickly to make a decision. Yeah. 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 based on what they're doing. Yeah. Seen with wolves, seen it with chimps, see it with gorillas. And in this situation, you know, it gets pretty crazy quick where you got chimps going up the trees. You have monkeys screaming and running and through the trees at breakneck speed. Yeah. And they often try to get to like the ends of the branch that are thinner. You have, oh, 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. And sometimes they little monkeys would know, get out where there's, they'll try on something that they can't support the chimp. And, 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. Oh. And then it's like, then they would, they would deal with them then. And it's, yeah, so they would like, because the monkeys are formidable, you know,

like they have pretty big teeth, the males, and they'll defend females as well. The male monkeys. Throw them out of the tree. Yep, thrown down. Yep. Yeah. I love this so much. Big primate guy, big ape guy.

Big primate guy. You're a big ape guy? Yeah. Oh yeah. I didn't know that. Never told me that. It can't be that big ape guy. Well, it just doesn't come up with you.

Listen, if you were a big ape guy, I'd heard about it. Phil? I can support. Phil had dinner with, Phil had dinner with, listen, here's how I know you're lying. I heard you guys had lunch.

Yes. So I come to Phil yesterday. Uh-huh. I said, Phil, what did you guys talk about at lunch? Guess what he said? Wasn't apes.

He said you guys talked about a TV program. We did. About chairs. The chair company. Check it out. So don't give me the ape guy. Oh, look, apes.

Apes didn't come up. up during yesterday's lunch, Steve, but they have come up multiple times. I can show you, I can show you tons of ape images on my phone. Big orangutan guy, big gorilla guy, big chimp guy. Given me. Not so much monkeys. Cren, you wear? Um, I don't know if I'd heard that. I've got pictures of me with apes. They're behind glass, of course, but real big ape guy. Yeah. No, I love this. Dude guy, ape guy, state guy. One of my dreams, one of my dreams is to go watch apes. in the wild. One of my wildest dreams.

Well, you're sitting next to the right guy. I know. I know. That's what I'm saying. I'm all fired up about this. I love it. Yeah, they're amazing. Chimp vampire,

chimp crazy. Yeah. You see chimp vampire, huh? Mm-hmm. So good. You've got a shirt with a big monkey on it, Randall or a big primate of some kind. Monkeys have tails. Sorry.

Um, I have several shirts. That's like entry level ape information. Yeah. I have several shirts. 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, but it's more cartoonish. It's less photorealistic than my ring of tins shirts.

Sound like an ape guy. Yeah. Sounds like an ape. He's a big estate sale guy. Ah, okay. Renaissance man, some people say. Hot dogs, estate sales and apes. Life is meant to be enjoyed.

Why shy away from your childish, you know, impulses and attractions? I think apes are fascinating. Yeah. I want to get to white wolves and muscox. Let's talk a little about 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 a new coyote.

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? 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. Okay. Like kind of this like neon green plant matter.

So they kind of relish it. I think they, yeah, I think that they seek it out. I think it is like a preference thing. I think, and how to what degree do they, do they eat it? 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. Got it.

And like that tree that I was in in, in the, the previous picture almost no monkeys came to it like a few they want it they get it they get it 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 yeah I think it was so I think the hunting that chimps do is mostly around preference for meat and I mean it is obviously a great source of nutrients and protein and fats um and so the breakdown of like the animal you're asking like what they do so they'll lead just bone 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 um and the so this is the female chimps that got this afterwards and the males they go for the choice to me it's the organs they'll go for the intestines like i mentioned lungs liver um brain too they'll crack open the skull how do they get into that school they just they can bite their way into it oh yeah yeah so like that's a cool thing about chimps like human evolution i don't know we there's a book called catching fire richard rangham 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 uh that is about like how cooking made us so much of that work yeah 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 sagittal crest that you know ridge in 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 grow up just kind of like around our temple if you just like clench your jaw you can just feel it about your temple chimps jaw muscles grow up top so they can just like yeah they can mow a skull if they need to and chewing for you know six hours a day 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 a couple minutes in um and you know 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 now did they use that image because you can't see that he's all ripped up um no this was in like a wildlife photographer the year competition that it won one of the commended awards a few years ago this is a surreal image and though 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 emotion 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 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. And the canines on that. Oh. Yeah, the chimps, yeah. So is that that monkey's tail sticking out? Yeah, that's flapping down.

