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

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That's F I R S T L I T E dot com. Join today by wildlife photographer extraordinaire Ronan Donovan. If you ever, oh man, when a what if you ever look at that national geographic, right, or stuff like that, or some super like amazing wildlife image that pops up and it makes its way all over the place. Like, for instance, if you're kind of into wildlife and you have recently seen these extraordinary images of a beaver swimming around under the ice doing his business. Or the whitest wolves you've ever seen ganging up and killing 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 content creator. And describes himself as a conservation photographer. Do I got that right? Yeah, sounds great. And what we're talking about is who intro'd us was one of our camera guys. Who is a vision who paints his pictures with visual imagery. Rick Smith. Now, some of how me Rick getting a lot of fights. One of the biggest fights I've gotten about Rick Smith was about a white T-shirt. We were filming one time and we're in Hawaii. And I had on a white T-shirt. Rick's like, you can't film in a white T-shirt. And I said, watch me. And we got in a fight about it. I wore the white T-shirt. And to this day, when I see that footage, I'm like, wow, you really can't wear a white T-shirt. Yeah, Rick, generally everything that he puts out is very well thought out. And who thought the camera guy would write about the visuals, you know? Everything is not thought out. Sometimes Rick is wrong. Rick's often wrong. And then we have, there's a thing that'll happen where 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. Say that 10 times. For instance, COVID, they had very different views on what would be an appropriate response to COVID. And my God, I get sick of hearing about that. He'd be like out in the woods, you know, camping or whatever. And just in the background, he just heard those two like, yeah. Me and Rick, about came to blows over white T-shirts, but he introduced us and here we are. Here we are. We'll see how many fights we get in. Yeah. Tell me, so we're not going to, we're not going to be together long enough. We'd have to go spend a week or two together and then we'll get a fight. Um, tell me about the, the, the, the beaver under the ice thing. It never occurred to me, you don't see pictures of beavers under the ice. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, that's like their whole winter world. Yeah. I'm always explaining that. I was explaining that to a guy the other day where a guy had a problem with beavers that plugged up as a irrigation ditch, but then they drained the ditch. And I was explaining, they make mistakes. Like he thought he was cool and could build like under the ice environment here. Yeah. Cause he's planning on for four months, whatever. Yeah. He's planning on, he's trying to figure out how can I live where I never go into the open air and then you drain his spot. Yeah. Now he's in a tough position. Tough position. Cause he's got to strike off cross country. A beaver and winter without his food, cash and a home is like, yeah. I was like, he made a bad mistake. Probably not long for this. He made a bad mistake. And then he's going to be like, get killed by a yard dog. Yeah. Yep. Cougars, whatever it is. Yeah. So yeah, tell about that a little bit. Like you wanted to, someone said, Hey, get a picture of a beaver under the ice. The assignment came through and it was, it was with a writer, Ben Goldfarm. Yep. He was great. We talked about having him on the show. He wrote that book called Eager. You should totally have him on. Really? He's really interesting. He's presented in Bowdoin a few times. Great science communicator, funny. He's a going guy and very well researched on all things beaver. And he's got a new book that was about crossroads. Yeah. Yeah. Which is also another interesting time. Road ecology. But yeah, he, one of our colleagues, Mark Kenyon, had him on his show. Yeah. About the road stuff. Yeah. I've seen a present. He's great. Oh, there's various with Dan Flores. Yes. Yep. Small one. I mean, there's a picture of it. Yeah. I'm sure there are buds. You can tell. Sounds like you're late to the, he needs a haircut. Let me see that. All right. That's definitely Dan. You can see him. Oh, that's Dan. Yeah. That's Dan. Yeah. I'm sure they're good friends. Okay. So go on. So yeah, the story got pitched and it was, you know, it's 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 of beavers. And I pitched the idea of like, well, I want to see what they do under the ice. I want to see them access their winter food cache. No. And it took, it took like three winters of trying. Are you serious? Oh yeah. There's like, there's some pictures that are of the initial mistakes. Oh, let me, I just want to tell people. Yeah. If you're listening, you're screwed. No, we're going to do our dam, we're going to do our dam. It'll be, it'll be a rich. Yes. This is mostly the vast majority of our audience only listens. Okay. I'm sorry. And they'll still have a wonderful experience. We're going to show a lot of imagery that if you want to check out and us talking about it, go to watch the show on YouTube. Yes, please do. You'll see the imagery. You'll be in time to do it. You'll see the imagery. Um, we will do our best to try to tell you what's going on. Meteor podcast network, YouTube channel. Yeah. So not the regular Meteor. Yeah. Meteor podcast network. If not, I'll do my best to say what you're seeing here is a beaver. This is a beaver underwater. At the top of the screen, there's a bit of ice. Yes. Yeah. So the first few attempts were like essentially I started to late one year, the first winter. Tell me why. Um, scheduling basically. I started in like. Oh no, no. Too late. Like the ice was right. Yeah. March. Okay. So it's 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 a Dupu year, just this cool little ranch that's up against public and, uh, was putting this system under the ice and it's this whole elaborate setup where it's like, I got a drill test holes, just a small little chainsaw hole through the ice to put a GoPro under water with a light to be able to just like. Periscope around. See what's going on. Like where I'm, what's the underwater world like? Do you mind if I real quick tell people something? Sure. Uh, I realized we kind of left something a little bit unsaid in the north. I'm going to start with something. I'm going to start with a different thing. If you take beavers from the north and transplant them down south, do you know what takes them a while to realize they don't need to do all this? They're like, oh, we got to make a food cache. Yeah. Beavers down south. Like, no, you don't. Yeah. But if you take a beer from the north and turn them down south, it'll be a while. So he realizes he doesn't need to go through all this bullshit. Yeah. It's like someone who grew up in the Great Depression. Yeah. Just stuff in stuff in cash and their mattress. You know, why does my mom clip? Cored. Yeah. Cording. So a beaver. So this is, this is about the north. Uh, a beaver needs to have deep water. They like deep water anyways, because where they escape, but they need to have deep water in the winter because everything's going to freeze. So they'll have a lodge or a bank then with a submarine entrance where they can come in a whole underwater and then go up into a cavity that they excavate out of a river bank or the shore of a lake or whatever, or they create a dome shaped lodge and they have a cavity in there that is somewhat insulated and they can live up in there for food. Cause 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 cash and then they usually have the cash right in front of their lodge or right in front of their bank then and usually skirting in on the left or right side, they have a runway and the entrance up into their hut or bank then. And that's their food pile and a food pile can be the size of a park truck. And it's visually, it's like a raft, essentially that they're sinking to the bottom of the stream bed or the river bed. Yeah. And there's a surface plate. Like you can spot them until you get a couple of feet of snow. You can spot the food cache, but it's like an iceberg for whatever's sticking up. How was the formula with iceberg? Like 10% of it or something? Yeah, 30, 70, something like that. Yeah, whatever's sticking up, that thing is probably packed with feed all the way down to the bottom and they excavate all that mud out to keep it deep. And if you jump, like if you're looking for a place to dive in a pond, if you jump off a beaver lodge, you might be hitting six, eight feet of water because they excavate all that mud out to build that lodge and it creates this big deep pool and that's their refugia, like under the ice where there are caches. So trying to get a picture one going about his business down there is what we're talking about. Yeah, it's a good 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 cashing food for months and months, like there aren't very many other animals that can do that. Like, you know, a lot of carnivores cash, but they get discovered pretty quickly by birds or other carnivores, but like beavers have this thing where they're able to just store, yeah, way north, like in Alaska or Ed to the Arctic. I mean, it's like, yeah, six months plus of food that they need to cash in this form of, and it's just a cambium. Like it's just this little tiny bit and they're mainly just, I think a lot of it just maintenance, you know, where they're just like feeding the micro gut biome in their stomach enough to keep them alive versus like, I don't know if they necessarily are gaining weight. It's just kind of like a maintenance thing. And so these beavers that I was focused on trying to get 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 next couple of pictures here, Phil, there's. So that's your setup. 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 basically a lot of cold nights doing that. So here you are. You just laid out on the ice with all this electronics. Yep. It's great. It looks like a ice fishing setup. Set up without the shanty that keeps you warm. Yep. Let me hit you with one thing about this, just because it coming up right away. They're very, like if you go in, if you're trapping and you go in and set up a lodge and you're axe and holes through the ice and they're already pretty lethargic in the winter, you might not see activities three or four days because they spook so bad. Yeah. Were you finding that they would take a while to get used to all that change? They were pretty curious even. Like they were. Yeah. The first time I set up like next picture, you can see this like pea soup beaver coming by. That was the first night. