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

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Ronan Donovan https://www.ronandonovan.com/. Topics discussed: What it means to be a National Geographic Explorer; doing hard shit to get the perfect image; photographing beavers through the ice; when arctic wolves get used to you being around; musk ox kills; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:35Steven Rinella?

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• 1:20Steven Rinella?

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• 2:04Steven Rinella?

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• 2:49Steven Rinella?

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case underwearless.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.

• 2:59Steven Rinella?

  You can't predict anything. Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F I R S T L I T E dot com. Joined today by wildlife photographer, extraordinary Ronan Donovan. If you ever, I don't know, man, if you ever look at National Geographic, right? Or stuff like that, or some super like amazing wildlife image that pops up and it makes its way all over the place?

• 3:41Steven Rinella?

  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 musk ox pictures, which were everywhere for a while? That's this guy. So wildlife biologist turned photographer, filmmaker, did Kingdom of the White Wolf for Nat Geo Film Series. He's a National Geographic Explorer and Storytelling Fellow and describes himself as a conservation photographer. Don't got that right? Yeah, all sounds great. And what we're talking about is who intro'd us was one of our camera guys.

• 4:25Steven Rinella?

  Uh, who's a visual, who paints his pictures with visual imagery. Rick Smith, and I was talking about how me and Rick getting a lot of fights. One of the biggest fights I've gotten, I mean, 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.

• 4:48Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, Rick, generally, everything that he puts out is very well thought out. The camera guy.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  He has not about the visuals, you know?

• 5:11Steven Rinella?

  Everything is not thought out. Sometimes Rick is wrong. Rick's often wrong. And then we have, uh, there's a thing that'll happen where, uh,

• 5:23Steven Rinella?

  our, 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.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  Say that 10 times.

• 5:38Steven Rinella?

  For instance, COVID response, they had very different views on what would be an appropriate response to COVID. And my God, I get sick of hearing about that.

• 5:51Steven Rinella?

  He'd be like, out in the woods, you know, camping or whatever, and just in the background, you'd just hear those two like.

• 6:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, me and Rick about came to blows over white T-shirts. But he, he introduced us and here we are.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Here we are. We'll see how many fights we get in some.

• 6:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, tell me, so, uh, we're not gonna, we're not gonna be together long enough. We'd have to go spend a week or two together and then we'll get in a fight. Um, tell me about the, the.

• 6:20Steven Rinella?

  The the beaver under the ice thing. It never occurred to me. You don't see pictures of beavers under the ice.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's, you know, that's like their whole winter world.

• 6:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'm always explaining that. I was explaining that to a guy the other day.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:33Steven Rinella?

  Where a guy had a problem with beavers that plugged up his irrigation ditch.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 6:36Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:46Steven Rinella?

  Cause he's planning on for four months, whatever.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:49Steven Rinella?

  He's planning on, he's trying to figure out, how can I live where I never go into the open air?

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 6:57Steven Rinella?

  And then you drain.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:00Steven Rinella?

  His spot.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:01Steven Rinella?

  Now he's in a tough position.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Tough position.

• 7:03Steven Rinella?

  Cause he's got to strike off cross country.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  A beaver in winter without his food, cash and a home is like.

• 7:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I was like, he made a bad mistake.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Probably not long for this.

• 7:12Steven Rinella?

  He made a bad mistake.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:13Steven Rinella?

  And then he's gonna be like, get killed by a yard dog.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cougars, whatever it is, yeah.

• 7:19Steven Rinella?

  So, yeah, to tell about that a little bit, like, you wanted to, someone said, hey, get a picture of a beaver under the ice.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  The assignment came through and it was, it was with the writer Ben Goldfarb.

• 7:29Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Who's great.

• 7:30Steven Rinella?

  We talked about having him on the show. He wrote that book called Eager.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  You should totally have him on.

• 7:34Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 7:35Speaker 02

  He's really interesting. He's presented in Bowden 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.

• 7:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is also another interesting topic.

• 7:49Steven Rinella?

  Road ecology.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Um, but yeah, he.

• 7:51Steven Rinella?

  Mark, one of our colleagues, Mark Kenyon, had him on his show.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:54Steven Rinella?

  About the road stuff.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've seen him present. He's great.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  Oh, there's, there he is with Dan Florries.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Yes, yep.

• 8:01Steven Rinella?

  There you go.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  There's, I mean, there's a picture of it.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sure there are, bud.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  You can tell.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Sounds like you're late to the.

• 8:07Steven Rinella?

  He needs a haircut. Let me see that.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  All right, that's definitely Dan. You can see him. Yeah, that's Dan.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sure they're good friends.

• 8:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so go on.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  So, yeah, the story got pitched and it was, you know, it was kind of like a benefit of beavers on dry landscapes kind of a story to to make it succinct and they wanted a lot of livestock agriculture, kind of working lands with beavers kind of images and some natural history 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 cache.

• 8:42Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  And it took, it took like three winters of trying.

• 8:47Steven Rinella?

  Are you serious?

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. There's like, there's some pictures that are of the initial mistakes.

• 8:54Steven Rinella?

  Oh, let me, I just want to tell people.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:58Steven Rinella?

  If you're listening, you're you're screwed. No, we're gonna do our dam. We're gonna do our.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  No, it'll be a, it'll be a rich.

• 9:04Steven Rinella?

  Yes. This is mostly, the vast majority of our audience only listens.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 9:10Steven Rinella?

  I'm sorry.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  And they'll still have a wonderful experience.

• 9:12Steven Rinella?

  We're gonna show a lot of imagery that if you want to check out and and us talking about it, go to, watch the show on YouTube.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Yes, please do.

• 9:22Steven Rinella?

  You'll see the imagery.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Take time and do it.

• 9:23Steven Rinella?

  You'll see the imagery. Um, we will do our best to try to tell you what's going on.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Meat Eater Podcast Network YouTube channel.

• 9:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Not the regular Meat Eater.

• 9:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Meat Eater Podcast Network. If not, I'll do my best to say what you're seeing here is a beaver.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  This is a beaver underwater.

• 9:41Steven Rinella?

  At the top of the screen, there's a bit of ice.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah. So the first few attempts were like essentially, I started too late one year, the first winter.

• 9:51Steven Rinella?

  Tell me why.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Um, scheduling basically, I started in like.

• 9:54Steven Rinella?

  Oh, no, no, too late. Like the ice is right?

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, March.

• 9:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  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 along the Rocky Mountain Front in De Puyer, 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 gotta drill test holes, just a small little chainsaw hole through the ice to put a GoPro underwater with a light to be able to just like periscope around and see what's going on. Like where, what's the underwater world like?

• 10:29Steven Rinella?

  Do you mind if I real quick tell people something?

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 10:33Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I realize we kind of left something a little bit unsaid. In the north. I'm gonna start with something. I'm gonna start with a different thing. If you take beavers from the north and transplant them down south, you know it takes them a while to realize they don't need to do all this?

• 10:50Steven Rinella?

  They're like, oh, we gotta make a food cache.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:53Steven Rinella?

  If beavers down south, like, no, you don't.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:55Steven Rinella?

  But if you take a beaver from the north and turn him down south, it'll be a while till he realizes he doesn't need to go through all this bullshit.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like someone who grew up in the Great Depression.

• 11:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Oh, that takes a long time.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Stuffing cash in their mattresses, you know?

• 11:07Steven Rinella?

  Like, why does my mom clip coupons? Hoard, hoarding. So, a beaver, so this is, this is about the north.

• 11:16Steven Rinella?

  Uh, a beaver needs to have deep water. They like deep water anyways, that's where they escape. But they need to have deep water in the winter because everything's gonna freeze. So, they'll have a lodge or a bank den with a submarine entrance where they can come in a hole underwater and then go up into a cavity that they excavate out of a riverbank,

• 11:40Steven Rinella?

  or the shore of a lake or whatever. Or they create a dome-shaped lodge, and they have a cavity in there that is somewhat insulated and they can live up in there for food, because they can't get out of the ice until they, they're very good at busting up through the ice. But when they can't get out of the ice, they start collecting all kinds of twigs and small things, willow, whatever they can get 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 cache. And then they usually have the cache right in front of their lodge or right in front of their bank den. And usually skirting in on the left or right side,

• 12:23Steven Rinella?

  they have a runway and an entrance up into their hut or bank den. Um, and that's their food pile. And a food pile can be the size of a parked truck.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  And it's visually, it's like a raft essentially that they're sinking to the bottom of the the stream bed or the river bed.

• 12:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And there's a surface plate. Like, you can spot them.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:42Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 12:50Steven Rinella?

  What's the formula with iceberg? Like 10% of it or something?

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, 30, 70, something like that.

• 12:56Steven Rinella?

  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, you might be hitting six, eight feet of water. Cause they excavate all that mud out to build that lodge. And it creates this big, deep pool. And that's their refuge of like under the ice where their caches. So trying to get a picture one going about his business down there is what we're talking about.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good setup. Yeah, I think it is. I mean, it's like the, one of the coolest things that an animal does in the way of like caching food for months and months. Like there aren't very many other animals that can do that. Like, you know, a lot of carnivores cache, but they get discovered pretty quickly by birds or other carnivores. But like 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 cache in this form of, and it's just the cambium. Like it's just this little tiny bit and they're mainly just, I think a lot of it's just maintenance. You know, where they're just like feeding the micro gut biome in their stomach enough to like keep them alive. Versus like, I don't know if they necessarily are gaining weight.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  It's just kind of like a maintenance thing. And so these beavers that I was focused on trying to get those pictures, like the beginning, it was just murky water sediment, you'd 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 maybe the, the next couple of pictures here, Phil, there's.

• 14:36Steven Rinella?

  So that's your setup?

• 14:37Speaker 02

  That's the 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.

• 14:52Steven Rinella?

  So here you are, you're just laid out on the ice with all this electronics.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Yep, it's great idea.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  It looks like a ice fishing setup.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  Setup without the shanty to keep you warm.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Yep, there's.

• 15:02Steven Rinella?

  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 you're axing holes through the ice.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:13Steven Rinella?

  And they're already pretty lethargic in the winter.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:16Steven Rinella?

  You might not see activity for three or four days because they spook so bad.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:20Steven Rinella?

  Were you finding that they would take a while to get used to all that change?

• 15:23Speaker 02

  They were pretty curious even, like.

• 15:25Steven Rinella?

  Oh, they were?

• 15:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:33Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Cause they, they're basically.

• 15:36Steven Rinella?

  That's the first night, the first year?

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:39Steven Rinella?

  Oh, shit. I'd be happy with that.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  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 kinda tell it's a beaver, but for people that are listening, it's just like, uh, you could just throw a whole bag of gravel and sand and mud into the frame and you can kinda see a beaver through it with the ice on top of it.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  It could also be a rat that had drowned in pea soup.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  If it's not clear, if you think it could be a rat or a beaver, then my editors are gonna be like, no, it's not gonna work.

• 16:13Steven Rinella?

  So they're like, so that's like a dead rat in your tub?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. You just made that up. You just created that. The next picture was getting a little bit closer. This is the same site.

• 16:21Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Because stuff was melting on the edges and they will come out during the winter if, if they so choose and there's access.

• 16:36Steven Rinella?

  You know what trappers will say? They'll say that the feed pile sours.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 16:41Steven Rinella?

  And they'll say that they don't like, like, after a couple of months, they really don't want the feed pile.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Uh-huh.

• 16:48Steven Rinella?

  And that's when they start doing like, you know how that's always, the ice is a little thin along the damage?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:53Steven Rinella?

  They'll start going and pressing.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 16:56Steven Rinella?

  Up with their head and body.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:57Steven Rinella?

  To start trying to find any way to bust out.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:00Steven Rinella?