Yep. Got it. Almost like it's just, like, like it's high. It's holding it together, but it's wrapped around. And they tore it apart after this, like it was in two pieces pretty quickly. Is the bottom right, like guts or? It's a prolapsed, anus.

Yeah, that I was going to say. Oh, on the female? Yeah, she was, she, in the chimp, she's in a swelling state. So she's like an estuous. Okay. I think it's like a little, it's not. Not part of the dead monkey. Not part of the dead monkey, 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 estuous. Did you ever hear that argument? This is a good one, man. 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 comins and goins like you got to stick around be there present there's no outward display and other males can't wouldn't look and know they can't look at a human female

and know yeah She's an asteris. Hmm. Yeah. Does it make you uncomfortable be talked about like a beast? No. Okay. Good.

Those things don't bother me. You know me. Like a beast. Yeah, it was a good book, Sex at Dawn. Yeah. It just analyzes like the human sexual relationship from like, like, why do we, that's the favorite Rick, Rick Smith, we talked about Rick Smith earlier. Remember one day we were talking about all this and Rick Smith said, human, he was just, he was talking about humans.

Rick always likes to talk about humans like he's describing it. wild animal. And he said, we're monogamous, mostly. Yeah. We're a monogamous species, mostly. Yeah. We strive toward it. There's a strong pull toward it. Yeah. Yeah. I think with chimps, I mean, it's like, they're not at all. I mean, most not monogamous. No, most apes aren't. Um, and most primates aren't. But they will do, they'll do these things called like concert. where they'll like a male, a high-ranking 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 esturess, they'll like move out and go kind of like hide for a couple weeks. 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 time they do. Yeah. Yep. They'll go on patrol.

Why do they want to find them? Because they want to breed. They want a breeder. Yeah. I mean, the females, they want to be with every male possible. Like a, oh, how I got mixed up? I thought he said the male takes off. Yes.

He'll take off with the female. Oh, okay, with, okay. They leave the party and head out back. That was throwing me off. He splits and leaves the female. No, no. He'll convince her, coerce her either by her will or sometimes not necessarily to, like, go off and be just with him. How far off?

Um, a mile or something like that. Like Chimp Home Rangers aren't 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 dominate the, the breeding. So they don't have a lot of certainty about parentage. They have no known paternity. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. This, so this picture, which is stunning, you did not take this as a professional photographer. You took this as a researcher. Yes, correct. And then when you finished this, did you see? say i'm not a researcher i'm now a photographer no i i i mean i always had aspiration to be a photographer oh you did okay yeah so even at this time you recognize photography as a thing yeah i did 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 photographing 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 okay and with this after this project the researcher that was working for richard rangham he knew a photographer named tim layman um who was also a researcher turned photographer he also did canopy work he worked for national geographic and sent him some of these pictures and tim was like yeah you should show these in national geographic here's the name of the editor kathy moran here's her email here's like two sentences attached two pictures and then like 30 images and then wait so that was yeah that was like 2011 is when i spent the year living

in uganda photographing the chimps for research and then there was a couple years in between um i worked for like a production company out of uh the midwest with a guy named jeff simpson who was like a he was like a white tail hunter for a long time like a sitka athlete whatever whatever they call them um and you took pictures of deer uh 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 got and that was my first like actual paid kind of like film wildlife job and it was both to learn hunting because 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

they had to seem pretty like pretty tame the people no I mean just the whole get up after coming out of Uganda. A year in Uganda. Yeah. Watching chimps. 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. Um, and 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. Yeah. Like, see these cool snakes. And it was

amazing. Yeah. I loved it. Let's talk about the, the Arctic stuff. Phil, can you jump us to the Arctic stuff? Yeah. Running where is at the beginning or the end here? Yeah, towards the end. We could do maybe that like silhouetted wolf. Oh, Shox.

Oh, seen. So where are we at here? What's going on? Like, where are we at in your career and where are we at on the earth? I mean, first of all, visually, we could be in the, in the Paleolithic. Because that could be a mammoth. Yeah. The way that horn's sticking out, it could be a mammoth.