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Cause they, they're basically. That's the first night, the first year. Yep. Oh, shit. I'd be happy with that. Well, yeah. Working on different standards. The pose is cool. Like I love that image. It's the beaver with a stick in his mouth and a curved tail. Like you can kind of tell it's a beaver, but the people that are listening, it's just like a, you could just throw a whole bag of gravel and sand and mud into the frame and you can kind of see a beaver through it with the ice on top. It could also be a rat that had drowned in pea soup. It was just not clear. If you think it could be a rat or a beaver, then my editors are going to be like, now's not going to work. So they're like, so that's like a dead rat in your tub. Yeah. Exactly. You just made that up. You just created that. The next picture was getting a little bit closer. This is the same site. You can see. So the other thing about starting too late was they'd pretty much gone through most of their food cache already and they were already getting access out of the ice. Yeah. Because stuff was melting on the edges and they'll, they will come out during the winter if, if they so choose and there's access. You know what trappers will say? They'll say that the feed pile sours. Okay. And they'll say that they don't like, like after a couple of months, they really don't want the feed pile. And that's when they start doing like, you know how that's always the ice is a little thin along the damage? Yeah. They'll start going and pressing up with their head and body to start trying to find any way to bust out. Yeah. Because they, everybody says they get sick of it. Yeah. I mean, you can see this is all like sediments on top of the sticks. And I was, so this is, this was learning curve for me. It was like way too late. The 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 and realize that there was a beaver up creek just like digging. There's just a sediment coming out. Yeah. Just do it a bunch of stuff. And then it's done for the night. There's like no settling at all. And you see like all kind of trout blasted by there. You'd see some trout. This site had some really good brook trout. Next picture you can see same kind of site beaver coming by, being curious. Getting closer. Getting closer. So this was the first year. Are you manually? Yeah. This is all triggered. You're like, oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm like seeing it coming. Oh, really? It's live. Yeah. It's live, but it's like, no, it is. Yeah. Yeah. It's a live feed. So it's not like a, like a motion triggered camera system that are like camera traps that I use for photograph and 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. 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. So for all these, you're like, you're hit. You're like, wham. Yeah. I just assumed when I saw the images. Yeah. When they came out. Yeah. It was like, you know, in the wildlife photography world, there was a little splash. Nice. Yeah. I assumed it was all camera trap shit. I don't know how that, I never thought how that would work under water. I guess it doesn't work under water. Yeah. I mean, we, I say we, there's some amazing photo engineers at National Geographic and some other companies that contract and worked on this system. They did develop an underwater camera trap system. I tried it out with this. It just wasn't the right application. It was made for doing like submerging, diving down, maybe like 50 meters, having a diver behind the system and then setting it up. But it is like a self contained lights underwater housing has a computer model, AI trained live feed video camera that triggers based on what comes in front of it. And for my purposes, I tried it out, but it was like a total pain. Like I had to deploy it down. I couldn't see any live feed. Do it didn't have any wiring coming up. So I couldn't really control it on top side. So this was a whole system that developed with this guy, Tom O'Brien at National Geographic Photo Engineering. What was the longest stakeout you ever did? The first one was for this, it was like a week and a half straight. Let me how many hours? Sorry, how many hours? I would do like a stakeout. I mean, for the beaver one, maybe like 16 hours or something like that. Single stakeout. Yeah. Yeah. It's a long sit. Yeah. These were long, close. Yeah. I put up a tent for a few of them. Are you serious? Yeah. There's a bunch of like, you'd make a good ice. There's a bunch of Wisconsin deer hunters. They're on their neck is standing up right now. Six or seven pictures filling you back. Yeah. He's wasting a lot of talent. Yeah. Cause he could be a phenomenal ice fisher. How long have you been here? 16 hours? I've never, I think I've been ice fishing once. It's all I needed. Yeah. That picture here, this was like the 3.0 setup. So I had like a little kind of like high tech hobo camp had a little bit of weather protection there. I see, yeah, he's got, I see two by fours. I see all the aluminum. I see a beaver lodge. I see a ridge rest, a tarp tent. Yep. A butt pad. Tons of wires. Tons of wires. I did two full nights here in the sleeping bag and like falling asleep and waking up like it's tedious and they didn't come out once at this site. And at nine AM, they had another lodge up Creek and they would come to this one where they had their food cache at like nine AM. The two of them, they'd chatter, they'd have a conversation and then they'd start doing their feeding rounds coming out to the cash pile. So I didn't have to do any nighttime work at this one anymore. And then you go back one photo and now you start to see like the clarity coming in, like totally different situation. So you're moving to, you're, you're picking your beaver ponds based on clarity. Only that basically. And I realized to like, I need beavers in a clear spot. And the pond, like I initially was like, I'm going to start a pond. It's going to be great. They're going to be contained. I know what they are. You can see the cash, but the pond, the sediment in the pond is crazy. Like it never settles. And there's all these tannins. There's no water flow, basically. You think of like, you know, Great Lakes area, those ponds are brown, teawater, essentially. And then just the nature of a beaver pond. I mean, you could have like a crystal clear trout stream. And then you get into the dam, like, like dams have beaver ponds have a very short life cycle because they set, they load up with sediment so fast. They're like, they're a sediment trap. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? So I could picture, I never thought about, you know, a lot of times you get, you chop a hole and you put it around your eyes and you can kind of see what's going on. But yeah, I could picture now that that would be an extra, that even that, though you're not happy with that one would be an extraordinarily clear water. This was extraordinary clear water. And this was a section where they have, I mean, the beavers will have multiple, you know, they'll have multiple dam structures. And so a lot of the times the upper dams will filter out a lot of sediment to begin with. And so you get, this was like the perfect mix of a stream that had the right amount of flow. So if there was disturbance, you know, they do kick up dust and sediment whenever they go by. And in some ways you take that as a bad sign. Like if you chop a hole and look down in there and you can see the runs have sediment, it's a sign that they're in there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So if it's too clear, you might be like, oh, right, what's no beavers on it. 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 yeah, God, that's awesome. Yeah, just trying to show, because every stick in this picture beavers 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 structures of lodges are basically like adobes. They mud them. They make them incredible. And as he choose the, as he choose the cambium off, those sticks sink down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they'll come back, like the ones under the beaver now in the picture, those are all discarded so that you can see they've been stripped and then they just sink to the bottom. So this beaver right here, is he, did you catch him drawing? Is he drawing that off the feed pile or is he still working on the feed pile? Drawing that off. So the feed pile. So he's nabbing that out of his pile. Feed piles on the left side of the frame, kind of in the back there. And then the darkness that this beaver's headed into is the lodge entrance. So he's taking that sucker up in there to take it in for a snack. A little grocery run. And then he'll boot it back out. Yep, exactly. And come and discard it. So that, that big pile below him of all those sticks that have had the bark stripped off, that's all stuff he's kicked out of his lodge. But he's going up in there because he's got to get up into, that's the thing you don't think about. Yeah. He can't eat underwater. Right. He's got to drag that stick up in somewhere and find a little pocket up in a bank downer lodge to chew it. Yeah. And then he wouldn't have any room in there if he never moved him back out. So then he's got to clean it out and make a little, just like a little, I guess you'd call it like a midden. Yep. Yeah. He's got like a little trash midden outside his front door. Yeah, exactly. And that's what piles up. I mean, like the amount of maintenance they have to do in their territory is pretty impressive, not just the dams, but like everything around it. What's cool too is how, if you catch one on the land, you know, he's very vulnerable. Yeah. I mean, you can pick him up by the tail. I don't recommend it, but seen it done. Done and 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. Yeah. I mean, so graceful. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a straight line on there. Just all curves and. Yeah. They swim fast and, you know, a 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 pretty slow, like generally under the water, they're not, unless they're scared, they're just kind of like cruising. And there's not previous picture where they're kind of like torpedoing, where it just kind of like, do a little tail flick and then just, just talk, just be perfectly buoyant in the middle of the water column. Let's see a couple more cruise. I think, are these all the beaver ones? Yeah, those are all the beaver ones. We have some more of a. I wanted to see more of your like total keepers. I mean, I just showed two. Yeah. So in the end, you don't have like 20 that you're super happy with. No, I mean, I have like, so basically there's like four frames previous to this, where you're getting like the beaver coming in. So I'm like taking a series of images, leading up in and out. But I only had like, I don't know, five opportunities with this water clarity. And yeah. So how many hours total, if you had to just take a ballpark? Spent, how many hours you spent on the ice? On the ice. It was probably, probably over a hundred. How many times did you punch through the ice and get wet? Less than a hundred, but not too far away. Yeah. That's, that's, that's like a deadly, we should do a public service announcement. Yes. Beavers use their runs. This is kind of, this is kind of trippy. Beavers use their runs so much. You can have 18 inches of ice on each side of a run, and the run has no ice or an inch of ice. They use them so much. I think they have to. It's to the point where a lot of times, once you learn what you're looking at, you can look at a frozen beaver pond and by the 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 tip, 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 going to be bad ice. Yeah. It is a dangerous thing. And it's from them just whirling around there, whirling around there. Just keeping it stirred up, just like a little agitation in the water column that keeps it like that. Yeah. I mean, when you see you were punching your boots through. When you fall in like up to your elbows, like those times and with chest waders, that gets sketchy too. And yeah, but yeah, most of the time I didn't lose any gear, thankfully, which was the thing that I was kind of most worried about. Even stuff like melting through the ice during that warmer section. Like that one that I was in in March, I went into April too and it was like full on runoff. I was doomed. All right, everybody, if you're getting fired up for spring turkey season, you're going to want to hear this, man, I'm Tony, I'm fired up. 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The giveaway ends one minute before midnight on Monday, April 13th, 2026. So you got all day that day, but it ends right before midnight. Gobble, gobble. Cabri Dairy Milk bars are made to share, but how do you decide who gets what? If you're the one who does the washing, keeps all the socks from getting separated, irons and folds it, then you deserve the biggest share. And if you have a floor job, well, you're lucky to get a few chunks, really. Cabri made to share, pick up a limited edition bar now. Growing up the Great Lakes, we spent a lot of time on the ice. I would kind of categorize my head when someone said they fell through the ice. It would be, did you get your hair wet? Yeah, that's a good... And there's only, I only felt through the ice one time in my life where I got my hair wet. A lot of times it's like knees down, waist down, one time, and it was at a beaver lodge, did I get my hair wet? That's a big fall through. That's a big fall. Because most of them are like, in the end, it's scary for a minute, but in the end it's like fairly minor. Yeah, usually like your chest up is still out of the water. You're like, okay, I'm okay. But yeah, it's a complete and total collapse. That's great, man. So what, let's talk about background a little bit. I don't know where I heard this. It's in Corinne's notes. You were like a troublemaker when you were a little kid? Yeah, I was. Like what kind of troublemaker? How bad? I got a couple felonies when I was 13. Is there such a thing? Yeah, yeah, they can charge you and then there's a Mr. and the Beast. So a real bad troublemaker? Yeah, it was thieves. Like I was just like stealing stuff. Were you brought up poor? Not poor, no. No, we... Just a rebel. We were probably, I don't know, lower middle class. My dad built a house I grew up in. My parents were kind of like back to the landers, but not hippies. My mom had her master's in teaching and dad was in Vietnam, Combat Navy Vet. Oh, your dad was a Vietnam veteran. And then came home and... Yeah, so did he have a hard time coming home and dealing with all that? He did. I mean, he's very well adjusted with it now, I think in a lot of ways. He's very open and talked about anything, but for a long time, no. He just bottled it up. I mean, he drank a lot coming back. It was hard for him coming back. He was in San Francisco. He's driving cabs, kind of like sleeping out of the cab. Just a hard time coming home and people were just like, they didn't want to hear about it. Man, I grew up around... My dad was 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, 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 74, dude. There was a lot of tension about that shit when I was a kid that you just... You know, you kid, you don't conceptualize everything. I even remember my dad saying, it's different for them. My dad would be like, we came home, we were heroes. If you wanted... When I came home, if you wanted a job, the right thing to do was someone else would step aside to make a job for you. When you came home from World War II, he says, these guys is not that way. And it was alive and well at that time. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's still like a palpable memory for that generation. And those of us raised by that. I mean, my dad's definitely, I think, has PTS. What year were you born? I was born in 83. Yeah. So he's like... Yeah. It wasn't old. Like the war wasn't old. No, no. No. I mean, and it wasn't something that he didn't... Are talking about until he went back actually. I mean, he has like a beautiful relationship now with Vietnam and he's been back maybe like 15 times. He's kidding me. He has started NGO or yeah, contributed to an NGO and started his own branch of it to help build homes like $2,000 homes for veterans in Vietnam, specifically in the southern end, where he was in the Mekong Delta. Oh, really? He was on those river patrol boats, like the Pockele and Hau boats. Yeah. My father-in-law was the... worked on one of the barges that serviced those boats. And he went back like two years ago to the village where they were anchored. Yep. Yeah. I went back with my dad for a visit in 2010. There was a translator Ming that my dad worked with who was this like badass little dude who went on to work with the seals after my dad left. And he was... My dad thought he was killed. He heard some story of the Viet Cong afterwards, like put him in an interned camp and then yeah, caught up to him afterwards in a bar or something. And then he died. And then my dad was reading a book and found out that he was still alive. Oh, really? We went and met him. You sure? Yeah, it was cool. Guy's great. He passed away just a few years ago. But my dad supports his family a lot. And yeah, just a cool relationship that 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. Ran pretty wild. And yeah, some of that's probably like a repercussion of maybe some of the trauma that my dad brought home with him. He was gone a lot. You know, the 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. Yeah. It was like a negative feedback loop. And there was trouble at home. My parents got divorced. You know, there was some abuse and I would act out in school. And then like stealing stuff just became like an easy progression. And my brother's older. And so I kind of like would run a little harder because I had him in front of me. And it was literally just like a few months of realizing you could steal stuff. Like people where I grew up, I grew up in Rover Mott and people don't lock their car doors. And it was like middle school spring break, walking around the town near where I grew up and just like stealing stuff and then started stealing bigger things. The two Fallonies were broke into a truck and stole someone's shotgun. Some guys like antique was like his grandfather shotgun. Feel bad about that still. He got it back. Oh, that's good. I treated it pretty well for being 13 and not knowing what I was doing. And then another one was breaking entering into like a golf course maintenance shed. Like messing around and doing stuff. And like breaking entering is like an automatic felony. Yeah. It feels like a lot of off. Yeah. Yeah. And so much of it was like this idea around stealing Brian Harman stuff, whatever. Yeah. 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. 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. Well, they'll just like, they'll build push the boundaries because they're not given those guardrails necessarily. And so I was, thankfully my parents stepped in, my dad was now a bound instructor for years and like an outdoor experiential learning program. And was like, all right, we just got to send Ron into the wild again. And I grew up rural kid, you know, run around and we didn't hunt grown on my dad and one have guns around the house, but we didn't eat meat either. And I'll grow a vegetarian weight 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 had the four miscimeters 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 could be the judge's discretion. And I was in that judge's discretion realm. 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. The 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, yeah, when I was 13, I had my 14th birthday under like a tarp tent. Like it's kind of like a hoods in the woods idea where you're stripped down of like all your identifying possessions. We're wearing like fatigues, army surplus store stuff, and you're sleeping under just like a tarp tent. And I was the youngest kid. The rest were, yeah, 15, 16, 18 year olds and a lot of like hard, there were some hard dudes and there was co-ed too. There were some women too that were just from inner city world and just like somehow found some way to get to this camp. And basically it was like putting you through a series of trials. You do like a week long physical intensive where there's 14 of us and we would carry like a, we had two stretchers, a wilderness stretcher's way 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 and the other seven would carry the other. And you do, I think the first day we did like less than a mile in like flat prairie of southern southeast in Oregon. And then, you know, kind of got our stride a little bit and we could do like, you know, six miles maybe in a day. And then you did a week long solo. What's the, so, I don't want to stay too long at this camp here, but what are they, what's the repercussion if you don't move the stretcher? Like if you got all these, if you got all these kids that are trying to like push against authority and you say, hey, move, move, go, go, go. What, why do they, why can they not to say it? No. Yeah. I mean, a lot of that was part of it. Like that happened the first day where people were just like, we're not doing this. Like this is dumb. But then what happens when you don't? Well, there's like, like your, your food and your kind of like the other group supplies are still ahead of you as well. So like you do kind of need, there is a motivation there. Got it. And then eventually the other, like the kind of peer pressure comes in where like some of the kids are like, just do it, just let's just do this, pick it up, do it, like, let's get it over with. And some kids ran away and they, yeah, they would basically just like call the cops and be like, all right, this kid's running and we all knew what the consequences were if we ran. Oh, then you go to the next step up. Yeah. 