  Because they, everybody says they get sick of it.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  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 was like way too late. The beavers were already actually doing more excavation up creek. So I would literally be there watching at night, get through all that setup. Be freezing my ass off and then see like a brown wall come through the frame. Realize that there was a beaver up creek, just like digging, excavating. Yeah, just doing a bunch of stuff and then it's done for the night. There's like no settling at all.

• 17:31Steven Rinella?

  And you see like all kind of trout blasting by there?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, you'd see some trout. This site had some really good brook trout. Um, next picture you can see same kind of sight beaver coming by being curious.

• 17:41Steven Rinella?

  Getting closer.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Getting closer. So this was the first year.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  Are you manually?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is all triggered.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  You're like, oh, okay.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm like seeing it coming.

• 17:49Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really? It's live?

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's live.

• 17:51Steven Rinella?

  Not live, but it's like.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  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 laptop setup is, I'm seeing what's happening. I have ambient lights that are constant, that are low.

• 18:13Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  So I have, I can see what's coming in the frame. I can see the beaver coming in and then I trigger the actual camera with the flash.

• 18:19Steven Rinella?

  All these, you're like, you're hit, you're like, wham.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 18:22Steven Rinella?

  I just assumed when I saw the images.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:26Steven Rinella?

  When, when they came out.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 18:27Steven Rinella?

  It was like, you know, I don't know, in the wildlife photography world, there's a little splash.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Nice. Yep.

• 18:33Steven Rinella?

  I assumed it was all camera trap shit. I don't know how that, I never thought how that would work underwater. I guess it doesn't work underwater.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  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

• 19:21Speaker 02

  really control it from topside. So this was a whole system that developed with this guy, Tom O'Brien, at National Geographic Photo Engineering.

• 19:29Steven Rinella?

  What was the longest stakeout you ever did?

• 19:31Speaker 02

  The first one was, for this, it was like a week and a half straight.

• 19:35Steven Rinella?

  No, I mean, how many hours? Sorry. How many hours of a real stakeout?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  I mean, for the beaver one, maybe like 16 hours, something like that.

• 19:42Steven Rinella?

  Single stakeout?

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 19:45Steven Rinella?

  It's a long sit.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, these were long, cold sits. Yeah. I put up a tent for a few of them.

• 19:50Steven Rinella?

  Are you serious?

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:51Steven Rinella?

  Uh, there's a bunch of like, you'd make a good ice fisher.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  There's a bunch of Wisconsin deer hunters.

• 19:55Steven Rinella?

  His hair on their neck is standing up right now.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Six or seven pictures, feeling go back.

• 19:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he's wasting a lot of talent.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:01Steven Rinella?

  Cause he could be a phenomenal ice fisher. How long you been here? 16 hours?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  I've never, 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 it had like a little kind of like high-tech hobo camp. Had a little bit of weather protection there.

• 20:19Steven Rinella?

  I see, yeah, he's got, I see two by fours. I see all the aluminum. I see a beaver lodge. I see a ridge rest, a tarp tent.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:27Steven Rinella?

  A butt pad. Tons of wires.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Tons of wires. I did two full nights here in the sleeping bag. And like falling asleep and waking up, I get, it's tedious. And they didn't come out once at this site. And at 9:00 AM, they had another lodge up creek. And they would come to this one where they had their food cache at like 9:00 AM. The two of them, they'd chatter, they'd have a conversation. And then they'd start doing their feeding rounds, coming out to the cache pile. So I didn't have to do any nighttime work at this one anymore. And then you go back one photo. And now you start to see like the clarity coming in, like totally different situation.

• 21:06Steven Rinella?

  So you're moving to, you're, you're picking your beaver ponds based on cl- clarity?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Only that, basically. And I realized too.

• 21:14Steven Rinella?

  You're like, I need beavers in a clear spot.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  And the pond, like I initially was like, I'm gonna start a pond. It's gonna be great. They're gonna be contained. I know where they are. You can see the cache. 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. You think of like, You know, Great Lakes area, those ponds are brown tea water essentially.

• 21:34Steven Rinella?

  And they're just the nature of a beaver pond.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:36Steven Rinella?

  You could have like a crystal clear trout stream. And then you get into the dam like, like dams have, beaver ponds have a very short life cycle. Cause they set, they, they load up with sediment so fast.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 21:49Steven Rinella?

  They're like, they're a sediment trap.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:50Steven Rinella?

  You know what I mean? It's like a picture. I never thought about.

• 21:54Steven Rinella?

  You know, a lot of times you get, you chop a hole and you like, put it around your eyes.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:58Steven Rinella?

  And you can kind of see what's going on.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:59Steven Rinella?

  But yeah, I could picture now that that would be an ex, that even that, though you're not happy with that one would be an extraordinarily clear water.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:26Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Whenever they go by.

• 22:28Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:36Steven Rinella?

  Have sediment. It's a sign that they're in there.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 22:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:41Steven Rinella?

  So if it's too clear, you might be like, oh.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Right. What's nothing been happening? Yeah, there's no activity. Yeah. So this site was great and that was a picture that ended up being the one that we selected and.

• 22:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. God, that's awesome.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Just trying to show, cause 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 and warm. I mean, the, the structures of lodges are basically like adobes. They mud them. They make them incredible.

• 23:14Steven Rinella?

  And as he chews the, as he chews the cambium off, those sticks sink down.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and 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.

• 23:28Steven Rinella?

  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?

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Drawing that off, so the feed pile.

• 23:40Steven Rinella?

  So he's nabbing that out of his pile?

• 23:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:49Steven Rinella?

  So he's taking that sucker up in there to?

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Taking it in for a snack.

• 23:52Steven Rinella?

  Little grocery.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  And then he'll boot it back out. Yep, exactly. Come and discard it.

• 23:55Steven Rinella?

  So that, that big pile below him of all those sticks that have had the bark stripped off. That's all stuff he's kicked out of his lodge.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:05Steven Rinella?

  But he's going up in there because he's got to get up into, that's the thing you don't think about.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:09Steven Rinella?

  He can't eat underwater.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:11Steven Rinella?

  He's got to drag that stick up in somewhere and find a little pocket up in a bank down her lodge to chew it.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:18Steven Rinella?

  And then he wouldn't have any room in there if you 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.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. He's got like a little trash midden outside his front door.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:39Steven Rinella?

  What's cool too is um, how uh,

• 24:44Steven Rinella?

  if you catch one on the land, you know, he's very vulnerable.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:48Steven Rinella?

  I mean, you can pick him up by the tail.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:50Steven Rinella?

  I don't recommend it, but.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Seen it done.

• 24:53Steven Rinella?

  Done it, seen 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.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:08Steven Rinella?

  I mean, so graceful.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah, I mean, there's not a straight line on there. It's just all curves and. Yeah, they swim faster than, 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.

• 25:28Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  And there's a 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.

• 25:38Steven Rinella?

  Let's see a couple more of these.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Cruise.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Uh, I think, are these all the beaver ones?

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, those are the main beaver ones. We have some more of a.

• 25:43Steven Rinella?

  I wanted to see more of your like total keepers.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  I mean, I just showed two.

• 25:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So in the end, you you you don't have like twenty that you're super happy with?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:08Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Water clarity and yeah.

• 26:10Steven Rinella?

  So how many hours total if you had to just take a ballpark?

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Spent.

• 26:14Steven Rinella?

  How many hours you spent on the ice?

• 26:16Speaker 02

  On the ice? Um, it was probably, probably over a hundred.

• 26:23Steven Rinella?

  How many times did you punch through the ice and get wet?

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Less than a hundred, but not too far away. Yeah.

• 26:29Steven Rinella?

  That's a, see, that's a, that's like a deadly, we should do a public service announcement.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:34Steven Rinella?

  Beavers use their runs. This is kind of, this is kind of trippy. Beavers use their runs so much. You can have eighteen inches of ice on each side of a run and the run has no ice or an inch of ice. They use them so much. I think they have to.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 26:54Steven Rinella?

  It's to the point where a lot of times you, once you learn what you're looking at, you can look at a frozen beaver pond and by the discolorations in the ice, see the runs. And also they're exhaling underwater, they're blowing bubbles and all those bubbles freeze into the ice. But often I will tell, like, I'll be out messing around with my kids. I'll be like, watch your ass in front of that lodge because there's gonna be bad ice.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is a dangerous thing.

• 27:17Steven Rinella?

  From them just whirling around there, whirling around.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Just keeping it stirred up. It's like a little agitation in the water column that keeps it like that. Yeah, I mean, when you

• 27:24Steven Rinella?

  See, you were punching your boots.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  When you fall in like up to your elbows, like those times and uh, with chest waiters, that gets sketchy too and

• 27:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  But yeah, most of the time I didn't lose any gear thankfully, which was the thing that I was kind of most worried about. Even stuff like melting through the ice.

• 27:40Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  It was, I was doomed.

• 27:51Speaker 05

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• 28:18Steven Rinella?

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• 28:58Steven Rinella?

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• 29:43Steven Rinella?

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• 30:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:20Steven Rinella?

  I would kind of categorize my head when someone said they fell through the ice. It would be, did you get your hair wet?

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good.

• 30:29Steven Rinella?

  And there's only, I only fell through the ice one time in my life where I got my hair wet.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 30:35Steven Rinella?

  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?

• 30:44Speaker 02

  That's spooky.

• 30:45Steven Rinella?

  That's a big fall through.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  That's a big fall.

• 30:47Steven Rinella?

  Cause most of them are like, in the end, you know, it's scary for a minute, but then it's like fairly minor.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, usually like your chest up is still out of the water. You're like, okay, I'm okay.

• 30:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, a complete, total, a complete and total collapse.

• 31:02Steven Rinella?

  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 Crin's notes. You were like a troublemaker when you were a little kid?

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:12Steven Rinella?

  Like what kind of troublemaker? How bad?

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Um, I got a couple felonies when I was, yeah, when I was 13.

• 31:19Steven Rinella?

  Is there such a thing?

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, they can charge you and then doesn't necessarily mean.

• 31:22Steven Rinella?

  So a real bad troublemaker?

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was thieves, like I was just like stealing stuff.

• 31:27Steven Rinella?

  Were you, were you brought up poor?

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Not poor, no, no, we.

• 31:31Steven Rinella?

  Just a rebel?

• 31:31Speaker 02

  We were probably, I don't know, lower middle class. My dad built the house I grew up in.

• 31:35Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Um, my parents were kind of like back of the landers, but not hippies. Um, mom had her masters in teaching and dad was in Vietnam combat.

• 31:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh, your dad was Vietnam veteran?

• 31:47Speaker 02

  And then came home and, um, yeah, so.

• 31:50Steven Rinella?

  Did he have a hard time coming home and dealing with all that?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  He did. I mean, he's, he's very well adjusted with it now, I think, in, in a lot of ways. He's very open, he 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 to come back. He was in San Francisco, he was 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.

• 32:14Steven Rinella?

  Man, I grew up around. My dad was a 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. But even 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, or sorry, not knowing it then, but thinking back now and be like, oh yeah, man. There was a lot of like, I was born in, I was born in seventy four, dude. There was a lot of tension about that shit when I was a kid that you just, you know, you kid, you don't conceptualize everything. I remember my dad saying it's different for them. My dad be like, we came home, we're heroes.

• 32:55Steven Rinella?

  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, it's not that way.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 33:05Steven Rinella?

  And it was alive and well, you know, at that time.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  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 my dad's definitely, I think, has PTS.

• 33:19Steven Rinella?

  What year were you born?

• 33:21Speaker 02

  I was born in eighty three.

• 33:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so he's like, it wasn't old, like the war wasn't old.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  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 fifteen times.

• 33:36Steven Rinella?

  You're kidding me.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  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 Mekong Delta.