I mean, it's a striking image. It's like this could be anywhere across thousands of years of time. Yeah. Yeah, we're looking at it's 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 woolly, tusky, horny looking. not that kind

horned shape non-descript shape of hair and horn that was some great descriptive narration there's like that I think the audio only listeners will be pleased yeah they might be getting the better end of the deal

they might be yes I made it sound better than this so we are we're at 80 degrees north we are on the furthest northern landmass in Canada. It's called Ellesmere Island. Okay. And this photo's from 2018. So this is, yeah, a couple years into my career. I think I officially started working for National Geographic in 2014 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 to seeing landscape, place that hasn't changed very much at all. all since the glaciers receded and the draw to this place and um it was covered national geographic in the late 80s by photographer jim brandenberg and uh researcher david meech and so cover image of national geographic is a like a white wolf kind of jump in between two ice flows yeah that was in the 80s remember that one and there were a couple other articles on it and the the draw to this place is that it is stepping back into that relationship where wolves aren't scared of people okay And the allowance for that is basically like the same principle that I... Because they're 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 Audubon journals that Dan Flores talked about it and his podcast he did for you.

Yeah, Lewis Clark, the killed one with a stick. Yeah. Clark bayoneted one. They would just be like laying on the sandbars when they're going up the river and like, bitch, be curious. They be around camp all the time and be curious. And here it's that same deal where they're 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 just curious what it is, if it's edible, whatever. Mostly it's like they picked up a camera, like one of the first meetings. So not even stuff that smells good.

No, it smells like me. Like one of the first meetings was for me with this pack, I called them the Polygon pack because of these cool polygon tundra formations that are that far north and their 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. just being curious so they're just like there's three wolves just satelliteing me at like 20 feet and i'm photographing them and um i'd been there before um and kind of knew a little bit about what was up with the wolves and you know had an understanding of it and this one female

darts in and grabs one my other camera there's like a big big bodied camera it's like a 10 000 thing and grabs the how just grab the handle with their teeth like the with the grip and just goes so it's just like a little rubber kind of handles a cannon one like a sneak attack like in and out just darts in quick yeah and it's and gone and i find myself foolishly like running after like as if i'm going to catch a wolf and i got big boots on and it's like on the tundra it's all hummicky and and 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 realize 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 yeah and so i stop

do the kind of like walk away look over the shoulder and she starts falling 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 coming back and then you understand what that relationship is but yeah this place is so you don't need to go look for him because they'll come find you they'll come find you yeah yeah you basically like set camp there and they'll come check you out yeah and you don't place a bait for him there's no bait there's no there's no bait there's no lure i mean as part of the work you don't like it wouldn't be you'd place a bait 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 for nat 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 you're 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 10,000 pounds of stuff. I see. Thousand pounds of food. I'm up there with a couple of people.

We have a base camp. You have 5,000 pounds of fuel. You have four wheelers. It's daylight all summer until like August 30th. Then you get the first little dip of sunset. that you know and so you're just you're doing sometimes 20 30 40 hour days and you're just following the wolves following them hunting setting up camp or always coming back to base camp so the first time went up there I was with a team that they had a base camp all the time and these little dinky like

250 ATVs um and I just saw that there was this amazing opportunity where like you bring up bigger ATVs 500s and you camp off your ATVs for extended period time and then you can follow the wolves like does not have to do big round trip Yeah, and I have to do big round trips and like they go hunting and they can do like 60 miles over the course of two days. So you're going to miss stuff. That's what I wanted. I want to just, 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. How many wolves are out? Elzmere in how many muscocks there was an estimate um maybe 15 years ago or so that was 200 arctic wolves for the entire Canadian Arctic for the entire Arctic period which I I think is low like 200 white phase wolves yeah yeah because they're all through none of it they're in greenland this is not this is a yellowstone wolf but um yeah there you get a view of

Wow. Damn. Yeah. Look at that place. Yeah. It's a cool landscape. This is a, this is a story of, so here we're like, we're just looking at an arctic landscape and there's one wolf in the foreground and another half dozen scooting along, kind

of dirty white. It almost looks like the Missouri Bricks. He's got blood on his fly. Yeah. It's kind of breaks territory. It does remind me of some of that bad lands. You know, it's, uh, very well eroded. God, what an incredible picture.