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. Got it. And they recommended to go to like the next step is 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're started the lowest level and you work way up based on behavior to more freedom. And there's some of these programs that like, if you graduate from them, you can go to any college in the US because it means that you've run the gauntlet and you're like a very formed young person, a teenager. So, yeah, so I was one of the best things for me was just going to this. And that fixed it? Yeah. I mean, I didn't, no more felonies. I went to no more felonies. Yeah. And I went to like a, it was a reform school essentially, like a second chance school in northern Vermont afterwards. And like skip eighth grade went there. There's one other kid in my freshman class and my best friend there at the time, he, 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. It was younger. And I, yeah, the, that change of being in the wild, essentially it was like realizing that I had no freedom. I was sent to this place and I was in trouble all the time and all I want was freedom. I was like a super rowdy kid. 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 you decided 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 a spotted owl surveys in Yosemite National Park. So there was a fire ecology study, basically. It was like, how well the owls do in areas of burned versus unburned areas. Showed basically that there wasn't much of a change that the owls or fire adapted, but the actual work was amazing. I mean, I grew up in Vermont, didn't have experience really in like the West. My dad brought me out to maybe a couple of weeks I had in the Beartos and then 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 how many chicks they had. And that was kind of like the scope of the work. And so it would be out camping and back, back in for 10 days on, four days off. And were you into, were you getting into photography at that point? That was when I bought a camera. Yeah. I bought like a used, like a film camera on eBay. Like a couple hundred bucks for everything and had the idea that I would be interested in photography. I took a black and white class when I was in high school, but didn't really take to it. And it was mainly a vehicle to like photograph the wildlife and the landscapes that I was, like 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. You didn't want any photos touched by man. No, I just thought, yeah, I got just enamored with, with these, like the idea. And I think we all experienced it, this idea of like being in a ecosystem. It's almost like being around people that have a regulated nervous system. You know, like we have these elders that I think basically people who are like, you can't flap them. Like they're just like solid. I think about like, I don't know, any of these old timers you've been around who've seen the world and have been through hardships and are, I think of, I mean, some of these religious figures, or like elders that I spent time with around Indian communities around here, where they're just, they speak wisdom and that's their role in life. And I think that people are drawn to that. You know, you just like, when you're around that kind of a human, that kind of a nervous system, you're just, you're at ease, you're curious, you want to learn from them. And that's how I feel around like ecosystems that are 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 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. And Yosemite was that first introduction to that. So what was the work you did with chimps? Chimps? Yeah, there's a picture we could pull up. It's kind of towards the end, but it's a canopy photo of chimps in trees in Uganda. So I had a, I called you in one lie because there's a picture of some chimps outside the house. Yeah. What's the lie? Because the man made, duh. Oh, well that was early. Yeah. I mean, yeah, early on. I was still experimenting. Yeah. I mean, I showed you my high tech hobo camp. Yeah. Oh, wow. My relationship to photography has changed a lot around just that. What is that? That is a picture of chimps up in a canopy. So what country are we in here? This is Uganda. So 2011, I had an opportunity to work as a field researcher for Kabali chimpanzee project. Okay. And they wanted me to use photography as the, as the tool photo video to basically create imagery around behaviors. And so capturing different behaviors to create a catalog to better understand. Okay. Chimp behavior. And so we're looking here at a picture. We're kind of up in the canopy over, I can't tell if we're in rainforest, but over a heavy forest. We're up in the canopy and it's like a tree of very convoluted crotches and limbs. And if you kind of look throughout the tree, you're looking at not quite a dozen, but a lot of chimps scattered around. What are they doing up there? Grabbing something to eat? Yeah. This is a cool tree. It's a big fig tree. Okay. 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, well, now that I'm looking, I see it's just Yes. Drink all that. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. This is called the ficus capensis. And for the listeners, a lot of fig trees and fruiting trees, they'll grow like kind of apple trees or oranges where the fruits are at the end of the canopy, the extension of the crown, where the leaves are. This fig tree, the figs grow in bunches like grapes. Like, and they're huge. And so this tree would fruit for maybe three weeks, once or twice a year. And it would just be Mecca for this group of chimps. And this was part of what I was asked to do was climb the trees and photograph them from the chimps. With tree climbing gear. Tree climbing gear. Yeah, I had that experience. You got any pictures of that setup? Not in this deck, but it's... You left the camera or you were physically there? I was there, yeah, physically there. Yeah, so that was all... You were unbothered. Yeah, so these chimps... Wow, that's an incredible picture there. Yeah. What's that dude got in his hand? This picture is of a group of female chimps in the process of tearing apart the remains of a red colobus monkey. Got it. So this is stepping into some of the cool... Cool similarities that we share with chimps. Chimps are territorial social apes, just like we are. We are territorial social apes and we hunt and it's cultural. So, you know, we are... I like to think of every human is born as a hunter and it's just a matter of how their nature is nurtured. Do we get nurtured into hunting or not? And chimps are the same way. So certain groups of chimps hunt a lot and certain groups don't. This community that I was with, they're habituated. They've been studied for 30 years. So I could follow them. Your question earlier about them being easeful in the canopy is because they're studied and most of the chimps have been around humans pretty much their whole life. So is what they're holding on to there, that's a dead monkey? That's a dead monkey. And the part of him that looks all gnawed on... Yeah. What's that part? That's the part of the vertebrae poking through. So it's been broken up. Oh, so you happen to just catch it where you can't see where he's ripped apart? Yeah. So this is... This went on for maybe 30 minutes. I saw the initial hunt. Okay. How'd they kill him? It's super coordinated, really interesting. So they'll be... They will go hunting. Like they will... Like me and Randall. 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. They border patrol quiet. They border patrol quiet. Yeah. And they do stuff where they knuckle walk and they walk on the back pads of their feet. And they'll be walking and you'll see them do like the pause where like one foot's up, one hand's up where they're like... Oh, like a pointing... Yeah. Are they listening and the other chimps know like, oh, I gotta listen. Yeah. It's just like a pointer where they're trying to just basically like key into something and pay attention and listen. So when they go... Let's take the border patrol thing. Is it... Is it a certain time of day? What's the cadence to it? It's not... So the community that I was with, they... I'd only been border patrolling with them a few times. And one of the times was they were going to the edge of the border and this border was the border with like the human world. The edge of their national park range where they live. This community of chimps, national park on three sides. There's a next picture here that does show like the actual border. And we don't have talked to the bottom picture, but we can speak to the top picture there. So you see just a very hard line between the... So I'm with this group of chimps and they're going out on this... So what we're looking at is like a big block of forest with a very hard line where it goes into open cut areas. Looks like you're flying over the Midwest. Yeah. Yeah. Looking at where the wood lot butts up to the hay field. 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. This idea of these lines between like the wild world and quote human dominated world. So they were going to patrol that. They're going to the edge of that and they're going to the edge of that to look for crops. They're going to crop raid, but it's the same behavior where they don't want to be seen. They know they're doing something kind of naughty and they don't want to get seen by people. So we're going out. It's three males that I'm with. They were all named. It was Johnny Big Brown and Stout. Stout was like in his 60s. He was like this legendary old man. In his 60s. Chimps can live to be the 60s in the wild. They could live to the 80s in captivity. And so they're out moving Johnny's up front and they just run a trail and it's just me, the only human with them and they veer into the thick brush and I'm confused why they're doing that. And I have my job is to follow them and see what they're up to. So I'm on my hands and he's crawling in trying to get close to them and see what they're doing. I get up to them. The three of them are just sitting next to each other just like just chilling. They're not doing anything, which is confusing. Like it was mid morning and I sit with them a couple minutes go by and then I hear human voices. How close can you sit with them? Me to you. What do you wear? A little further, just like crappy clothes I got at a market in town because they're going to get torn out by vines and jungle. Okay. So I got pants and just like a long sleeve shirt and a backpack. Just like food and water for the video. But they've like accepted you as a presence in their day. Yeah. They've accepted me because they've been habituated by researchers for the 30 years prior. But they ignore you or they acknowledge you? That I mean, that's the interesting thing about this situation where I only been there for like a month. And so they didn't really know me, but I came with people that they know and they recognize faces better than we do. Like chimp facial recognition is it's better than ours essentially, but you know, they, that's because again, territorial social animals, we need to be able to recognize very quickly friend or foe 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 are cool. And so I'm with them and I realized that they're hiding from these people and now I'm also hiding from these people. Yeah. Not intentionally, but these chimps are essentially like, okay, you're cool, but these guys we don't know. We don't know who these people are. And so I'm in the bushes. And they had heard them. They heard them before I did. And there's waiting. They're more keyed out. They're just waiting it out. And so these guys come into view, they have no idea we're there. They pass by completely unaware of the whole time and I'm just sitting there next to the chimps. And do the chimps hold tight when they're hiding? Yep, they hold tight. They just watched. They knew what they were doing. Yep. Not turning their heads real fast or? No. No. And they're chill about it. They know they can get up a tree and move if they needed to. Oh, yeah, that's a good point. But it was very much like they're on. It doesn't feel life or death to them. Not to them. They just rather go unnoticed. They just rather go unnoticed. They just didn't want to carry on their day and not get scolded for potentially going. The crop ratings is what seemed like they were doing. So 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 a 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. If you got a fight with them, he's going to beat your ass, huh? Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, chimps, roughly it's like five times our strength. Their bone density is roughly like twice as dense. Their skin is much tougher. So cool fact, we're the only apes that float. They'll sink. The rest of the apes sink. And so that tells you a lot about density, strength, muscle fiber density, all this. We traded kind of that robust ability to climb trees and be super burly for locomotion. And so one of these chimps, people watched him. I wasn't there for it. He fell 80 feet to the deck out of a tree and ran off into the woods. And then came back a couple of days later and had a little limp or something. But it was all right. Yeah, they would mess you up. There are stories I read about of like, I don't know, the 20s, and have these like weird like traveling shows, side show things, who go to like county fairs and things. And there'd be like the pin the chimp game. And then have a chimp where they 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. And then you got to mix it up with him. Yeah. And then there'd be a dude, I think they probably must, they probably have to take all of his teeth out because chimps, their move is they, they dig, they just take, they'd glove you, they take your fingers off. And for men, they rip off your balls. Yeah, that's right. That's like so having a rattle. I've seen footage of the, just let that one slide. I've seen footage of like a Border Patrol where they encounter another group of chimps and they rip, they rip the male's genitals off and they basically rip them limb from limb. Yeah. And it's like, it's like something, it's like a monster out of a movie. Like you think about the strength that would require to just pull the limb off of another animal your same size. You can pull the sack off a guy. Yeah. Takes some force. You're not gonna be able to do that. No. I mean, that would help us like, you know, breaking down deer and stuff in the field. Yeah. So, yeah. To us like, chimp strength. We need knives. Yeah. Yeah. All right, everybody. If you're getting fired up for spring turkey season, you're going to want to hear this. Man, I'm Tony, I'm fired up. Well, anyway, right now we're running the ultimate spring turkey giveaway and it's packed with over $13,000 in prizes, including an incredible turkey hunting experience, gear from SIG, a shotgun from Benelli, a $1,000 gift card from First Light and a whole big pile of gear from other partner brands. One lucky winner is going to receive a spring, 2027 Rio Grande turkey hunt in the Texas hill country for you and two of your buddies or family members brought to you by bird dog. 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No set up fee, online only, terms apply. So let's talk about when they set out to go hunt. They, there's a hunt leader, I'm assuming, and he strikes off, he knows where he's going. Yeah, it, they will, so the group that I was with, they didn't hunt that much. Maybe like once a month. Oh, there's, and that's all based on like, it's culturally based, it's based, so it's a learned behavior that's passed down. It's not something that like all chimp groups don't necessarily hunt just because they, they can. And then it's around like energy. So how much fruit are they getting outside of their diet? Because it takes a lot of energy to hunt for the meat. It takes a lot of like physical energy to move and to catch the monkeys that are fast. And so there's another community south of the one that I was spent most of my time and called in Go Go. And it's this famous community. There's a documentary called Chimp Empire. Okay. It's fantastic. It's on Netflix. It focuses on that site. These researchers have spent, yeah, 40 years studying that. And to your question around like hunt leader, there was these like couple guys, couple chimps who were, they just love to hunt. They like to go border, but they like to hunt monkeys or chimps. That was like their deal. They didn't really care much about socializing in the hierarchy of other chimps. They were just like, when we get together, we're going to do some stuff. And they, that community was the biggest known chimp community. It was like, And it could have been just driven by the personality of a couple of the animals. Personality of a couple of the animals, a built like abundance too. So there's a lot of monkeys in their home range. It's worthwhile. So it's worthwhile and there's opportunity and there's opportunity to learn. And so they, they do these like coordinated hunts where, yeah, you got the leader, they head out, they're going, they start to look up. They're trying to like listen and the monkeys know. And so they'll, they'll often get quiet. The monkeys will. Got it. But then they'll be, they'll send up kind of these like beaters, let's call them. That'll like little smaller chimps, maybe that'll go up, younger chimps that still know what to do. And they'll kind of try to flush them. Some of the big males that go up too. So they hear, they hear or see another monkey at working in a tree. Yep. And not the big dudes, but some other dudes. Sometimes the big dudes would go up and they would. Like, how would, do you have any idea how they, how would it be conveyed? Like, hey, you go up there. Yeah. I think it's just, I think it's just instinctual. I think it's like, I 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, you're like, oh, this is, I'm going to take this lead on this situation here. So you never able to detect a decision. You wouldn't know what to look for. Decisions get made. I mean, they look to each other. You know, it's kind of like, like they gaze, follow, they look to each other, they look up, if one's looking up, they'll look to, like, think of like dogs that look to you really quickly to make a decision. 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. They don't get in trouble about this or not. Yeah. I've seen it with wolves, seen it with chimps, seen it with gorillas. And in this situation, you know, it gets pretty crazy quick where you've got chimps going up the trees. You have monkeys screaming and running and through the trees at breakneck speed. And they often try to get to like the ends of the branch that are thinner. You have, you have chimps that are breaking and lunging. I mean, it's like these guys are chimps are unbelievable athletes, of course, and they can jump and fly through the trees in a way that is just kind of terrifying to watch. And sometimes they... But those little monkeys would know, get out where the... They'll try. On something that they can't support a chimp. But the chimps would even just jump and like jump these big gaps. And a lot of times I saw where the chimps would grab a monkey and then chuck them down. And then there'd be other chimps below. And then it's like, then they would, they would deal with them then. Really? Yeah. So they would like, because the monkeys are formidable, you know, like they have pretty big teeth, the males and they'll defend females as well. The male monkeys. Throw them out of the tree. Yep. Throw them down. Yep. Yep. I love this so much. Big primate guy, big ape guy. Big primate guy? You're a big ape guy? Yeah. Oh yeah. I didn't know that. Never told me that. Can't be that big. Big ape guy. Well, it just doesn't come up with you. Listen, if you were a big ape guy, I'd have heard about it. Phil? I can support a... Phil had dinner with... Phil had dinner with... Listen, here's how I know you're lying. I heard you guys had lunch. Yes. So I come to Phil yesterday. Uh-huh. I said, Phil, what'd you guys talk about at lunch? Guess what he said? Wasn't apes. He said you guys talked about a TV program. We did. About chairs. The chair company. Just check it out. So don't give me the ape guy. Oh, look, apes didn't come up during yesterday's lunch, Steve, but they have come up multiple times. I can show you, I can show you tons of ape images on my phone. Big eranotang guy, big gorilla guy, big chimp guy. Here's me. Not so much monkeys. Cren, you wear? I don't know if I'd heard that. I've got pictures of me with apes. Tell me orangutan. They're behind glass, of course, but... Real big ape guy. Yeah. No, I love this. Zoo guy, ape guy, state guy. One of my dreams... Hot dog guy. One of my dreams is to go watch apes in the wild. One of my wildest dreams. Well, you're sitting next to the right guy. I know. Sounds like... I know. That's what I'm saying. I'm all fired up about this. I love it. Okay. Yeah, they're amazing. Chimp vampire, chimp crazy. Yeah, you see chimp empire, huh? So good. You've got a shirt with a big monkey on it, Randall, or a big crime mate of some kind. Monkeys have tails. Sorry. I have several shirts. That's like entry-level ape information. Yeah, I have several shirts. I have one with a big male orangutan. I have one with a juvenile orangutan. And then I have another one that's a gorilla, but it's more cartoonish. It's less photorealistic than my orangutan shirts. Sounds like an ape guy. Yeah. Sounds like an ape. He's a big estate sale guy. Oh, okay. Renaissance man, some people say. Hot dogs, estate sales and apes. Life is meant to be enjoyed. Why shy away from your childish impulses and attractions? I think apes are fascinating. Yeah, I want to get the white wolves and musk oxes. Let's talk a little about the chimps. When they catch it. Well, here's another question I got about this. Is it partially competition, the desire for them to kill the monkeys? Like, you know