• 33:49Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  He was on those river patrol boats, like Apocalypse Now boats.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah, I went back with my dad for a visit in two thousand ten. There was a translator, Ming, that my dad worked with, who was this like badass little dude who went on to work with the SEALs after my dad left. And he was, my dad thought he was killed. He heard some story of the, the Kong 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 for my dad a lot in that world to go back and have that relationship. But you ran pretty wild.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  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. Um, you know, the the impetus for what I was doing, stealing stuff was all about like how to fit in, like how to be cool, how to try to get friends and I just I was bigger than most kids when I was younger, just 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 in school and then like stealing stuff just became like an easy progression.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  And my brother's older and so I kind of like would run a little harder because I had him in front of me. Yep. 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 rural Vermont and people don't lock their car doors. Got it. And it was like middle school, spring break, walking around the town near where I grew up and just like stealing stuff. And then started stealing bigger things. The two felonies were I broke into a truck and stole someone's shotgun. God. Some guy's like antique, it was like his grandfather's shotgun. Um, feel bad about that still. He got it back. That's good. I treated it pretty well um for being thirteen and not knowing what I was doing.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  And then another one was breaking entering into like a golf course maintenance shed. Yeah, whatever. Messing around doing stuff and like breaking entering is like an automatic, automatic felony. Yeah. That feels misdemeanor like. Yeah, yeah. And so much of it was like this, this idea around. Stealing Brian Harmon stuff, whatever. This idea around like young men, like teenagers, we don't really have like initiations anymore. Like rites 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.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  If like men aren't in service to creating and protecting more life in communities, then it's just going to become this like 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. And so I was, thankfully, my parents stepped in. My dad was an hour bound instructor for years and like an outdoor experiential learning program. And was like, all right, we just gotta send Ronan to the wild again. And I grew up rural kid, you know, running around and

• 37:28Speaker 02

  we didn't hunt growing up. My dad didn't want to have guns around the house, but we didn't eat meat either. We all grew up vegetarian. We ate fish sometimes. But my parents sent me out to Oregon to this like wilderness therapy camp. This is after you got in trouble. This is after I got in trouble. Yeah, the courts, like I had enough, I had the four misdemeanors 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 detention 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 was satisfied with that. We won't send him to juvie. Send him here and we'll reevaluate when he gets back. And so

• 38:13Speaker 02

  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. You were wearing like fatigues, army surplus store stuff. And you're sleeping under just like a tarp tent. And I was the youngest kid. The rest were, yeah, 15, 16, 18 year olds and a lot of like hard, there were some hard dudes and there was coed 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

• 38:53Speaker 02

  We had two stretchers, 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 southern, southeastern 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.

• 39:17Steven Rinella?

  What's the, so, I don't want to stay too long at this camp here, but what do they,

• 39:25Steven Rinella?

  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 just say no?

• 39:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:43Steven Rinella?

  But then what happens when you don't?

• 39:44Speaker 02

  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, you do kind of, there is a motivation there.

• 39:53Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  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, set it up.

• 40:01Steven Rinella?

  Let's get it over with.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:11Steven Rinella?

  Oh, then you go to the next step up.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And the next step up is like, they wanted their recommendation. I was there for a month for kind of the main program, and then I was there for an extended, because I didn't, they felt like I didn't get the work done. I just kind of like coasted through.

• 40:25Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  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 US, because it means that you've run the gauntlet, and you're like a very formed young person.

• 40:56Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Teenager. So, yeah, so I, I was one of the best things for me, was just going to this.

• 41:02Steven Rinella?

  And that fixed, that fixed it?

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I didn't, uh,

• 41:05Steven Rinella?

  No more felonies?

• 41:06Speaker 02

  I went to, no more felonies. Um, yeah. And I went to like a, it was a reform school essentially, like a second chance school in northern Vermont afterwards. 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 while we were there. And so I had all these opportunities. There were kids doing heroin in their rooms. It was stuff that I hadn't been exposed to. Wow, yeah. And I, yeah, that, that change of being in the wild, essentially it was like realizing that I had no freedom. I was sent to this place and I was in trouble all the time and all I wanted was freedom. I was like a super rowdy kid.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Didn't want to be indoors and 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, that did, that absolutely fixed 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. And like a minor in environmental conservation. And then went into wildlife biology after that. Yeah. So what was your first gig in biology? First gig was doing 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.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  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 of weeks I had in the Barretoose and the Wind Rivers, which was amazing. So I knew, I knew what wildness and like the idea of an intact ecosystem and old growth forests and grizzlies and these places where wildness doesn't exist in New England in that way. And so being in Yosemite is like a, it's a dream for that. You have giant sequoias, you have huge unbelievable landscapes. And we were, we would catch owls and ban them and monitor them throughout the, throughout the summer and basically decide

• 43:16Speaker 02

  how many chicks they had. And that was kind of like the, the scope of the work. And so it'd be out camping, backpacking for ten days on, four days off.

• 43:24Steven Rinella?

  Were you into, were you getting into photography at that point?

• 43:27Speaker 02

  That was when I bought a camera. Yeah, I bought like a used, like a film camera on eBay. Like a couple hundred bucks for everything and had the idea that I would be interested in photography. I took a black and white class when I was in high school, but didn't really take to it. And it was mainly a vehicle to like photograph 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, that was like, I was super strict about it.

• 43:56Steven Rinella?

  You didn't want any photos touched by man.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  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. Think about like, I don't know, any of these old timers you've been around who've seen the world and have been through hardships and are, I think of I mean, some of these religious figures, 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,

• 44:44Speaker 02

  when you're around that kind of a, 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. And that was what I wanted to photograph. That's where I wanted to be and spend time in, in Yosemite was that, that first introduction to that.

• 45:19Steven Rinella?

  So what was the work you did with chimps?

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Chimps, yeah, there's. Picture we could pull up, it's kinda towards the end, but it's a canopy photo of chimps in a, in trees in Uganda. So I had a-

• 45:33Steven Rinella?

  I caught you in one lie, cuz there's a picture of some chimps outside the house.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, what's the lie?

• 45:39Steven Rinella?

  Cuz it's man-made, duh.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Oh, well, that was early, yeah, I mean, yeah, early on-

• 45:44Steven Rinella?

  I was still experimenting.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm gonna show you my high-tech hobo camp. Yeah, my relationship to photography has changed a lot around-

• 45:52Steven Rinella?

  What is that?

• 45:52Speaker 02

  That is a picture of chimps up in a canopy, so-

• 45:57Steven Rinella?

  What country we in here?

• 45:58Speaker 02

  This is Uganda, so 2011, I had an opportunity to work as a field researcher for Kibali Chimpanzee Project.

• 46:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  And they wanted me to use photography as the, as the tool, photo/video to basically create imagery around behaviors. And so capturing them behaviors to create a catalog to better understand-

• 46:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Chimp behavior and-

• 46:20Steven Rinella?

  So we're looking here at a picture, we're kinda 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 kinda 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?

• 46:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is a cool tree, it's a big fig tree, we're on the equator, 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 fig tree-

• 47:00Steven Rinella?

  Well, now that I'm looking, I see it's just-

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Yes, see all that, isn't that crazy? This is called a ficus capensis, and for the listeners, a lot of fig trees and fruiting trees, they'll grow like kinda 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 lea- uh, 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-

• 47:41Steven Rinella?

  With tree climbing gear?

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Tree climbing gear, yeah, I had that experience-

• 47:44Steven Rinella?

  You got any pictures of that setup?

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Uh, not in this deck, but, um, it's- You left the camera or you were physically- I was there, yeah, physically there, yeah, so that was all. Yeah, so these chimps.

• 47:55Steven Rinella?

  Wow, that's incredible picture there.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:57Steven Rinella?

  What's that dude got in his hand?

• 47:59Speaker 02

  This picture is of a group of female chimps in the process of tearing apart the remains of a red colobus monkey.

• 48:07Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  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 thirty years, so I could follow them. Your question earlier about them being easeful in the canopy is because they're studied and mostly chimps have been around humans pretty much their whole life.

• 48:48Steven Rinella?

  So is what they're holding on to there, that's a dead monkey?

• 48:51Speaker 02

  That's a dead monkey.

• 48:52Steven Rinella?

  And and the part of him that looks all gnawed on?

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 48:56Steven Rinella?

  What's that part?

• 48:57Speaker 02

  That's the part of the vertebrae poking through, so it's been broken up.

• 49:01Steven Rinella?

  So you happen to just catch it where you can't see where he's ripped apart?

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is, this went on for maybe thirty minutes. I saw the initial hunt.

• 49:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay, how'd they kill him?

• 49:11Speaker 02

  It's it's super coordinated, really interesting. Um. So they'll be, they will go hunting, like they will.

• 49:19Steven Rinella?

  Like me and Randall.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  You and Randall heading out. 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.

• 49:41Steven Rinella?

  Border patrol quiet.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  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 him do like the, like paws where like one foot's up, one hand's up, where they're like. Like a pointing. Yeah, where they're listening and the other chimps know like, oh, I gotta listen. Yeah, it's just like a pointer where they're trying to just basically like key into something and pay attention and listen.

• 50:04Steven Rinella?

  So when they go.

• 50:07Steven Rinella?

  Let's take the Border Patrol thing.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:09Steven Rinella?

  Is it, um, is it a certain time of day? What's the cadence to it?

• 50:15Speaker 02

  It's not. So the community that I was with, they, I'd only been Border Patrol with them a few times. And one of the times was they were going to the other border and this border was the border with like the human world. It's the edge of their national park range where they live. This community of chimps, national park on three sides. Um, there's a next picture here that does show like the actual border and we don't have to talk to the bottom picture, but we can speak to the top picture there. So you see just a very hard line between

• 50:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  So I'm with this group of chimps and they're going out on this.

• 50:52Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  Looks like you're flying over the Midwest.

• 51:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:01Steven Rinella?

  Looking at where the woodlot butts up to the hayfield.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  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 Menominee Indian Reservation and agriculture next to it.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  This idea of this, these lines between like the, the wild world and quote, human dominated world.

• 51:21Steven Rinella?

  So they were going to patrol that.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  They're going to the edge of that and they're going to the edge of that to look for crops. They're going to crop raid. But it's the same behavior where they don't want to be seen. They know they're doing something kind of naughty.

• 51:30Steven Rinella?

  God.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  And they don't want to get seen by people. And so we're going out. It's three males that I'm with. They were all named. It was Johnny, Big Brown and Stout. Stout was like in his sixties. He was like this legendary old male.

• 51:41Steven Rinella?

  In his sixties.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Chimps can live to be the sixties in the wild. They can live to the eighties in captivity. And so they're out moving. Johnny's up front and they just run, run a trail and it's just me, the only human with them. And they veer into the thick brush and I'm confused why they're doing that. And I, my job is to follow them and see what they're up to. So I'm on my hands and knees 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, couple minutes go by, and then I hear human voices.

• 52:14Steven Rinella?

  How close can you sit with them?

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Uh, me to you.

• 52:16Steven Rinella?

  What are you wearing?

• 52:17Speaker 02

  A little further, just like. Crappy clothes I got at a market in town because they're gonna get torn out by vines and jungle.

• 52:24Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  So I got pants and just like a long sleeve shirt and a backpack. Just like food and water for the day.

• 52:29Steven Rinella?

  But they've like accepted you as.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean.

• 52:31Steven Rinella?

  Presence in their.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, they've accepted me because they've been habituated by researchers for the thirty years prior.

• 52:38Steven Rinella?

  They ignore you or they're they acknowledge you?

• 52:41Speaker 02

  That I mean, that's the interesting thing about this situation where I'd 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.

• 53:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:26Steven Rinella?

  And they had heard them.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  They heard them before I did.