Oh, he's wet. Uh, he's, he's gone through. a little creek earlier but he's got a little bit on him he's got a little blood from a hair Arctic hair that he had hunted earlier they coordinated try to hunt this big the hairs up there will group in like groups of a hundred like pure white hairs pretty cool to see on the landscape

but yeah this this scene was one where you know I was up there with teams for multiple years filmed for Planet 3 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 muscoxin and big die offs in the north climate change related and i went up and spent two weeks just by myself uh with the wolves and no ATVs 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 wasn't 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 14 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 were 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 musk ox herds in the distance and so I went down to the wolves and then I went straight to the musk ox 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 main he's got

that little gray coat this is when he's a yearling and uh I'm running ahead of them And Gray main'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 stage is that Gray main and he's running next to me. We're both running towards muscoxen. 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'd build a relationship probably and the wolves will realize quickly that oh these guys throw projectiles because the

anyway it's still that they hunt muscoxin like that they'll use dogs bay up get a whole group of muscox into rosette just create that defensive circle and then they'll just lob projectiles in to the herd and and get food you know and the wolves would realize quickly that that was a amazing relationship so how is how is this island how is the island administered um it is a mix so like the colonial Canadian government controls and owns some of it. There's also like Inuit, um, the province of Nunavit, um, which is self governed as part of Ellsmer. I mean they like technically it's all within Nunavit, but the Canadian government still like there's a military base in the north, there's a weather station. There's one habitation, um, on the southern end, that's maybe like 150

people called Greece Fior is the furthest habitation in Canada, but they were moved through 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, they survived and some people went back home, maybe years later they were given the opportunity, but a lot of people stayed. Um, so they were initially like caribou mainland hunters. Yeah. And they're now kind of, there's some caribou up there,

but the caribou population, some, subspecies of Peary caribou is like totally tanked, um, in the north and in Nunavit and muscoxin and marine mammals too is what they hunt now. Okay. But they, those guys don't make forays up here to hunt. They hunt wolves. there's a $900 bounty on wolves and none of it they hunt wolves down where they're at yeah got it yeah got it oh wow yeah yeah yeah so now we're looking at a a very distressed young musk ox 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 a i don't know three four wolves ripping them all kind of tearing him Oh, what an image.

Yeah. You ever feel bad for watching stuff get killed like that? Yeah, it doesn't feel good. Yeah. I mean, I feel bad for anything that doesn't die quickly. Yeah. Even animals that I've. God, they don't.

The wolves? Yeah. Why would you? I don't know. I mean, it's like, I've been out of professional hunters and it takes two hours from an animal to die. Yeah. So it's, you know, it's usually 20 minutes for wolves from, when they engage, even if it's a big adult, sometimes a little longer with the adults, but, you know, and, in, uh, the wood buffalo national part, I think that they, uh, they did, they did, they did the study as a long time ago, how long it takes them to bring one down.

Mm-hmm. It was about six hours per pop for a buffalo. Yeah. Totally. But it's a whole dance. It's a dance. And it's a lot of like preamble. It's slow motion.

Yeah. It's not all like melee. No, no. A lot of like, a lot of like, a lot of like sitting and watch. seeing what's going on. And that's how isolating. That's how these would unfold too. Okay. You could technically be hunting for, I've seen six to 10 hour hunts, but they're sleeping for half of that.

And they're just seeing what's up. Yeah, they'll pressure them disengage, pressure, disengage and do that whole deal. Because the musk selecting who they want. They need them to, they either need to startle them and get them to scatter. So like they'll hunt the wind a lot and hunt like one of the first times I saw this was I'm 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 coolies and suddenly the wolves are at full tilt and I can't say anything ahead of them. And then we get over this little depression and then there's like a muscox in there. Oh, they do. They smell them. Yeah, there were two bulls in there. So they were hitting speed to try to create chaos first, but the, the bulls are too big and nothing, they didn't.

So if they pull up on those bulls, 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 test to see them? Yeah. They want to see anybody injured, what's going on. They want to see them move. Maybe someone's playing on a bad ankle. Yeah, 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 to whirl a few times. They want to see what's going. They want to get them to see because they, I mean, they, 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 bull that's like on his last. Got it. And they like that, the image we looked at, they're on a calf. 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 muscoxen to stampede. I've never seen Buffalo do it a little bit, um, you know, Kate Buffalo do it where they actually stand their ground against lions. Buffalo do a little bit with wolves here where they, they gather up the group together, but the musk oxen are real good at that. I mean, that's their move is they just not breaking the group. Not breaking the group. If they can hold it, then like the wolves can't do anything. They basically can't

do anything. Is that right? Yeah, especially this time of year, you can see there's a 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 rutting season for the muscoxen, it's like August. And so you'll have a herd of, like, let's say, you know, 10 cows and calf pairs. And then you have a herd bull with them. And so the cow calf pairs group up in the rosette.