how wolves, they run into coyote. If they can get them, they're going to get them. Because why have him running around? Why have another guy out there killing stuff? I think it's taste. Like, I think it is both the taste for meat and also they go for the intestines and the undigested plant matter. Okay. Like kind of this neon green plant matter. So they kind of relish it. I think they, yeah, I think that they seek it out. I think it is like a preference thing. I think. To what degree do they eat it? Because the competition thing, just to button that up, I think it's like, there's so much food. Like, equatorial jungle monkeys eat leaves and also fruits. But it's like, chimps can dominate the fruiting tree all day long. Got it. And like that tree that I was in, in the previous picture, almost no monkeys came to it. Like a few. They want it. They get it. They get it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's kind of like, maybe you 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. Yup. And 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. And so the breakdown of like the animal, you're asking like what they do. Like they leave just bone. No, they'll kind of be scraps, like hide scraps. That female monkey that was in the picture, she was pretty well cleaned up. And so this is the female chimps that got this afterwards. And the males, they go for the choice of meats. The organs, they'll go for the intestines, like I mentioned, lungs, liver, brain too. They'll crack open the skull. How do they get into that skull? They just 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 energy and good all. He has a great book called Catching Fire. Uh huh. That is about like how cooking made us so much available. I don't know if that worked. Yeah. Yeah. And that the softness of our food now allows us to, we gave up all this bite force basically. So like chimps, a lot of predators, you know, have like sagittal crest that, you know, ridge in the top of their skull that muscles attached to so they can have a massive bite force. Chimps have that. A lot of apes have that. We don't. Our jaw muscles go up just kind of like around our temple. If you just like clench your jaw, you can just feel it above your temple. Chimps jaw muscles go up top so they can just like, yeah, they can mow a skull if they need to. God. 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. And, you know, this scene was, I photographed a bunch of images leading up to this, but this is the one that kind of shows a lot about the behavior and the intensity of it. Now, did they use that image because you can't see that he's all ripped up? Um, no, this was in like a wildlife talk of the year competition that it won one of the commended awards a few years ago. This is a surreal image. Yeah. And no, I think it's like the other images are kind of, it's like 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 a motion. There's obviously like hands touching the monkey hands in a way. That female on the right is obviously warning and having a conversation with the, the chimp on the other side there. So I think that this image to me just brings a lot of the energy to the scene in a way that some of the other images didn't necessarily. And the canines on that. Oh, yeah, the chimps. Yeah. Sharpest. So is that that monkey's tail sticking out? Yeah, that's flapping down. Yep, got it. It's almost like it's just like, like it's tied, it's holding it together, but it's wrapped around. And they tore it apart after this, like it was in two pieces pretty quickly. Is the bottom right like guts or or eight? It's a prolapsed anus. Yeah, that I was going to say. Oh, on the female. Yeah, she was she and the chimp, she's in a swelling state. So she's like a estrus. Okay. I think it's like a little, it's not. Not part of the dead monkey. Not part of the dead monkey. No, no, that's just, they get a visual sign. A lot of apes get a visual sign and primates in general of when females are an estrus. Do you ever hear that argument? This is a good one, man. Do you ever hear the argument that one of the things that leads to human monogamy? And permanent occupation between a breeding male and female human is that there's no outward display. There's no outward display. So you have to always be around. Interesting. You can't time a male can't time his Cummins and Goans. Like you got to stick around, be there present. There's no outward display. Other and other males can't wouldn't look and know. They can't look at a human female and know that she's an estrus. Does it make you unconsciously talked about like a beast? No. Okay. Those things don't bother me. You know me. Like a beast. Yeah, it was a good book, Sex at Dawn. It just analyzes like the human sexual relationship from like some species. That's a favorite Rick, Rick's, we were talking about Rick Smith earlier. Remember one day we were talking about all this and Rick Smith said, he was talking about humans. Rick always likes to talk about humans like he's describing a wild animal. And he said, we're monogamous mostly. We're a monogamous species mostly. We strive toward it. There's a strong pull toward it. Yeah. I think with chimps, I mean, it's like they're not at all. I mean, most. Not monogamous. No. Most apes aren't. And most primates aren't. But they will do, they'll do these things called like conserships where they'll like a male, a hiring email, not even always hiring, but he'll try to like build a relationship with a female. And then when she's at her peak cycle, estrus, they'll like move out and go kind of like hide for a couple of weeks and just be gone from the rest of the group. And then the rest of the males kind of lose their mind and try to find them. But most of the time. Yeah. Yep. They'll go on patrol and. Why do they want to find them? Because they want to breed. They want to breed her. Yeah. I mean, the females, they want to be with every male possible. Like a, oh, I got mixed up. I thought you said the male takes off. Yes. He'll take off with the female. Oh, okay. With. Okay. They leave the party and head out. That was throwing me off. I thought that he splits and leaves the female. No, no. He'll convince her, coerce her either by her will or sometimes not necessarily to like go off and be just with him for how far off. Mile or something like that. Like chip home range is not that big, but that's rare. Most of the time it's like, yeah, it's the top males. But they'll share. It's not like the male will dominate the breeding. So they don't have a lot of certainty about parentage. They have no known paternity. Okay. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Uh, this, so this picture, which is stunning. You did not take this as a professional photographer. You took this as a researcher. Yes. Correct. And then when you finished this, did you say, I'm not a researcher. I'm now a photographer. No, I, I mean, I always had a aspiration to be a photographer. Oh, you did. Okay. Yeah. So even at this time, you recognize photography as a thing. Yeah, I did. I did. I wanted to do it. And I didn't know, I didn't know what my, like I didn't know how to tell stories. Like I would just go for like one off pictures, you know, I, I got obsessed with, obsessed with photographing waterfowl and build like a floating blind and like get at their level and just photograph all kinds of cool waterfowl around Montana, but didn't ever do anything with those images. Okay. And with this, after this project, the researcher that I was working for, Richard Rangham, he knew a photographer named Tim Layman, who was also a researcher, turn photographer. He also did canopy work. He worked for National Geographic and sent him some of these pictures. And Tim was like, yeah, you should show these National Geographic. Here's the name of the editor, Kathy Moran. Here's your email. Here's like two sentences attached to pictures and then a gallery link to maybe like 30 images and then wait. And so that was, yeah, that was like 2011. And so when I spent the year living in Uganda, photographing the chimps for research. And then there was a couple of years in between. I worked for like a production company out of the Midwest with a guy named Jeff Simpson, who was like a white tail hunter for a long time, like a Sitka athlete, whatever they call him. And you took pictures of deer? I did like, especially like sponsored content videos with like Corey Jacobson and like Jim Olde Jr. and Jonathan Hart, who was one of the co-founders of Sitka. And so just go and film, it was like big game archery hunts. And that was my first like actual paid kind of like film wildlife job. And it was both learn hunting because I didn't grow up with it. And I was curious. And then it was also to kind of hone my chops with. So that was after this? After this, yeah. They had to seem pretty like pretty tame. The people? No, I mean, just the whole get up after coming out of Uganda. A year in Uganda. Yeah, watching chimps. Yeah, it was hard to come home in a lot of ways. Like the life there was pretty, it was pretty amazing. I mean, I lived in a research camp, you hear elephants at night. 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 and fibbians. Yeah. Like see these cool snakes and it was amazing. Yeah, I loved it. Well, let's talk about the the Arctic stuff. Phil, can you jump us to the Arctic stuff? Yeah, Ron and word is that at the beginning or the end here? Yeah, towards the end, we could do maybe that like silhouetted wolf box. Oh, scene. So where are we at here? What's going on? Like where are we at in your career and where are we at on the earth? I mean, first of all, visually we could be in the in the Paleolithic because that could be a mammoth. Yeah, the way that horn sticking out, it could be a mammoth. I mean, it's just striking images. It's like this could be anywhere across thousands of years of time. Yeah. Yeah, we're looking at is three canine figures, silhouetted. 