• 53:28Steven Rinella?

  And they're just waiting.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  They're more keyed out. They're just 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.

• 53:36Steven Rinella?

  And do the chimps hold tight when they're hiding?

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Yep, they hold tight. They just watched. They knew what they were doing. Yep.

• 53:41Steven Rinella?

  Not turning their heads real fast or?

• 53:43Speaker 02

  No, no, and they're chill about it like they they know they can get up a tree and move if they needed to.

• 53:48Steven Rinella?

  God, oh, yeah, that's a good point.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  But it was very much like they're on.

• 53:51Steven Rinella?

  It doesn't feel life or death to them. They just rather go unnoticed.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  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 raiding is what it seemed like they were doing. So that that border patrol mentality, that was kind of what they were up to. And then they got to the edge of the 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 uh cash crop that they use and they walked along that border. For maybe a quarter mile realizing that it's not a food for them and they went back into the forest.

• 54:21Steven Rinella?

  If you got in a fight with them, he's gonna beat your ass, huh?

• 54:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  They'll sink.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  The rest of the apes sink. And so that tells you a lot about like density, strength, muscle fiber density, like all this. We traded kind of that robust ability to climb trees and be super burly for locomotion. And so like one of these chimps, people watched him, I wasn't there for it. He fell eighty feet to the deck out of a tree and like ran off into the woods. And then like came back a couple of days later and was like, had like a little limp or something, but it was alright. Yeah, they would mess you up. There's, there's stories I read about of like, I don't know, in the twenties and have these like weird like traveling shows, sideshow things. And they would go to like county fairs and things. And there'd be like the pin the chimp game.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  And they'd have a chimp where they're like, I think that they took, they trimmed the claws way down or like, yeah, basically file them way off. And then take the canines out.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  And then you gotta mix it up with him.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then there'd be a dude, I think they probably must, they probably have to take his, all of his teeth out. Cause chimps, their move is they, they dig, they just take, they glove you, they take your fingers off. And for men, they rip off your balls.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  Is that right?

• 55:46Speaker 03

  I've seen.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  So having Randall.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  And it's like, it's like something, it's like a monster out of a movie. Like you think about the strength it would require to just pull the limb off of another animal of your same size.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  To pull the sack off a guy.

• 56:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Takes some force.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  Do that.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  No.

• 56:17Speaker 04

  I mean, that would help us like, you know, breaking down deer and stuff in the field.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Do it like.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  Chimp strength.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  We need knives.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:25Speaker 05

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• 56:53Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have in my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com. This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp.

• 57:35Steven Rinella?

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• 58:16Steven Rinella?

  If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. If you don't have insurance or live outside the U.S., you can still get 10% off your first month. Go visit betterhelp.com/meateater to explore your payment options. That's betterhelp, H E L P, dot com slash meat eater. If you've got something weighing on your mind, taking a toll on you, don't be afraid to reach out. Betterhelp.com/meateater. So let's talk about when they set out to go hunting.

• 58:58Steven Rinella?

  They

• 59:00Steven Rinella?

  there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a hunt leader, I'm, I'm assuming.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 59:04Steven Rinella?

  And he strikes off, he knows where he's going.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, they will, so the group that I was with, they didn't hunt that much, maybe like once a month.

• 59:13Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 59:26Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  And then it's around like energy. So how much fruit are they getting outside of their diet? Cause it takes a lot of energy to hunt for the meat, takes a lot of like physical energy to move and to catch the monkeys that are fast. And so there's another community, south of the one that I was spent most of my time in called Ngogo, and it's this famous community. There's a documentary called Chimp Empire.

• 59:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  It's fantastic, it's on Netflix. It focuses on that site. These researchers have spent, yeah, forty 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 was like.

• 1:00:19Steven Rinella?

  And it could have been just driven by the personality of a couple of the animals.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Personality of the animals, a bit like abundance too. So there's a lot of monkeys in their home range.

• 1:00:28Steven Rinella?

  So it's worthwhile.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  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 those, they'll often get quiet, the monkeys will.

• 1:00:45Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  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 too.

• 1:00:58Steven Rinella?

  So they hear, they hear or see another monkey up working in a tree.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:01:03Steven Rinella?

  And not the big dudes, but some other dudes.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  Sometimes the big dudes will go up, um, and they would.

• 1:01:09Steven Rinella?

  Like, how would, do you have any idea how they?

• 1:01:14Steven Rinella?

  How would it be conveyed? Like, hey, you go up there.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's just, I think it's just instinctual. I think it's like, I think it's lost on us. And I think that there's, I think it's like in those moments where when you're working in group, like there is some of that intuition that comes through where you're like a situation like, oh, this is, I'm gonna take this lead on this situation here.

• 1:01:33Steven Rinella?

  So you're never able to detect a decision? You just, you wouldn't know what to look for?

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  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 you. Like, think of like-

• 1:01:48Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  Dogs that look to you really quickly to make a decision.

• 1:01:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  That happens, I've seen 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.

• 1:02:00Steven Rinella?

  Are you gonna get in trouble about this or not?

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, seen with wolves, seen it with chimps, seen it with gorillas. And in this situation, you know, it, it gets pretty crazy quick where you've got chimps going up the trees.

• 1:02:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  You have monkeys screaming and running and through the trees at breakneck speed.

• 1:02:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  And they often try to get to like the ends of the branches that are thinner. You have-

• 1:02:18Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  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-

• 1:02:30Steven Rinella?

  But those little monkeys would know, get out where the-

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  They'll try.

• 1:02:33Steven Rinella?

  On something that they can't support a chimp.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  And, but the chimps would 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.

• 1:02:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  And then it's like, then they would, they would deal with them then. And it's-

• 1:02:50Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they would like, cause monkeys are formidable. You know, like they have pretty big teeth, the males, and they'll defend females as well. The male monkeys-

• 1:02:59Steven Rinella?

  Throw them out of the tree.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  Yep, throw them down. Yep. Yep.

• 1:03:03Steven Rinella?

  I love this so much. Big primate guy, big ape guy.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  Big primate guy.

• 1:03:06Steven Rinella?

  You're a big ape guy?

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. I didn't know that. Never told me that. Can't be that big of an ape guy.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  Well, it just doesn't come up with you.

• 1:03:12Steven Rinella?

  Listen, if you were a big ape guy, I'd have heard about it.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  Phil?

• 1:03:17Steven Rinella?

  I, 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.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:03:26Steven Rinella?

  So I come to Phil yesterday.

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:28Steven Rinella?

  I said, Phil, what'd you guys talk about at lunch? Guess what he said? Wasn't apes. Said you guys talked about a TV program.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  We did.

• 1:03:35Steven Rinella?

  About chairs.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  The chair company.

• 1:03:40Speaker 05

  Check it out.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:03:41Steven Rinella?

  Highly recommended.

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  Guy.

• 1:03:43Speaker 05

  Oh, look, apes, apes didn't come up during yesterday's lunch, Steve, but they have come up multiple

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  I can show you, I can show you tons of ape images on my phone. Big orangutan guy, big gorilla guy, big chimp guy.

• 1:03:55Steven Rinella?

  Do's me.

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  Not so much monkeys.

• 1:03:57Steven Rinella?

  Crin, you where?

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  Um, I don't know if I'd heard that.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  I've got pictures of me with apes.

• 1:04:03Steven Rinella?

  Real big.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  They're behind glass, of course, but.

• 1:04:05Steven Rinella?

  Real big ape guy.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, I love this.

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  Zoo guy, ape guy, state guy.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  One of my dreams, one of my dreams is to go. Watch apes in the wild. One of my wildest dreams.

• 1:04:17Steven Rinella?

  Well, you're sitting next to the right guy.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  I know, I know. That's what I'm saying. I'm, I'm all fired up about this. I love it.

• 1:04:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're amazing.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Chimp Empire, Chimp Crazy.

• 1:04:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you see Chimp Empire, huh?

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:28Steven Rinella?

  So good.

• 1:04:28Speaker 05

  You've got, you've got a shirt with a big monkey on it, Randall, or a big primate of some kind.

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  Monkeys have tails.

• 1:04:33Speaker 05

  Sorry.

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  I have several shirts.

• 1:04:36Steven Rinella?

  That's like entry level ape information.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  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 orangutan shirts.

• 1:04:50Speaker 05

  Sound like an ape guy.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Sounds like an ape.

• 1:04:52Steven Rinella?

  He's a big estate sale guy.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Ah, okay.

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  Renaissance man, some people say.

• 1:04:58Steven Rinella?

  Hot dogs, estate sales and apes.

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  Life is meant to be enjoyed. Why shy away from your childish, you know, impulses and, and attractions? I think apes are fascinating.

• 1:05:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I want to get to white wolves and musk oxes, but let's, let's talk a little about chimps. When they catch it. Well, here's another question I got about this.

• 1:05:20Steven Rinella?

  Is it partially competition? The desire for them to kill the monkeys? Like, you know how wolves, they run into a 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?

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  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 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, a preference thing. I think. And then how, to what degree do they, do they eat it? Cause like the competition thing, just to button that up, I think it's like, there's so much food, like ecological 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 the previous picture, almost no monkeys came to it, like a few. If they want it, they get it.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  They get it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's kind of like, maybe you could 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. They leave 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

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  the, so this is the female chimps that got this afterwards and the males, they go for the choice meats, the organs, they'll go for the intestines, like I mentioned, lungs, liver. Hmm. Um, brain too, they'll crack open the skull. How do they get into that skull? They just. They can bite their way into it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So like, that's the cool thing about chimps, like human evolution, I don't know, we, there's a book called Catching Fire, Richard Wrangham, who's the man that I was doing this research for, he was at Harvard for his career, he studied under Jane Goodall. He has a great book called Catching Fire. Uh huh. That is about like how cooking made us so much. I'm familiar with that word. Yeah. Yeah. And that.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  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 attach to so they can have a a massive bite force. Chimps have that. A lot of apes have that.

• 1:07:53Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  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 above your temple. Chimps jaw muscles grow up top, so they can just like, yeah, they can mow a skull if they need to.

• 1:08:04Steven Rinella?

  God.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  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 of 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.

• 1:08:26Steven Rinella?

  Now, did they use that image because you can't see that he's all ripped up?

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  Um, no, this was in like a wildlife photographer of the year competition that it won one of the commended awards a few years ago.

• 1:08:38Steven Rinella?

  This is a surreal image.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. And though I, I think it's like the other images are kind of, it's a group of chimps sitting around and 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.

• 1:09:10Steven Rinella?

  And the canines on that. Oh.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, the chimps. Yeah.

• 1:09:15Steven Rinella?

  So is that that monkey's tail sticking out?

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's flapping down.

• 1:09:18Steven Rinella?

  Yep. Got it.

• 1:09:19Speaker 04

  It's almost like it's just like, like it's tied, it's holding it together, but it's wrapped around.

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  And they tore it apart after this, like it was in two pieces pretty quickly.

• 1:09:29Speaker 04

  Is the bottom right like guts or? Ape butt.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  It's a prolapsed anus.

• 1:09:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, that I was gonna say.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  Oh, on the female? Yeah, she was, she, and the chimp, she's in a swelling state, so she's like a estrus.

• 1:09:42Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  I think it's like a little, it's not.

• 1:09:44Speaker 04

  Not part of the dead monkey.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Not part of the monkey, no. No, that's just, um, they get a visual sign, a lot of apes get a visual sign and primates in general of when females are in estrus.

• 1:09:54Steven Rinella?

  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?

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:10:12Steven Rinella?

  There's no outward display, so you have to always be around.

• 1:10:16Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 1:10:17Steven Rinella?

  You can't time, a male can't time his comings and goings.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:10:22Steven Rinella?