And then the herd bull is, 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 get to him. When you're staking out with these guys and hanging out these wolves, how, how, how many days, pass between an event like this? Between like

from successful hunt to successful hunt how much time goes by you get three or four days depending on like how big the animals they take down I mean once they killed this animal was basically like

hide in 12 hours with there were six adult wolves but then they chill for four pups those will go on walkabouts but yeah they chilled they chilled for they slept for like 15 hours they chilled out but then they go on like

they go walk around for fun they'll do border patrols too hmm yeah so here we got a pop and i'm assuming a female that's that's that's gray main still when he was a yearling yeah just big brother and he's he's got his paws and his nose resting on a hoof yeah muscox leg like the way that my dog will do to my crocs at home yep exactly yeah just these scenes that and i'm there i'm just like how close are you there closer to the media you, like half of them between me to you. It's like a wide angle lens.

This is after I don't care. Spent a month with them. I mean, it took, it takes time. Like in 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 those six adults were fine. There was three that came up. One stole my camera.

The other three adults were back with the pups. They were giving zero sign of fear about me. But the pups were like, we got to, this is, we got to get out of here. Would they draw the line at you touching them? um so i would set boundaries like i would bop them like nose like hey you got to 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 a another hunt scene where this is in the dark i had a little flash trying to light it but they have another calf is a separate hunt scene three of the wolves work in this calf

and one of the wolves i know for a long time bright eyes um i'm again just kind of me to you to this whole action the whole thing happening them hunting and killing and and they're obviously not worried but one time the in that melee the muscox 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 you ever grab into that meat and eat yourself this one i did it was the only time i did it yeah i cut off some back strap they were away the wolves the other three members and the pups were just over the hill and they were howling after they

killed the muscox calf so they were gone i didn't really want to have them see me taken it i felt like there was some like yeah some like betrayal around that dynamic but yeah it was a yeah pretty pretty beautiful scene to be able to have some easy meat man man yeah these are just incredible photos man and then how much time total with the body work with looking at how much time total did you spend in this spot um i've been there like it spans 10 years basically of time and then i've been there for like a year cumulative like three month trips and how often is a photographer trailing after these wolves 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 um i've been asked a bunch and don't really have any desire to do that uh like because people want to go camp and just check it out they want to photo yeah they want to photography tours get close to wolves got it and um 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 um and so there's yeah there's still people that go there so it's kind of it'll get it'll get like a little yellow stony where it's just like people hanging out film and stuff 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 logistically tough logistically tough yeah you got be really yeah it's just

a place that thankfully you can't drive to 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 all all of a sudden you like click the shutter and it's there's the money do you mean like like how like what do you how do you get paid yeah so pretty much all my work is either assignment based so that's a national geographic magazine assignment but it's not a day rate um they want an image no it's it's it can be a day right 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 $50,000. Um, here's kind of our rough timeline.

$50,000 is like you choose. I'm not asking you give exact figures. You don't need to do that. Oh, I don't mind doing that. Okay. And that you could just do it all as $100 for all I care. But go ahead. So that includes like all your expenses.

I mean, that's over, that's stretched out over three years. It's not like a full time job for that period of time. Okay. So it's like a week here, week here, day rates included in that. If you have an assistant, if you have travel, if you have expenses, all that's included in that. That's just like, that's a, a fee, let's say, for the whole story. And then the other story, the other way I do things is through grants, 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. Mm-hmm. There will be footage. Yes. Right. So if you're doing something that, like the Beaver thing. Yeah. They're, they're rolling the dice.

Mm-hmm. yeah because you could come back and say it's all mucky yeah yeah got it that's why i won't ever get an assignment from national geographic you need 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 going to spend blank days and you're going to get what you get yeah and i'm going to try my hardest and if i don't deliver then i don't get work in the future but that's the that's the that's the cooker with it is it's like you have to got deliver you have to deliver and it's kind of like there's that notion of I'm a

freelancer I'm not an employee so it's kind of like you're only as good as your last story kind of idea I understand if you bomb multiple stories it's like yeah though yeah you don't yeah you're not the guy that gets it and for a while it's like being a hunting guide yeah you charge X for your heart charge X for 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 stop getting clients yeah do you get easy assignments 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