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, not that kind, horned shape. Mm hmm. Nondescript shape of hair and horn. That was some great descriptive narration. There's like that. Yeah, I think the audio only listeners will leave. Please. Yeah, they might be getting the better end of the deal. I mean, it sounds better than this. So we are we're at 80 degrees north. We are on the furthest northern landmass in Canada. It's called Ellosmere Island. Okay. And this photo is from 2018. So this is yeah, a couple years into my career, I think officially started work of National Geographic in 2014 on the Yellowstone Project. And this place, as Randall mentioned, it is it is like stuck in time. Like you can go there and it's the closest feeling that I've ever had to like being on a Pleistocene landscape place that hasn't changed very much at all since the glaciers receded. And the draw to this place and it was covered National Geographic in the late 80s by photographer Jim Brandenburg and researcher David Meach. And so covering the National Geographic is like a white wolf kind of jumping between two ice flows. That was in the 80s. If you remember that one and there were a couple other articles on it. And the the draw to this place is that it is stepping back into that relationship where wolves aren't scared of people. Go. And the allowance for that is basically like the same principle that I... Because they're habituated? Not necessarily because they're habituated. There is they do see human settlement. There's like a weather station nearby that they can go visit if they decide to and like peon stuff. And it's kind of just like a recreational outing for the wolves to go there. But it's mostly kind of the my understanding of the wolf world from time here and reading is like this is how wolves were even around here. Like they were curious. I mean Lewis and Clark journals and Audubon journals that Dan Flores talked about it in his podcast he did for you. Yeah, Lewis Clark, the killed one with a stick. Yeah, Clark Bay and Eddard one. They would just be like laying on the sandbars when they're going up the river and like, bitch be curious. They'd be around camp all the time and be curious. And and here it's that same deal where they're just like come up, they'll sniff your boots. They want to steal stuff. That's like their main really. That's their main deal is they want to play keep away with you like straight up. They like come in hot. They want to steal something. If there's anything on the ground that they can pick up, it's gone. They're just curious what it is. If it's edible, whatever. Mostly it's like they picked up a camera like one of the first meetings. So not even something that smells good. No, it smells like me. Like one of the first meetings was for me with this pack. I call them the polygon pack because of these cool polygon tundra formations that are that far north and their den was close to that. And I have 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 satellite me at like 20 feet. And I'm photographing them and I'd been there before and kind of knew a little bit about what was up with the wolves and you know, I've had an understanding of it. And there's one female darts in and grabs one of my other cameras, like a big, big bodied camera. It's like a $10,000 thing. Gramps the how? Just grab the handle with her teeth, like the, with the grip and just goes. So just like a little rubber kind of handle. It's a cannon one. Like a sneak attack, like in and out. Just darts in quick and it's gone. And I find myself foolishly like running after it. Like as if I'm going to catch a wolf and I got big boots on and it's like on the tundra. It's all hammocky. And then the other wolves are kind of running with me because they're like, oh, this is like, this is it. We're playing the game. And I realized quickly, we've all played keep away with dogs, probably, or with kids at some point and realize it's only fun while you're chasing. And so I stop, do the kind of like walk away, look over the shoulder and she starts following me. I let her get maybe like five feet away and then I like turn around, jump and clap and yell. She startles and drops the camera and come back 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. Yeah. And you don't place a bait for them. There's no bait. There's no lure. 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 is kind of like the chimp world where you're like, I can follow them 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, film for Nat Geo, also an assignment from the magazine in that same time. And 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. 1000 pounds of food. I'm up there with a couple of people. We have a base camp. You have 5000 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. 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 dinky like 250 ATVs. And I just saw that there was this amazing opportunity where like you bring up bigger ATVs, 500 or 700s and you camp off your ATVs for extended period of time. And then you can follow the wolves. Because I don't have to do big round trips. Yeah. And I have to do big round trips and like they go hunting and they can do like 60 miles over the course of two days. And that's, you're going to miss stuff. That's what I wanted. I wanted to, I mean, I want to see all of their life. You don't want to miss anything, but the hunting is like, that's the behavior that made wolves, essentially what they are is they had to solve that problem of how do we as a smaller predator take down bigger things? Yeah. We have to do it together. We have to defend territory from other wolves and we have to hunt together. All right, everybody, if you're getting fired up for spring turkey season, you're going to want to hear this, man, I'm telling you, I'm fired up. 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The giveaway ends one minute before midnight on Monday, April 13th, 2026. So you got all day that day, but it ends right before midnight. Gobble, gobble. It's a bit noisy, folks. Mark's is going off. Anyways, I'm going to ping the presentation to you now so you can see what I mean. Yeah, mother. Oh. Gotta go, hon. Thanks for introducing me to Canva. Love ya. How many wolves are on Elzmir in, uh, how many moscox? There was an estimate, um, maybe 15 years ago or so. That was 200 Arctic wolves for the entire Canadian Arctic, for the entire Arctic period. Which I think is low. Like 200 white-phase wolves. Yeah. Because they're all through none of it. They're in Greenland. This is not, this is a Yellowstone wolf. Oh, apologies. But, um, yeah, there you get a view of, of this. Damn. Yeah. Look at that place. Yeah. It's a cool landscape. This is a, this is a story of, so here we're like, we're just looking at an Arctic landscape and there's one wolf in the foreground and another half dozen scooting along. Kind of dirty white. It almost looks like the Missouri breaks. He's got blood on his forehead. Yeah. It's kind of breaks territory. It does remind me of some of that Badlands. You know, it's very well eroded. God, what an incredible picture. He's wet. 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 hair, Arctic hair that he had hunted earlier. They coordinated to try to hunt this big. The hairs up there will group in like groups of 100. Like pure white hairs. Pretty cool. This is gonna landscape. But yeah, this, this scene was one where, you know, I was up there with teams for multiple years, filmed for Planet Earth 3, a couple other productions over the years, and then was up there with a research team that was researching. We'll get into this, but this disease that's affecting muskox and big die-offs in the North, climate change related. And I went up and spent two weeks just by myself with the wolves and no ATVs just on foot and set up a little spike camp and wasn't producing anything. It was just up there to walk around with them as much as I could, which was, didn't think it would be very much, but ended up being every day, it's been with them. They had their pups nearby the rendezvous site and there were 14 adults and five pups. And there was this one kind of midnight I got woken up, light was getting good. Woken up by some Fox kits and I see the wolves were starting to get ready. They were a mile down and they're starting to get ready to kind of go out to go hunt. And I saw some muskox herds in the distance. And so I went down to the wolves and then I went straight to the muskox 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 Greymane. He's got the little gray coat. This is when he's a yearling. And I'm running ahead of them and Greymane's leading. He was kind of the alpha at this time. And I look behind me, he's coming and the other wolves are coming behind him. And then I realized that this one stage that Greymane and he's running next to me. We're both running towards muskox. And it was this very quick realization of like, oh, this is what we've done for a long time. This is how this would have started. Demestication. 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 realized quickly that, oh, these guys throw projectiles. Because the Inuits still that they hunt muskox and like that. They'll use dogs, bay up, get a whole group of muskox into rosette, just create that defensive circle. And then they'll just lob projectiles into the herd and get food. And the wolves would realize quickly that that was an amazing relationship. So yeah. Well, how was this island, how was the island administered? It is a mix. So like the colonial Canadian government controls and owns some of it. There's also like Inuit, the province of Nunavut, which is self-governed. That is part of Ellsberg. I mean, 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 on the southern end. That's maybe like 150 people called Greece Fjord is the furthest habitation in Canada. But they were moved through a colonial imperialism idea of having like people being born on all your sovereign lands or whatever they call it by colonialism. So they brought people from mainland Quebec and just like drop them off on this pretty rough part of the island on the southern end. And basically we're like good luck. Didn't tell them how long they were going to be there. And it's kind of like a nightmare scene, but they survived. And some people went back home. Maybe years later, they were given the opportunity, but a lot of people stayed. So they were initially like caribou mainland hunters. And they're now kind of, there's some caribou up there, but the caribou population, some subspecies of puricaribou is like totally tanked in the north and in Nunavut. And Muscoxon and Marine mammals too is what they hunt now. But they, those guys don't make forays up here to hunt. They hunt wolves. There's a $900 bounty on wolves in Nunavut. They hunt wolves down where they're at. Yep. Got it. Yep. Got it. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. So now we're looking at a very distressed young Muscox. 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. Yeah. These are bad. What an image. Yeah. These are the same ones. You don't feel bad for watching stuff get killed like that? Yeah. It doesn't feel good. Yeah. I mean, I feel bad for anything that doesn't die quickly. Even animals that I've... God, they don't. The wolves? Yeah. Why would you? I don't know. I mean, hunters, I mean, it's like, I've been out with professional hunters and takes two hours for an animal to die. So it's, yeah, it's usually 20 minutes for wolves from when they engage, even if it's a big adult, sometimes a little longer with the adults. But, you know, in the Wood Buffalo National Park, I think that they did this study as a long time ago, how long it takes them to bring one down. I think it was about six hours per pot for a buffalo. Yeah, totally. But it's a whole dance. It's a dance. And it's a lot of like preamble. It's slow motion. It's not all like melee. No, no, a lot of like hanging out, sitting, watching, seeing what's going on. And that's how a lot of these would unfold too. Okay. You could technically be hunting for, I've seen six to 10 hour hunts, but they're sleeping for half of that. And they're just kind of watching. Yeah, they'll pressure them, disengage, pressure, disengage, and do that whole deal. Because they're not 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's kind of like Central Montana breaks. There's little dips and swells and coulis. And suddenly the wolves are at full tilt. 