  Like, you gotta stick around, be there, present. There's no outward display, other, and other males can't, wouldn't look and know. They can't look at a human female and know.

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:33Steven Rinella?

  That she's an estrus.

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  Hmm, yeah.

• 1:10:35Steven Rinella?

  Does it make you uncomfortable, be talked about like a beast?

• 1:10:37Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:10:38Steven Rinella?

  Okay, good.

• 1:10:39Speaker 04

  Those things don't bother me. You know me, come on.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  Like a beast. Yeah, it was a good book, Sex at Dawn.

• 1:10:46Steven Rinella?

  Is that what that's called?

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. It just analyzes like the human sexual relationship from like species.

• 1:10:52Steven Rinella?

  That's a favorite Rick, Rick, we talked about Rick Smith earlier, remember one day we were talking about all this and Rick Smith said. Human, he was, he was talking about humans, Rick always likes to talk about humans like he's describing a wild animal.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:11:05Steven Rinella?

  And he said, we're monogamous, mostly.

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:12Steven Rinella?

  We're a monogamous species, mostly.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:11:15Steven Rinella?

  We strive toward it. There's a strong pull toward it.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:19Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think with chimps, I mean, it's like, they're not at all, I mean, most.

• 1:11:25Steven Rinella?

  Not monogamous.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  No, most apes aren't, um, and most primates aren't, but they will do, they'll do these things called like concertships where they'll like, a male, a hiring male. Not even always hiring, but he'll try to like, build a relationship with a female, and then when she's. At our peak cycle asteris, they'll like move out and go kind of like hide for a couple of weeks.

• 1:11:49Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  And just be gone from the rest of the the group. And then the rest of the males kind of lose their mind and try to find them. But most of the time.

• 1:11:55Steven Rinella?

  They do?

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yep. They'll go on patrol and.

• 1:11:58Steven Rinella?

  Why do they want to find them?

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Cause they want to breed. They want to breed her. Yeah. I mean, the females, they want to breed with every male possible. Like a.

• 1:12:07Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I got mixed up. I thought you said the male takes off.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Yes, he he'll take off with the female.

• 1:12:12Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay. With, okay. They leave the party and head out. That was throwing me off. I thought he splits and leaves the female.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  No, no, he'll he'll convince her, coerce her either by her will or sometimes not necessarily to like go off and be just with him.

• 1:12:28Steven Rinella?

  How how far off?

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Um, a mile or something like that. Like chimpanzees aren't that big, but that's that's rare. Most of the time it's like, yeah, it's a the top males will, but they'll share. It's not like the male will dominate the the breeding.

• 1:12:43Steven Rinella?

  So they don't have a lot of certainty about parentage?

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  They have no known paternity.

• 1:12:47Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:12:48Steven Rinella?

  Uh. This, so this picture, which is stunning. You did not take this as a professional photographer. You took this as a researcher.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  Yes, correct.

• 1:12:58Steven Rinella?

  And then when you finished this, did you say, I'm not a researcher, I'm now a photographer?

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  No, I I, I mean, I always had aspiration to be a photographer.

• 1:13:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you did? Okay. So even at this time, you recognized photography as a thing?

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:13:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:13:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  And with this, after this project, the researcher that I was working for, Richard Wrangham, he knew a photographer named Tim Lehman. Um, who was also a researcher turned photographer. He also did canopy work. He works for National Geographic. And sent Tim 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 to pictures, and then a gallery link to maybe like thirty images and then wait. And so that was, yeah, that was like two thousand and eleven is when I spent the year living in Uganda photographing the chimps for research.

• 1:14:05Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  And then. There was a couple of years in between. Um, I worked for like a, a production company out of the Midwest with a guy named Jeff Simpson, who was like a, he was like a whitetail hunter for a long time, like a Sitka athlete, whatever, whatever they call them.

• 1:14:23Steven Rinella?

  And you took pictures of deer?

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  Uh, did like, especially like sponsored content videos of like, uh, Corey Jacobson and like Jim Old Junior and Jonathan Hart, who was one of the co-founders of Sitka. Uh, and so we just go and film. It was like big game archery hunts.

• 1:14:37Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  And that was my first like actual paid, kind of like film wildlife job. It was both to learn hunting, cause I didn't grow up with it and I was curious. And then it was also to kind of hone my chops with.

• 1:14:48Steven Rinella?

  So that was after this?

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  After this, yeah.

• 1:14:51Steven Rinella?

  They had to seem pretty like, pretty tame.

• 1:14:54Speaker 02

  The people?

• 1:14:55Steven Rinella?

  No, I mean, just the whole get up after coming out of Uganda.

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  A year in Uganda.

• 1:14:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Chasing 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.

• 1:15:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  Like see these cool snakes and it was amazing. Yeah, I loved it.

• 1:15:26Steven Rinella?

  Let's talk about the, the Arctic stuff.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:30Steven Rinella?

  Phil, can you jump us to the Arctic stuff?

• 1:15:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. Uh, Ronan, where is that at the beginning or the end here?

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, towards the end. We could do maybe that like silhouetted wolf, wolf box.

• 1:15:40Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Scene.

• 1:15:42Steven Rinella?

  So, 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?

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  I mean, first of all, visually, we could be in the, in the Paleolithic.

• 1:15:51Steven Rinella?

  Cause that could be a mammoth.

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. The way that horn sticking out, it could be a mammoth.

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a striking image. It's like, this could be anywhere across thousands of years of time.

• 1:16:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah, what we're looking at is three canine figures silhouetted. Um, there's heavy cloud cover. That's black. The earth is black, sandwiched 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, uh, not that kind. Horned.

• 1:16:32Steven Rinella?

  Shape.

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:34Steven Rinella?

  Non-descript shape of hair and horn. That was some great descriptive narration there. Yeah, I think the audio only listeners will be pleased.

• 1:16:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. They might be getting the better end of the deal.

• 1:16:43Steven Rinella?

  They might, yes.

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  I made it sound better than this.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  So we are, we're at eighty degrees north. We are on the furthest northern landmass in Canada. It's called Ellesmere Island.

• 1:16:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  And this photo is from two thousand eighteen. So this is, yeah, a couple of years into my career. I think officially started work for National Geographic in two thousand fourteen.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  On the Yellowstone project. Um, and this place, you know, 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 Pleistocene landscape, place that hasn't changed very much at all since the glaciers receded. And the draw to this place, and um, it was covered National Geographic in the late eighties by photographer Jim Brandenburg.

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  And researcher David Meach. And so cover image of National Geographic is a, like a white wolf kind of jumping between two ice floes.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  That was in the eighties, if you remember that one. And there were a couple of 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.

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  And the allowance for that is basically like the same principle that I.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  Cause they're habituated?

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  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 pee on 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 uh, from time here and reading is, is like this is how wolves were. Um, even around here, like they were curious. I mean, Lewis and Clark journals and Audubon journals. Dan Flores talked about it in his podcast he did for you.

• 1:18:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Lewis Clark that killed one with a stick.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, Clark Bayoneted one. They would just be like laying on the sandbars when they're going up the river and like, be curious. They'd be around camp all the time and be curious and, and here it's that same deal where they're just like, come up, they'll sniff your boots. They wanna steal stuff. That's like their main.

• 1:18:50Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  That's their main deal is they wanna play keep away with you, like straight up. They like come in hot. They wanna steal something. If there's anything on the ground that they can pick up, it's gone.

• 1:19:00Steven Rinella?

  They're just curious what it is, if it's edible, whatever.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  Mostly it's like they picked up a camera, like one of the first meetings.

• 1:19:06Steven Rinella?

  So not even something smells good?

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  No, it smells like me. Like one of the first meetings was for me with this pack, I called them the polygon pack. Cause these cool polygon tundra formations that are that far north and their den was close to that. And I had a camera on the ground, the wolves, they do the surrounding thing, which is what freaks people out. And they're just catching scent. They're just being curious. So they're just like, there's three wolves just satelliting me at like 20 feet.

• 1:19:31Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  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 I had an understanding of it. And this one female darts in and grabs one of my other cameras, like a big, big bodied camera. It's like a $10,000 thing.

• 1:19:46Steven Rinella?

  Grabs it how?

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  Just grab the handle with her teeth, like the, with the grip and just goes. So it's just like a little rubber kind of handle. It's a cannon one.

• 1:19:54Steven Rinella?

  Kind of like a sneak attack, like in and out.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  Just darts in quick and it's, and it's gone. And I find myself foolishly like running after it. Like as if I'm gonna catch a wolf and I got big boots on. It's like on the tundra. It's all humky and, and then the other wolves start kind of running with me. Cause they're like, oh, this is like, this is it. We're playing the game. And I realized quickly, we've all played keep away with dogs probably or with kids at some point. And realize it's only fun while you're chasing.

• 1:20:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  And so I stop, do the kind of like walk away, look over the shoulder and she starts following me. I let her get maybe like five feet away and then I like turn around, jump and clap and yell and she startles and drops the camera and. Then you understand what that relationship is, but yeah, this place is. So you don't need to go look for them 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. You don't place a bait for them? There's no bait. There's no lure. I mean, as part of the work, you don't like, it wouldn't be that 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, King of the White Wolf that you mentioned early on.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  Film from Agio, 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. 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. Yep.

• 1:21:48Speaker 02

  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 I went up there was with a team that they had a base camp all the time and these little dink, like 250 ATVs. And I just saw that there was this amazing opportunity where like you bring up bigger ATVs, 500s or 700s. And you camp off your ATVs for extended period of time and then you can follow the wolves. Like not have to do big round trips. Yeah, not have to do big round trips and like they go hunting and they can do like 60 miles over the course of two days. You're just gonna, you're gonna miss stuff. That's what I wanted. I wanted to, I mean, I wanted to see all of their life. You don't want to miss anything, but

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  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.

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• 1:25:10Steven Rinella?

  How many wolves are on Elsmer in a, how many musk ox?

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  There was an estimate, um, maybe fifteen years ago or so, that was two hundred Arctic wolves for the entire Canadian Arctic, for the entire Arctic period, which I, I think is low.

• 1:25:28Steven Rinella?

  Like two hundred white phase wolves.

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz they're all through Nunavut, they're in Greenland. Um, this is not, this is a Yellowstone wolf. Oh, apologies. Um, but, um, yeah, there you get a, a view of.

• 1:25:40Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  Of this.

• 1:25:41Steven Rinella?

  Damn.

• 1:25:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Steven Rinella?

  Look at that place.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's a cool landscape. This is a, this is a story of.

• 1:25:46Steven Rinella?

  So here we're like, we're just looking at Arctic landscape and there's one wolf in the foreground and another half dozen scooting along. Kind of dirty white.

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  It almost looks like the Missouri Brakes.

• 1:25:57Steven Rinella?

  He's got blood on his.

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's kind of breaks territory. It does remind me of some of that Badlands, you know, it's a very well eroded.

• 1:26:03Steven Rinella?

  God, what an incredible picture. Uh, he's wet.

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  Uh, he's, he's gone through, yeah, a little creek earlier, but he's got a little bit on him. He's got a little blood from a hare, Arctic hare that he had hunted earlier. They coordinated to try to hunt this big. The hares up there will group in like groups of a hundred.

• 1:26:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:26:22Speaker 02

  Like pure white hares, pretty cool to see on the landscape. Um, but yeah, this, this scene was one where, you know, I was up there with teams for multiple years, filmed for Planet of Three, um, a couple of 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 musk ox 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 would be very much, but ended up being every day. It's been with them. They had their pups nearby, the rendezvous site.

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  And there were fourteen adults and five pups. And there was this one kind of midnight, I got woken up, light was getting good. Woken up by some fox kits and I see the wolves 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. Get there before the wolves did. And this wolf I've known for years, called him Graymane. He's got that little gray coat. This is when he's a yearling. And, uh, I'm running ahead of them and and Graymane's leading. He was kind of the the alpha at this time. And I look behind me, he's coming, the other wolves are coming behind him. And I realized at this one stage that Graymane, and he's running next to me, we're both running

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  towards musk oxen.