yeah um it's not like i have to go someplace like Uganda and try to find a bird or um go to Ellsmear where 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 in Kenya, Safaricom. And they wanted a series of wildlife images of like endangered 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. It was one of the premier wildlife cameraman in the world does a lot of work in east africa and it was 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 there was no pressure gravy it was no pressure it was just like knew we were going to get amazing things get to see yeah everything that you'd be excited about saw my first wild dog hanging out with cheat uh hanging out with um um with hyenas it was like socializing with hyenas this lone female wild dog i sent up the research they're like we don't ever see this um that was just a fun assignment because there's not any pressure in you ever get a call where you'd say i'm going to save us both the trouble and no because it's just not you're not going to be happy with it the saskatch photos aren't yeah yeah the saskatch photos or we want a snow leopard yeah you know yeah i had one birth 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 things that don't happen. They can write about tall. How do I tried to like do blank. But they can write about tall tails. Yeah. They can write about like, yeah, myth and all these things. So this writer pitched a story about basically like a like a beaver keystone species story around beavers in Grady Olson area. And it hinges around this guy named Billy Burton who the writer thought 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 swim up into it and like checked out the beavers got to be parties with him just you just like looked I think it was like maybe one or two times it happened when he was a kid um and Billy's an adult and maybe relaying the story to this guy in a social setting and the writer pitches it and so the the man who swam with beavers the editor's 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 bozeman who swims with beavers like i didn't know about that but he's got habituated beavers i'll go check it out so show um billy show me around with the writer walking around he's showing me where the beavers are and all the 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 my camera and he yeah he looks at me and he's just like well what if what you're talking about like we 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 well the writer said he's like oh maybe i told them 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 got to tell the editor this story's not possible and uh billy became a dear friend and i just talked to him yesterday and um i actually used his late father's bow to hunt my first archery elk this year was that right 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. I actually told the editor, I was like that this thing isn't true at all. That's not really on you, though. It wasn't on me. No, but I took the burden of like, can I'm, 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. Okay, yeah. For years, I traveled with photographers for magazine features. There's always a strange relationship. We always got long. Yeah. Yeah, it was rare that I'd be in the field with photographers. I did an amazing three weeks with David Quamman wrote the story on human chimp collision in Uganda.

Okay. And he wrote the story on that. And we did three weeks in the field together. It was a dream. Right. Yeah. What kind of wild stuff you got coming up? Like, what kind of pictures you're trying to get now?

Yeah, I've shifted a bit in kind of the, kind of the, relationship of how i'm working and um what's 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 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 a 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 got 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 plocking as an author martin precto is kind of this interesting thinker around like how do we rekindle our innate relationship to natural world 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 and i was trying to explain

animism my kids are you always yeah what i was trying to explain how do you approach it what's that how do you approach it like what do you say well we we it's hard to get there because we get there from a judeo christian understanding and then try to walk backwards yeah it's in there still like yeah they would they would tell you if you asked them does your dad lecture you buy animism and they would say yes she does that's great i mean i think it is like i think that is like one of the paths 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 know a good way to get into animism it's not really it's a it's a roundabout way to get into it but you familiar with this

idea imagine that you imagine the earth you imagine the earth as an organism and the rivers are its 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 mountain the mountain's alive you know it's got heat it's alive it's got it's got it's got things living on it parasitic things live on it you know i mean there's all sorts of functional relationships it's got things going on makes weather harvest the weather 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

braiding sweetgrass speaks to that yeah every indigenous land-based community that I spent time with that is how it works and oftentimes that looks like you go on the 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. You know, we talk about modern day therapy and it's wonderful that it's available and that people are accessing it and that it's a conversation that has had in a 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. So where is the work in this for you? I mean, this seems like, this seems like retirement thing. Well, I mean, ultimately it's like the thing that I've, 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 animal that's those are the things that feed us yeah like there's a psychologist francis weller who talks about the idea of primary versus secondary satisfactions related to the human psyche primary satisfactions are like storytelling ceremony ritual connection to food um dance song like the creative expression of humans and those feed communities and have for tens of thousands 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 inside in societies and for me it like again like getting back to like the reason i got in this