• 1:27:51Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  And it was this very quick realization of like, oh, this is what we've done for a long time.

• 1:27:57Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:57Speaker 02

  This is how this would have started.

• 1:27:59Steven Rinella?

  Domestication.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  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 would realize quickly that, oh, these guys throw projectiles. Because Inuit still, that they hunt musk oxen like that. They'll use dogs, bay up, get a whole group of musk oxen to rosette, just create that defensive circle, and then they'll just lob projectiles in to the herd and and get food.

• 1:28:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  And the wolves would realize quickly that that was a amazing relationship. So, yeah.

• 1:28:29Steven Rinella?

  Well, how is how is this island, how is the island administered?

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  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 Nunavut, um, which is self-governed.

• 1:28:50Steven Rinella?

  Has part of Elsmere?

• 1:28:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they, like, technically, it's all within Nunavut, 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 Griesfjord, 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, um, by colonialism. So they brought people from mainland Quebec and just, like, dropped them off on this pretty rough part of the island on the southern end.

• 1:29:27Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:27Speaker 02

  And basically, we're like, good, like, good luck. Um, 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.

• 1:29:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  And they're now kind of, there's some caribou up there, but the caribou population, sub- subspecies of pericariboo is like totally tanked.

• 1:29:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:53Speaker 02

  Um, in the north and in Nunavut and musk oxen and marine mammals too is what they hunt now.

• 1:29:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  But they, those guys don't make forays up here to hunt.

• 1:30:02Steven Rinella?

  They hunt wolves.

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  And there's a nine hundred dollar bounty on wolves in Nunavut.

• 1:30:05Steven Rinella?

  They hunt wolves down where they're at?

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:07Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:08Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Oh, wow.

• 1:30:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:13Steven Rinella?

  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 them up.

• 1:30:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are-

• 1:30:36Steven Rinella?

  Oh, what an image.

• 1:30:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are the-

• 1:30:38Steven Rinella?

  You ever feel bad for watching stuff get killed like that?

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't feel good. Yeah, I mean, I feel bad for anything that doesn't die quickly.

• 1:30:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  Um, even animals that I've-

• 1:30:47Steven Rinella?

  God, they don't.

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  The wolves?

• 1:30:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:51Speaker 02

  Why would you?

• 1:30:52Steven Rinella?

  I don't know.

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  I mean, hunters, I mean, it's like, I've been out with professional hunters and it takes two hours for an animal to die.

• 1:30:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  Um, so it's, you know, it's, it's usually twenty minutes for wolves from when they engage, even if it's a big adult. Sometimes a little longer with the adults, but.

• 1:31:08Steven Rinella?

  You know, in, in, in, uh, the Wood Buffalo National Park.

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:14Steven Rinella?

  I think that they, uh, they did, they did this study, it was a long time ago, how long it takes them to bring one down.

• 1:31:19Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:20Steven Rinella?

  I think it was about six hours per pop.

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  For a buffalo.

• 1:31:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, totally. But it's a whole dance.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  It's a dance and it's-

• 1:31:26Steven Rinella?

  There's a lot of like preamble.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  It's slow motion.

• 1:31:29Steven Rinella?

  It's not all like melee.

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  No, no, a lot of like hanging out, sitting, watching, seeing what's going on.

• 1:31:34Steven Rinella?

  And that's how a lot of these-

• 1:31:35Speaker 02

  Isolating. That's how these would unfold too.

• 1:31:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  Like you could technically be hunting for, I've seen six to ten hour hunts, but they're sleeping for half of that and they're just kind of watching. Yeah, they'll pressure them, disengage, pressure, disengage.

• 1:31:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  And do that whole deal.

• 1:31:49Steven Rinella?

  Cause the musk ox-

• 1:31:50Speaker 02

  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. Mm hmm. There's little dips and swells and coolies and suddenly the wolves are at full tilt and I can't see anything ahead of them. And then we get over this little depression and then there's like a musk ox in there. Oh, they do. They they. 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 that nothing they didn't. So if they pull up on those bulls. Yeah.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  Do they see it and see what they're dealing with like in terms of demographics, so to speak? Mm hmm. And just call it off? Or do they still go kind of test? They test. Yeah. They want to see is anybody injured? What's going on? They want to see him 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 on. They want to get them to see. Cause they, I mean, they they catalog. I mean, I'm sure they have like this landscape map and based on prey as well. And they'll know if there's an old bull that's like on his last. Got it. Got it. And and they like that the image we looked at, they're on a calf. Yep. That's their preferred. Okay.

• 1:33:21Speaker 02

  That's their after. I mean, it's they. So they're trying to siphon them off. They they want the musk ox into stampede. I've never seen buffalo do it a little bit. Um, you know, Cape buffalo do it where they actually stand their ground. Mm hmm. Against lions. Um, buffalo do a little bit with wolves here where they they gather up, they 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, they basically can't do anything. And especially. 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 musk oxen is like August. Uh huh. And so you'll have a herd of, let's say. You know, ten cows and calf pairs.

• 1:34:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:34:06Speaker 02

  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 them.

• 1:34:23Steven Rinella?

  When you're staking out with these guys and hanging out with these wolves.

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:34:27Steven Rinella?

  How, how, how many days pass between an event like this?

• 1:34:35Speaker 02

  Um.

• 1:34:36Steven Rinella?

  Between like, uh, from successful hunt to successful hunt, how much time goes by?

• 1:34:39Speaker 02

  You get three or four days depending on like how big the animals they take down. I mean, once they killed this animal, it was basically like hide in 12 hours.

• 1:34:51Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:34:52Speaker 02

  With, there were six adult wolves.

• 1:34:53Steven Rinella?

  But then they chilled for a couple of days.

• 1:34:55Speaker 02

  Those still go on walkabouts, but yeah, they chilled, they chilled for, they slept for like 15 hours. They chilled out, uh, but then they go on like, they go walk around for fun. They'll do border patrols too.

• 1:35:06Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:08Steven Rinella?

  So here we got a pup.

• 1:35:11Steven Rinella?

  And I'm assuming a female.

• 1:35:13Speaker 02

  That's the, that's Gray Maine still when he was a yearling.

• 1:35:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:35:15Speaker 02

  Just big brother.

• 1:35:17Steven Rinella?

  And he's, he's got his paws and his nose resting on a hoof.

• 1:35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, musk ox leg.

• 1:35:22Steven Rinella?

  Like the way that my dog will do to my crocs at home.

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  Yep, exactly. Yeah, just these scenes that, and I'm there, I'm just.

• 1:35:30Steven Rinella?

  How close are you there?

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  Closer than me to you. Like half of this is me to you. It's like a wide angle lens.

• 1:35:36Steven Rinella?

  And he just don't care.

• 1:35:37Speaker 02

  Spent a month with them. I mean, they, it took, it takes time. Like in the beginning, I was interesting that the pups were actually the most scared of the group. All the six adults in this pack during this time, all those six adults were fine. There was three that came up, one stole my camera. The other three adults are back with the pups. They were giving zero sign of fear about me, but the pups were like, we gotta, this is, we gotta get out of here.

• 1:36:00Steven Rinella?

  Would they draw the line at you touching them?

• 1:36:03Speaker 02

  Um, so I would set boundaries, like I would bop them like nose, like, hey, you gotta give some space, you know, I'd stand up and walk towards them or push them a few times like this, the previous photo here, there's a another hunt scene where this is in the dark and 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've known for a long time, Bright Eyes.

• 1:36:31Speaker 02

  I'm again, just kind of me to you 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 musk ox 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 to look back. She just like went back in the system and started to hunt again.

• 1:36:53Steven Rinella?

  You ever grab into that meat and eat it yourself?

• 1:36:56Speaker 02

  This one I did. It was the only time I did it. Yeah. I cut off some backstrap. They were away, the wolves, the other uh, three members and the pups were just over the hill and they were howling after they killed the uh, musk ox calf. So they were gone. I didn't really want to have them see me taking it. I felt like there was some like, yeah, some like betrayal around that.

• 1:37:15Steven Rinella?

  Dynamic.

• 1:37:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, but yeah, it was a, yeah, pretty, pretty beautiful scene to be able to have some easy meat.

• 1:37:25Steven Rinella?

  Man, yeah, these are just incredible photos, man. And then how much time total with the body work we're looking at, how much time total did you spend in this spot?

• 1:37:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:37:46Steven Rinella?

  And how often is a photographer trailing after these wolves?

• 1:37:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:38:05Steven Rinella?

  Like, cause people want to go camp and just check it out.

• 1:38:07Speaker 02

  They want to photograph them, get close to wolves.

• 1:38:10Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:38:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:38:24Steven Rinella?

  So it's kind of will get, it'll get like a little Yellowstone-y where it's just like people hanging out filming stuff.

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:38:38Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Logistically tough.

• 1:38:40Speaker 02

  Logistically tough. Yeah. You gotta be really, yeah, it's just a place that thankfully you can't drive to.

• 1:38:46Steven Rinella?

  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, what, is it all sudden you like click the shutter and it's there's the money? Jimmy, like, like, how, like, what do you, how do you get paid?

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So pretty much all my work is either assignment based. So that's a National Geographic magazine assignment.

• 1:39:15Steven Rinella?

  But it's not a day rate. They want an image.

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  No, it's, it's gonna be a day rate. Yeah. Yeah. So it can be, it'll be like a budget. They'll be like, all right, like the beaver story is like, okay, we have like fifty thousand dollars. Um, here's kind of our rough timeline. Fifty thousand dollars is like, you choose.

• 1:39:32Steven Rinella?

  I'm not asking you to give exact figures. You don't need to do that.

• 1:39:35Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't mind doing that.

• 1:39:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  And that.

• 1:39:37Steven Rinella?

  You could just do it all as a hundred dollars for all I care. But go ahead.

• 1:39:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:39:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:39:49Speaker 02

  So it's like a week here, a week here, day rate's 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.

• 1:39:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:00Speaker 02

  For the whole story. And then the other story, the other way I do things is through grants.

• 1:40:04Steven Rinella?

  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

• 1:40:12Steven Rinella?

  there will be footage.

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  Yes, right.

• 1:40:14Steven Rinella?

  So if you're doing something that, like the beaver thing.

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:40:20Steven Rinella?

  They're they're rolling the dice.

• 1:40:21Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 1:40:24Steven Rinella?

  Cause you could come back and say it's all mucky.

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:40:28Steven Rinella?

  Yep, got it.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  That's why I won't ever get an assignment from National Geographic. You need need a body of work.

• 1:40:34Steven Rinella?

  Right, so you're like, that's what I'm saying, like, when you click the shutter, it's not like there's the money. Like, you might make an arrangement where you're saying, I'm gonna spend blank days, and you're gonna get what you get.

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:46Steven Rinella?

  And I'm gonna try my hardest. And if I don't deliver, then I don't get work in the future, but

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  that's the that's the cooker with it, is it's like you have to

• 1:40:53Steven Rinella?

  You got to deliver.

• 1:40:53Speaker 02

  You have to deliver. And it's kind of like, there's that notion of, yeah, 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.

• 1:41:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  If you bomb multiple stories, it's like, yeah, they'll

• 1:41:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you don't, yeah, you're not, you're not the guy that gets it.

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  And for a while, it's like being a hunting guide.

• 1:41:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:12Speaker 02

  You charge X for your hard, 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

• 1:41:23Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  animals with your clients, eventually stop getting clients.

• 1:41:26Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:41:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's

• 1:41:28Steven Rinella?

  Do you get, do you get easy assignments?

• 1:41:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:41:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:39Speaker 02

  Um, it's not like I have to go someplace like Uganda and try to find a bird, or, um, go to Elsmere, where it's, yeah, 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 easiest assignments I had was it was like a commercial assignment for a cellphone company in Kenya, SafariCom. And they wanted a series of wildlife images of, like, endangered species in Kenya.

• 1:42:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  And also, like, a, 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, who's one of the premier wildlife cameramen in the world. Um, does a lot of work in East Africa, and it's basically Bob and I cruising around to these amazing spots in Kenya, in this, like, amazing film Land Rover platform that he designed, and it was awesome. And there was no pressure.

• 1:42:30Steven Rinella?

  It was gravy.

• 1:42:31Speaker 02

  It was no pressure. It was just like, knew we were gonna get amazing things. Get to see

• 1:42:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:36Speaker 02

  everything that you'd be excited about. Saw my first wild dog, hanging out with cheetah, uh, hanging out with, um, Um, with hyenas, it was like socializing with hyenas, this lone female wild dog. I sent it to research and they're like, we don't ever see this. That was just a fun assignment because there's not any pressure.

• 1:42:53Steven Rinella?

  Do you ever get a call where you'd say, I'm gonna save us both the trouble? And no, because it's just not, you're not gonna be happy with it.

• 1:43:03Speaker 02

  The Sasquatch photos aren't.

• 1:43:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. The Sasquatch photos, or we want a snow leopard.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:43:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had one.

• 1:43:11Steven Rinella?

  Giving birth.

• 1:43:11Speaker 02

  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 of they can write about things that happened one time. Or they can write about, don't happen. They can write about.

• 1:43:27Steven Rinella?

  How I tried to like do blank.

• 1:43:29Speaker 02

  But they can write about tall tales. 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, um, 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 kinda like swam up into it and like checked out the beavers.

• 1:43:56Steven Rinella?

  Got to be parties with him.

• 1:43:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:44:10Steven Rinella?

  The man who swam with beavers?

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  The editor's like, I want opening spread, double page, Billy swimming with beavers. And I was like, okay, like cool. There's a guy outside of Bozeman who swims with beavers. Like I didn't know about that, but.

• 1:44:21Steven Rinella?

  I'll buy it.

• 1:44:22Speaker 02

  He's got habituated beavers. I'll go check it out. So show up, Billy showing me around with a writer, walking around, he's showing me where the beavers are and all this stuff. The writer leaves and I'm kinda just casual. I'm like, so Billy, when do you swim with the beavers?

• 1:44:35Steven Rinella?

  Let me know when it gets to my camera.

• 1:44:36Speaker 02

  And he, yeah, he looks at me and is just like, well, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, we don't, I don't swim with beavers, they're wild animals, like, they're scared of me? Like, what do you mean? I was like, well, the writer said, he's like, oh, maybe I told him that when I was younger, I did a thing. So then I had this whole kind of afternoon of like, what do I do? I gotta tell the editor this story is not possible. And Billy became a dear friend and I just talked to him yesterday and I actually used his late father's bow to hunt my first archery elk this year.

• 1:45:08Steven Rinella?

  Was that right?

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  And so Billy, 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 along. But yeah, that was a funny assignment where I had to call, I eventually told the editor, I was like, that this thing isn't true at all.

• 1:45:25Steven Rinella?

  That's not really on you, though.

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:45:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay, yeah. For years, I traveled with photographers for magazine features. It's always a strange relationship. We always got along.

• 1:45:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it was rare that I'd be in the field of photography. I did an amazing three weeks with, David Quammen wrote the, did a story on human chimp collision in Uganda.

• 1:45:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:45:57Speaker 02

  And he wrote the story on that and we did three weeks in the field together. It was, it was a dream.

• 1:46:00Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 1:46:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Steven Rinella?

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• 1:47:17Steven Rinella?

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• 1:48:02Steven Rinella?

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• 1:48:27Steven Rinella?

  What kind of wild stuff you got coming up? Like for what kind of pictures you trying to get now?

• 1:48:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've shifted a bit in kind of the relationship of what how I'm working and um.

• 1:48:36Steven Rinella?

  What's that mean?

• 1:48:37Speaker 02

  Well, it means like I've stopped going to the Arctic in ways that I don't enjoy like going on the kind of the drive of you're there to do one thing and it's to like film. And I've started to try to understand more about like. The reason I get in this was around conservation. The reason is to try to educate people about wild spaces and to hopefully have them be around for generations to come. And a lot of what I realize now is so much of it is just around like human health. Like how well are humans in an area? Whether it's adjacent to national parks or even like in a country.

• 1:49:15Speaker 02

  Like how connected are we as a American nation to the natural world in a way that allows it to to sustain itself for a long time? So what that looks like to me is like being more on the land with people, being more around like, yeah, reconnecting nature in a relational way in like a sacred way, like what is sacred? To humans now in the natural setting, a lot of that is, I think it's kind of lost in a way. Um, but people are trying to rekindle it. Um, there's some cool work going on by like Bill Plonkin is an author. Um, Martin Preto is kind of this interesting thinker around like how do we rekindle?

• 1:49:53Speaker 02

  Our innate relationship to natural world as as like the human animal, like our psyches are totally honed for it. To be um, to learn from like essentially animism. Every culture in the world came from like an animism relationship.

• 1:50:06Steven Rinella?

  I was trying to explain animism to my kids.

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  Are you?

• 1:50:09Steven Rinella?

  Was it?

• 1:50:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:09Steven Rinella?

  I was trying to explain.

• 1:50:10Speaker 02

  How do you approach it?

• 1:50:11Steven Rinella?

  What's that?

• 1:50:12Speaker 02

  How do you approach it? Like, what do you say?

• 1:50:14Steven Rinella?

  Well, we we it's hard to get there because we get there from a Judeo-Christian understanding and then try to walk backwards.

• 1:50:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:24Speaker 02

  It's in there still like, yeah.

• 1:50:26Steven Rinella?

  They would they would tell you if you asked them, does your dad lecture you by animism? And they would say, yes, he does.

• 1:50:32Speaker 02

  That's great. I mean, I think it is like, I think that is.

• 1:50:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:50:46Steven Rinella?

  You know, a good way to get into animism, it's not really, it's a roundabout way to get into it, but you've heard this idea. Imagine that you imagine the earth, you imagine the earth as an organism.

• 1:50:57Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:50:58Steven Rinella?

  And the rivers are its arteries.

• 1:51:00Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:51:02Steven Rinella?

  The atmosphere is its lungs.

• 1:51:03Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:51:04Steven Rinella?

  You follow me?

• 1:51:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:51:06Steven Rinella?

  And then you can kind of get to, through that, you get to an idea like, well, let's say we imagine like that, the mountain, the mountain's alive.

• 1:51:14Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:51:15Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:51:15Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:51:16Steven Rinella?

  It's got heat, it's alive, it's got, it's got things living on it, parasitic things live on it, you know what I mean?

• 1:51:23Speaker 02

  There's all sorts of functional relationships.

• 1:51:26Steven Rinella?

  It's got things going on, makes weather, harvests the weather, right?

• 1:51:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it.

• 1:51:32Steven Rinella?

  Stuff like that.

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:51:41Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:51:42Speaker 02

  Every indigenous land-based community that I spent time with, that is how it works. And oftentimes, that looks like you go onto 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 is had in time, like when my dad grew up, it wasn't even available.

• 1:52:11Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:52:12Speaker 02

  But there's also things that people don't speak to other people about ever, but you can speak to the natural world about.

• 1:52:18Steven Rinella?

  So what, where is the work in this for you? I mean, this seems like, like, this seems like retirement thing.

• 1:52:25Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, ultimately, it's like the thing that I've And 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 the psychologist Francis Weller, who talks about that he have primary versus secondary satisfactions related to the human psyche. Primary satisfactions are like storytelling, ceremony, ritual, connection to food, dance,

• 1:53:10Speaker 02

  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 and societies. And for me, 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 to natural world, going on the land and doing, doing

• 1:53:54Speaker 02

  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...

• 1:54:26Speaker 02

  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, I would kill things. I would borrow a buddy's BB gun and shoot things, but I 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.

• 1:55:11Speaker 02

  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. Hmm. And then went through a, a practice of, yeah, in a way of trying to honor him in that way versus, yeah, the, the last four years of learning to hunt and doing it, just kind of however it came. Yeah. Um, and like there's this idea around, yeah, Robin Earl Kimmerer has a quote around ceremony is how we remember to remember. Oh, yeah. 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.

• 1:55:56Speaker 02

  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? Yeah. Yeah. Um, you still gonna take pictures? Still taking, yeah, still taking pictures. Yep. Um, yeah, I mean, I was just on my nominee reservation a couple of weeks ago and they're doing some cool stuff with getting buffalo back on land, call it homecoming. Um, so that kind of ties into what you're talking about though. It exactly ties into what I'm talking about. So it's, so it's kind of. That's what I said, the work of it, meaning like you can photo document. Yeah, I think. Places where this is happening in interesting ways or places where humans are.

• 1:56:33Steven Rinella?

  Re-engaging or continuing to engage around wilds, wild spaces and wildlife?

• 1:56:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz 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 wanna do it ethically because those wolves will get hammered during hunting season. Um, and they do around Yellowstone every year. The wolves like kinda 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 Menominee story is amazing.

• 1:57:19Speaker 02

  Um, there's a group called Medicine Fish there. It's a tribal nonprofit that uses uh, youth, work and empowerment, re- 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,

• 1:58:04Speaker 02

  be on, on the plains here in animate relationship. You know, we can read about it. Um, and I brought some books for y'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 nineteen thirty's.

• 1:58:20Steven Rinella?

  I've read a lot of those, but I haven't read those ones.

• 1:58:21Speaker 02

  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 a 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, 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 gonna happen.

• 1:59:00Steven Rinella?

  But that's it, 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, like Sentinel Island. There are some. Typically, people accept it. They want it. 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,

• 1:59:41Steven Rinella?

  cultures all around the world, you say to them, would you like food, like a guaranteed food supply? Yes, we would. Would you like cellular service? Yes, you would. Would you like, I remember reading this thing even from the seventies. I was looking at cash expenditures in Inuit communities and it was white gas, white gas. So I think number two cash expenditure, canned food, right? It's just people, I don't think you can go and look, it's just people again and again and again, want the stuff. They're like, oh, you can make my life easier. You can make it more likely that I'll live to be in my seventies or eighties. You can make it less

• 2:00:22Steven Rinella?

  likely that my baby will die. I'm in. Always. 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 exploring things of the past, but I always remind myself that it was a very, very deliberate decision around the world to move away from that lifestyle. It was imposed here and there, but typically people wanted it. They typically wanted it.

• 2:00:55Steven Rinella?

  And they will continue to typically want it.

• 2:00:58Speaker 02

  I think, I think a lot of times it was, it was forced. Like, I don't think there was necessarily like a choice.

• 2:01:04Steven Rinella?

  Uh, man, if we'd have to do a whole other show.

• 2:01:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:07Steven Rinella?

  I'll take you on, I'll take you on on that one.

• 2:01:09Speaker 02

  Sweet.

• 2:01:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:10Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 2:01:25Speaker 02

  But, but I also think what you're saying.

• 2:01:26Steven Rinella?

  They're interested in the goods.

• 2:01:28Speaker 02

  I think, I think we're kind of sitting in the same, in a way, like, they're interested in the tools.

• 2:01:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:32Steven Rinella?

  They want to maintain.

• 2:01:32Speaker 02

  They want the material culture.

• 2:01:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they want to maintain their, their way of life, perhaps.

• 2:01:37Speaker 02

  Well.

• 2:01:37Steven Rinella?

  In a way that, yeah, and.