work was to try to generate change in 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 ketosis where you're 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. My mom, we would do like nature journals or we would draw. And again, there was no hunting. I was curious about it. I would kill things. I would borrow everybody'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 as 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 sang 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. Yeah. And like there's this idea around, yeah, Robin Roll Kimmer 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 you know you still going to take pictures still take yeah still taking pictures yeah Um, yeah, I mean, I was just on a nominee reservation a couple weeks ago and they're doing some cool stuff with getting Buffalo back on land, call it homecoming. Um, there's, so that kind of ties into what you're talking about, though. It exactly doesn't want to talk about. So it's so 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 people are reengaging or continuing to engage around wild, wild spaces and wildlife. 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 um and they do around yellowstone every year these wolves like kind of get a little used to people get shot um 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 monominy story is amazing um there's a group called medicine fish there it's a tribal nonprofit that uses uh youth work and empowerment basically like rekindling their animism relationship to the natural world through song and ceremony and a buffalo herd now that they have um 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 in animate relationship you know we can read about it um and I brought some books for you all that you probably maybe you've heard of them or read them but like pretty shield and eagle voice remembers there are these um ethnographic interviews with elders in the 1930s i've read a lot of those but haven't read those ones yeah they're great and it's just these stories of like pre contact you know 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 plains 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 um this older ways of living that it was dangerous that it was unpredictable that it was you know unhealthy and so then we're we're rushing towards like the technological world you know that like none of us know what's going to happen but that's 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 uh sentinel island there are some yeah typically people accept it they want it's it's a 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 as 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 70s. It was looking at cash expenditures and Inuit communities. It was white gas. White gas. So I think number two cash expenditure, canned food, right? It's just people, I don't think. think you can go and look it's just people again and again and again want the stuff yeah they're like oh you can make my life easier you can make it more likely that i'll live to be in my 70s or 80s 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 spent a lot of time existing and i spent a lot of time exploring skill sets and and exploring things of the past but i always remind myself that um it was a very 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. I think a lot of times it was, it was forced. Like, I don't think there was necessarily like a choice.

Ah, man, we'd have to do a whole other show. I'll take you on. I'll take you on on on that one. Sweet. 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. But I also think what you're saying, they're interested in the goods. I think we're kind of speaking in a way like they're interested in the tools. Yeah. Yeah. They want to maintain. They want the material culture. Yeah. They want to maintain their way of life perhaps. Well, in a way that. Yeah. And, but. I think they want, yeah, they want guns. They don't foresee that this is the beginning of the end.

They want metal. 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 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'm not 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 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 there's probably a baked there's a baked in let's say there's a baked in nostalgia but also later you're like man should we have done that 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 um like human experiences and that that have been lost in some ways

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 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 do you follow me can you have do you wield that power as sort of like a a premier wild life photographer where you could say there's an image I'd like to get is so good you ought to find a writer yeah I mean that happens I don't claim to be

to be anything of that like prowess or level but I think that like the Nat Geo stories all pitch something and then they'll sign a writer I'll come with a writer or vice versa

so it will be that the image leads I mean National Graphic is I mean it's definitely an image magazine I see it's like they like you hook people with the cover if they don't stay on the newsstands anymore but if you hook people with the 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 yeah yeah it's like uh yeah the photographer is the dog the writer's the tail because i would always imagine the writer as the dog and the photographer is the tail and you need both i mean it's like you need both i mean i i don't know i don't think it should be the way it was when i was doing it i think that in some ways like looking at the the the wolf stuff if someone said to me, hey, you can look at these pictures or you can read with this guy wrote, I'd be like, I'll go with the pictures please. Like on that shit. Yeah. And you could take

an eighth grade essay and attach it to that. And somebody would be like, this best thing I've ever read. This is a transformative piece. Yeah. If I was the editor and someone came and said, uh, look, man, I'm going to get all these photos with all this crazy stuff. I'd be like, hey, we should probably find a writer to go with him. I mean, definitely has changed a lot, I think, in that way. but yeah i mean i we would need both i mean either need the dog in the and the tail need it all no but

who gets to be the tail i know it gets to be the dog who gets to be the tail yeah well so i i like i got one last question if if okay i think of the whole world the depths of the oceans whatever the whole world if you could get a picture hmm 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 what's the next beaver under the ice yeah yeah um what comes of mine i was in yelston just a couple weeks ago and read through the scene like found a big bowl carcass of elk um with some researches i was out they knew was there there the tom mountain they've been feeding on it collared one they knew it was

there and i ended up like tracing back the whole scene and like I would love to get a cool like a good image of like a mountain lion ambushing like coming in from the tree jumping on the back of a bull elk and going through that world yeah that's a tough one that'd be a tough one to get but not impossible this morning the first image in this deck we didn't get to it yet I saw a family of cougars this morning on a walk there you go six miles from here they just killed a mule deer 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 yep and they got up there and there's a lion sitting there gnawing on it they got a bunch of pictures of it yeah yeah

then they had to go in there and get their meat spook it off yeah but it had the gut pile yeah yeah that's what i walked in on initially it was confused and there was a raven that had been calling just a little bed there on the on the right there they had just just been there and then oh that's where the lines have been laying yeah that's cool wow oh there you go poor thing yeah yeah god you take nice pictures all the time oh those just cell phone images you can hear mom just in the back there yeah there they are yeah excellent man yeah don't tell yonis where that was no he won't mess to them i know just a joke he won't mess to them if he did he just let him go yeah i feel like everyone's gonna be hitting

And I'll tell you what, I was cutting Christmas trees. We were hunting trees in my family on Sunday, hunting trees. I'm hunting trees. I'm sitting here with my kids. I'm not kidding you, man. Like park. My daughter broke her foot. So she wait. I was like, you got to wait at the truck because she's got a broken foot. My wife said, I'm not going to leave her to the truck. So I'll just sit in the truck with her too. So me and the boys strike off up the hill. We don't go 100 yards. And I could get into how it was terrible Christmas tree hunting.

Well, you can see it right there. All that. Frozen ice and snow makes Christmas tree hunting impossible. Every tree, you got to tell the boys, get some sticks and whoop the tree. Yeah, because you can't judge them. You can't field judge. It's like looking at a deer from the back. They all look great. Yeah, you don't know how it looks.

So we had to beat, we like beat three trees clean, and we were just sick of it, and we decided to take one. Anyway, I look at one point, 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'd kick that sucker out of this little cluster of Christmas trees. Yeah. Brand new, beautiful track. And our dog's like all, our dog doesn't notice anything. You know, the dog has no idea this happened.

Like, not even, not even like, like, any sort of acknowledgement whatsoever that this has happened. Like, never sticks her nose in the track. Just nothing. There's not even there. It just doesn't register. It doesn't register. That dog, if we weren't there, that dog would probably be not alive anymore. be a cat snack

well thanks for coming on the show man yeah I appreciate you having me on Steve it's a fascinating world yeah I can't take a picture I sure you can dude I took black and white photography one and two in college wow it's a good thing you can say he's more formally trained

yeah yeah dark really yeah I realize I all I had to do is take black and white photography one and two to realize that was not a visual artist yeah

yeah you don't have it you don't have it you don't have it know I have it yeah I mean you've done I should just get the audio from my captions next time for yeah I thought that would be a little beside yeah yeah yeah your stuff man and and um I love seeing it and I got so excited about that beaver stuff that was cool nice yeah cool I'm glad you called me into so tell people how if did 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 um you can see it on my website

ronandahnum dot com Instagram is another place I have a lot of presents but yeah also check out the animus valley institute okay oh not my work but oh not okay not yeah but people that want to uh rewild themselves and rekindle that relationship to the animate world god they offer experiences and yeah but on your website they can just go peruse all these use material cruise images and all that yeah i do stuff we talked about today they'd find on there uh some of it some of it i haven't really showed many people yeah but uh some of it's available yeah i have a museum exhibit that's traveling around that was that was the country i forgot I forgot to ask, but I wanted to ask about that.

Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Thanks. It's, it'll be in, um, St. Petersburg, Florida next. Okay. It opens up in late March, early April, um, but going down for some program for that. It was in Amarillo, Texas just a couple months ago. Okay. It'll be in San Diego, a naturalist museum.

And what's the, what's the, what's the called? Oh, it's called wolves. It's, um, okay. Comparison, especially images of Yellowstone and Arctic wolves. Got it. Yeah. Oh. A big, big exhibit and, um, yeah, lots of text with it as well, it is.

well oh there is yeah yeah lots of maps and some because they had the images yeah had the images yeah need some text to go with it yeah but yeah it'll come through Museum of the Rockies maybe in a couple years oh is that right yeah which i'm excited about yeah yeah that'd be real popular around here i'm excited for yeah yeah i want to go to colorado too oh yeah need to do some work down there with wolves they need some help yeah all right man well thank you very much thanks steve thank you thank you all yeah By now you know what works were made for the long hauled to perform in the late season cold and what does not. First Lights white tail kits were made for the long haul

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