• 2:01:39Speaker 02

  But I think they want, yeah, they want guns.

• 2:01:40Steven Rinella?

  They don't foresee.

• 2:01:42Speaker 02

  They want ammo.

• 2:01:42Steven Rinella?

  Beginning of.

• 2:01:43Speaker 02

  They want metal. Right. I don't, I don't think that they see it initially. Like, 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, we do want that. But I think.

• 2:02:10Steven Rinella?

  I'm not trying to counter what you're saying. I'm just saying, this is something I've wrestled with.

• 2:02:14Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 2:02:14Steven Rinella?

  I've intellectually wrestled with this whole bunch.

• 2:02:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the tool specifically, but I think like, the way of life, I don't necessarily think that everybody wants. Like, if they.

• 2:02:24Steven Rinella?

  There's probably a baked, there's a baked in, let's say there was a baked in nostalgia.

• 2:02:28Speaker 02

  But also.

• 2:02:28Steven Rinella?

  Later, you're like, man, should we have done that?

• 2:02:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:31Speaker 03

  You're also not necessarily talking about material culture. You're talking about in that tran- transformation or transition, you're talking about losing intangible.

• 2:02:42Speaker 03

  Intangible things. That, 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, that have been lost in some ways.

• 2:03:01Steven Rinella?

  But even if the, even if the product, we're getting so far.

• 2:03:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:03Steven Rinella?

  We, 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.

• 2:03:16Steven Rinella?

  Virtually everyone was animistic. They became, they became monotheistic. We'll save this for the next show. I got one last question for you.

• 2:03:27Steven Rinella?

  It's a business question. If we look at, this is, this is gonna sound insulting, but it comes from me being a writer. Like oftentimes, the way that it moves is, is like, it moves it, that there's sort of like, a writer is gonna 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?

• 2:03:56Steven Rinella?

  Do you follow me? Can you, do you have, do you wield that power as sort of like a, a premier wildlife photographer? Where you could say, there's an image I'd like to get, it's so good, you ought to find a writer.

• 2:04:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that happens. I don't claim to be, to be anything of that, like prowess, prowess or level. But I think that, like the Nat Geo stories, I'll pitch something and then they'll assign a writer, I'll come with a writer.

• 2:04:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so what will be that the image leads?

• 2:04:27Speaker 02

  I mean, National Geographic is, I mean, it's definitely an image magazine.

• 2:04:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I see.

• 2:04:30Speaker 02

  And it's like, they, like, you hook people with the cover, if, you know, they don't stay on the newsstands anymore, but if you hook people to the cover, they'll, they'll go through it, this is what they, you know, that's what they say people do with it. They like, look at the pictures, and if the picture's interesting, then they'll read the article more. That's kind of how they speak to it.

• 2:04:45Steven Rinella?

  That's what I'm talking, yeah, it's like, uh, yeah, the photographer is the dog, the writer's the tail. Cause I would always imagine the writer as the dog and the photographer is the tail.

• 2:04:52Speaker 02

  And you need both. I mean, it's like, you need both. I mean, I.

• 2:04:55Steven Rinella?

  I don't know, I don't think it should be the way it was when I was doing it. I think that in, in some ways, like, looking at the, the wolf stuff, if someone said to me, hey, you can look at these pictures, or you can read what this guy wrote, I'd be like, I'll go with the pictures, please. Like, on that shit?

• 2:05:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you could take an eighth grade essay and attach it to that, and somebody be like, this is the best thing I've ever read. It's a transformative piece.

• 2:05:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, if I was the editor, and, and someone came and said, uh, look, man, I'm gonna get all these photos of all this crazy stuff. I'd be like, hey, we should probably find a writer to go with it.

• 2:05:28Speaker 02

  I mean, definitely has changed a lot, I think, in that way. But yeah, I mean, I we would need both. I mean, you need the dog and the and the tail. You need it all.

• 2:05:35Steven Rinella?

  No, but who gets to be the tail? To be the dog, who gets to be the tail?

• 2:05:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:41Steven Rinella?

  Well, so I I like, I got one last question. If if, okay, I think of the whole world, the the depths of the oceans, whatever, the whole world. If you could get a picture

• 2:05:52Steven Rinella?

  of one thing that you know to be a thing that happens. Right? Uh, like a sperm whale grabbing a giant squid, like one thing that you know occurs, what would you get?

• 2:06:04Speaker 02

  What's the next beaver under the ice?

• 2:06:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:10Speaker 02

  What comes to mind, I was in Yelson just a couple weeks ago and read through the scene, like, found a big bull carcass of elk. Um, with some researchers out, they knew it was there. There's a tom mountain lion that been feeding on it, collared one, they knew was there. And I ended up like tracing back the whole scene. And like, I would love to s- to get a cool, like a good image of like a mountain lion ambush, like coming in from the tree, jumping on the back of a bull elk and going through that world. Yeah.

• 2:06:46Steven Rinella?

  That's a tough one.

• 2:06:47Speaker 02

  That'd be a tough one to get.

• 2:06:48Steven Rinella?

  But not impossible.

• 2:06:51Speaker 02

  This morning, the first few images in this deck, we didn't get to it yet. I saw a family of cougars this morning on a walk. Six miles from here. They just killed a mule deer.

• 2:07:02Steven Rinella?

  Uh, my neighbor's kid, they got a bull. And when they went back up to get, they left some meat hanging in the tree.

• 2:07:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:07:10Steven Rinella?

  And they got up there and there's a lion sitting there gnawing on it. They got a bunch of pictures of it. Yeah. Then they had to go in there and get their meat, spook it off.

• 2:07:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:07:17Steven Rinella?

  But it had the gut pile.

• 2:07:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:07:20Speaker 02

  Yep. That's what I walked in on initially. It was confused and there was a raven that had been calling. It's a little bed there on the on the right there. They'd just been there.

• 2:07:29Steven Rinella?

  Well, that's where the lions have been laying.

• 2:07:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:30Steven Rinella?

  That's cool.

• 2:07:31Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:07:31Steven Rinella?

  Oh, there you go. Poor thing.

• 2:07:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:35Steven Rinella?

  God, you take nice pictures all the time.

• 2:07:37Speaker 02

  Oh, those are just cellphone images. You could hear mom just in the back there.

• 2:07:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there they are.

• 2:07:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:45Steven Rinella?

  Excellent, man. Yeah, don't tell Yanis where that was. No, he won't mess with them. I know, I know. Just a joke. He won't mess with them. If he did, he'd just let him go.

• 2:07:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I feel like everyone's gonna be hitting Ronin up for a hunting spot.

• 2:07:58Steven Rinella?

  I was cutting Christmas trees. We were hunting trees in my family on a Sunday, hunting trees. I'm sitting with my kids, I'm not kidding you, man. Like Park, my daughter broke her foot. So she wait, she, I was like, you gotta wait at the truck, she's got a broken foot. My wife said, I'm not gonna leave her in 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 a hundred 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 gotta tell the boys, get some sticks and whoop the tree. Yeah, you can't judge them. You can't feel judge. It's like looking at a deer from the back. They all look great. Yeah, you don't know how it looks.

• 2:08:40Steven Rinella?

  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, I look at the ground and our dog's running all over hell. I look at the ground and there's the brand newest, cleanest lion track. And I realized we'd kicked that sucker out of this little cluster of Christmas trees. Yeah, brand new, beautiful track. And our dogs 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.

• 2:09:20Steven Rinella?

  It just doesn't register. It doesn't register. That dog, if we weren't there, that dog would probably be not alive anymore. It'd be a cat snack. Well, thanks for coming on the show, man. Yeah, appreciate you having me on. It's a fascinating world. Yeah, I can't take a picture. Sure you can. Dude, I took black and white photography, one and two in college.

• 2:09:40Speaker 02

  Well, it's a good thing you're-

• 2:09:41Speaker 03

  You can say he's more formally trained.

• 2:09:43Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 2:09:44Speaker 03

  More formally trained, yeah.

• 2:09:47Steven Rinella?

  No, I realize that. All I had to do was take black and white photography one and two to realize I was not a visual artist.

• 2:09:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:09:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:54Speaker 02

  Right, a good writer, so.

• 2:09:55Steven Rinella?

  You don't have it, you don't have it.

• 2:09:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you've done, I should just get the audio for my captions next time for this.

• 2:10:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'll sign up a little bit beside this.

• 2:10:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10:03Steven Rinella?

  Audio captions.

• 2:10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10:05Steven Rinella?

  Well, yeah, your stuff's gorgeous, man, and, um, and I love seeing it. I got so excited about that Beaver stuff. That was cool.

• 2:10:11Speaker 02

  Nice, yeah.

• 2:10:12Steven Rinella?

  Super cool.

• 2:10:12Speaker 02

  I'm glad you called me in to-

• 2:10:14Steven Rinella?

  So, uh, tell people how, if 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?

• 2:10:21Speaker 02

  Um, you can see it on my website, ronandonanum.com, Instagram's another place I have a lot of presence. Um, but, yeah, also check out the Animus Valley Institute.

• 2:10:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:10:30Speaker 02

  Not my work, but-

• 2:10:31Steven Rinella?

  Oh, not, okay, not, yeah.

• 2:10:32Speaker 02

  But people that want to, uh, rewild themselves and rekindle that relationship to the animate world.

• 2:10:37Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 2:10:38Speaker 02

  They offer experiences and-

• 2:10:40Steven Rinella?

  But on your website, they can just go peruse all these years of material?

• 2:10:42Speaker 02

  Peruse, yeah. Peruse images and all that. Yeah, I do sell-

• 2:10:45Steven Rinella?

  The stuff we talked about today, they'd find on there?

• 2:10:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:10:54Steven Rinella?

  I was, that was gonna-

• 2:10:54Speaker 02

  The country.

• 2:10:55Steven Rinella?

  I forgot to ask, but I wanted to ask about that.

• 2:10:57Speaker 02

  Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Uh, thanks. It's, it'll be in, um, St. Petersburg, Florida next.

• 2:11:02Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:11:02Speaker 02

  Opens up in, in the late March, early April. Um, I'll be going down for some program for that. It was in Amarillo, Texas, just a couple of months ago.

• 2:11:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:11:11Speaker 02

  Be in San Diego and after his museum.

• 2:11:12Steven Rinella?

  And what's, what's it called?

• 2:11:14Speaker 02

  Oh, it's called Wolves. It's, um, a comparison, especially images of Yellowstone and Arctic Wolves.

• 2:11:20Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 2:11:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:21Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 2:11:21Speaker 02

  A big, big exhibit and, um, yeah, lots of text with it as well.

• 2:11:26Steven Rinella?

  Oh, there is?

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, lots of maps and some-

• 2:11:29Steven Rinella?

  Cause they had the images.

• 2:11:30Speaker 02

  Screens. Had the images, yeah. Needs some text to go with it. Yeah. But, yeah, it'll come through Museum of the Rockies maybe in a couple of years.

• 2:11:36Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 2:11:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:37Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's great.

• 2:11:37Speaker 02

  Which I'm excited about. Yeah.

• 2:11:38Steven Rinella?

  That's it, man. That'd be real pockets around here.

• 2:11:40Speaker 02

  I'm excited for it. Yeah, I want to go to Colorado, too.

• 2:11:43Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11:43Speaker 02

  Need to do some work down there with wolves. They need some help.

• 2:11:47Steven Rinella?

  All right, man. Well, thank you very much.

• 2:11:48Speaker 02

  Thanks, Steve.

• 2:11:48Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:11:49Speaker 02

  Thank you all. Yeah.

• 2:12:16Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that I have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. That way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com. Hey, let me tell you, when the hunt is over, the work isn't over. You've still got all

• 2:13:01Steven Rinella?

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• 2:13:45Steven Rinella?

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