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 smell them. Yeah, there were two bulls in there. So they were hitting speed to try to create chaos first, but the bulls are too big and nothing, they didn't. So if they pull up on those bulls, do they see it and see what they're dealing with? Like in terms of demographics, so to speak, and just call it off? Or do they still go kind of test to see? They test. Yeah, they want to see if anybody injured. What's going on? They want to see him move. So like, he's playing on a bad ankle, you know, totally. Yeah. Yeah, you'll get up to them. They'll be like laying down. Let's say there's like a bull that's ruminating laying down and they'll get them to stand up and get them to whirl a few times. They want to see what's going on. They want to get them to see because they, I mean, they, they catalog. I mean, I'm sure they have like this landscape map and based on prey as well. And they'll know if there's an old bull that's like on his last. Got it. Got it. And they like that. That image we looked at, they're on a calf. Yep. That's their preferred. Okay. That's their. I mean, it's they, so they're trying to siphon them off. They, they want the muskox into stampede. I've never seen Buffalo do it a little bit. You know, Kate Buffalo do it where they actually stand their ground against lions. Buffalo do a little bit with wolves here where they, they gather up the group together, but the muskox and are real good at that. I mean, that's their move is not breaking the group, not breaking the group. If they can hold it, then like the wolves can't do it. They basically can't do anything. And especially, 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 muskox in is like August. And so you'll have a herd of let's say, you know, 10 cows and calf pairs. And then you have a herd bull with them. And so the cow calf pairs group up in the rosette and then the herd bull is, he's just throwing wolves if need be, but the wolves can't do anything. And they can't do anything against him, but they want to get them to move. They want to get the back end exposed and they can pull on a calf. And get to them. When you're staking out with these guys and hanging out with these wolves, how, how, how many days pass between an event like this? Between like from successful hunt to successful hunt, how much time goes by? You get three or four days depending on like how big the animals they take down. I mean, once they killed this animal, it was basically like hide in 12 hours. Okay. With, there were six adult wolves. But then they killed for a couple days. Four pups. Those still go on walkabouts, but yeah, they chilled. They chilled for, it slept for like 15 hours. They chilled out, but then they go on like, they go walk around for fun. They'll do border patrols too. Hmm. Yeah. So here we got a pup and I'm assuming a female. That's the, that's Gray Main still when he was a yearling. Oh, yeah. Just big brother. And he's, he's got his paws and his nose resting on a hoof. Yeah. Muscox leg. Like the way that my dog will do to my crocs at home. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. Just these scenes that, and I'm there. I'm just like, how close are you there? Closer than me to you. Like half of the stream, me to you. There's like a wide angle lens. This is after I don't care. Spend a month with them. I mean, it took, it takes time. Like in beginning, I was interesting that the pups were actually the most scared of the group. All the six adults in this pack during this time, all the six adults were fine. There's a three that came up one, I'm still on 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 got to, this is, we got to get out of here. Would they draw the line that you touching them? So I would set boundaries. Like I would bop them like nose, like, hey, you got to give some space, you know, I'd stand up and walk towards them or push them a few times like this. The previous photo here, there's another hunt scene where this is in the dark. I had a little flash trying to light it, but they have another calf as a separate hunt scene. Three of the wolves working this calf. And one of the wolves I've known for a long time, bright eyes. I'm again, just kind of me to you to this whole action, the whole thing happening, them hunting and killing and, and they're obviously not worried. But one time the, in that melee, the Muscox calf bucked bright eyes and I'm kneeling down and she comes and she just falls on my lap. She's just like fully in my lap and I just push her back in. She didn't even bother to look back. She just like went back in the system and started to hunt again. You ever grabbed any of that meat and eat it yourself? This one I did. It was the only time I did it. Yeah. I cut off some backstrap. They were away. The wolves, the other three members and the pups were just over the hill and they were howling after they killed the Muscox 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, right around the dynamic. Yeah. But yeah, it was a, yeah, pretty, pretty beautiful scene to be able to have some easy meat. 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? I've been there like it spans 10 years, basically of time. And then I've been there for like a year cumulative, like three month trips. And how often is a photographer trailing after these wolves? So now, and some of this is because of the work that I've done, like there are people that are starting to go up there and do like tours. I've been asked a bunch and don't really have any desire to do that. Like, because people want to go camp and just check it out. They want to photograph the two or get close to wolves. And then there's film crews that go up there. And so then like there was a crew up there just this past year, the big like Disney project. And so there's, yeah, there's still people that go there. So it's kind of, it'll get like a little yellow stony where it's just like people hanging out, film and stuff. It's so expensive to get there. That's the thing that prevents human presence. It's just like, you know, it's astronomical. And so it just becomes a thing where people just don't. God, logistically tough. Yeah, you gotta be really, yeah, it's just a place that thankfully you can't drive to. So if you're a professional wildlife photographer and it takes so long to get the good images, like walk me through the economics. 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? Yeah, so pretty much all my work is either assignment based. So that's a National Geographic magazine assignment. But it's not a day rate. They want an image. 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 $50,000. Here's kind of our rough timeline. $50,000 is like, you choose. Oh, I'm not asking you to give exact figures. You don't need to do that. Oh, I don't mind doing that. Okay. And that you can just do it all as $100 for all I care. But go ahead. 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. So it's like a week here, week here, day rates included in that. If you have an assistant, if you have travel, if you have expenses, all that's included in that. That's just like, that's a, a fee, let's say, for the whole story. And then the other story, the other way I do things is through grants. Here's what I don't get about it. If we hire a camera guy and we're going to do something, we know there will be footage. Yes. Right. So if you're doing something that like the beaver thing, they're rolling the dice. Yeah. Because you could come back and say, it's all mucky. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. That's why I won't ever get an assignment from National Geographic. You need, need a body of work. Right. So you're like, that's what I was saying, like when you click the shutter, it's not like, there's the money. Like you might make an arrangement where you're saying, I'm going to spend blank days and you're going to get what you get. And I'm going to try my hardest. And if I don't deliver, then I don't get work in the future. But that's the, that's the cooker with it is it's like, you have to deliver. You have to deliver. And it's kind of like, there's that notion of, I'm a freelancer. I'm not an employee. So it's kind of like, you're only as good as your last story kind of idea. Like if you, if you bomb multiple stories, it's like, yeah, though. Yeah. You don't get, yeah. You're not the guy that gets it. And for a while. It's like being a hunting guide. Yeah. You charge X for your heart, charge X for your hunt and whatever sort of nice or shitty accommodations you put together for the clients comes out of that money. And then if you don't kill animals with your clients, eventually stop getting clients. Yeah. I think it's somewhat. Do you get easy assignments? Yeah. I mean, some, some ways, like the beaver assignment in a way was easier in the sense that like beavers aren't hard to find. It's not like I have to go someplace like Uganda and try to find a bird or go to Ellesmere 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 easy assignments I had was, was like a commercial assignment for a cell phone company in Kenya, Safari com. And they wanted a series of wildlife images of like endangered species in Kenya. And also like a video compilation to go with it. And so they came to me with it. I hired a good friend named Bob Pool who grew up in Kenya. It was one of the premier wildlife cameramen in the world. Does a lot of work in East Africa. And it was basically Bob and I cruising around to these amazing spots in Kenya in this like amazing film land rover platform that he designed. And it was awesome. And there was no pressure. Gravy. No pressure. It was just like, knew we were going to get amazing things, get to see everything that you'd be excited about. Saw my first wild dog hanging out with cheetah, hanging out with them with hyenas. It was like socializing with hyenas. This lone female wild dog. I sent it to the research. They're like, we don't ever see this. That was just a fun assignment because there's not any pressure. Do you ever get a call where you'd say, I'm going to save us both the trouble? And no, because it's just not, you're not going to be happy with it. The Sasquatch photos are good. Yeah. Yeah. The Sasquatch photos where we want a snow leopard. Yeah. You know, I had one. Giving birth. I had one that was, I did say yes to it was learning. It was like my first assignment with Audubon magazine and a writer pitched it. And you know, writers have the luxury of they can write about things that happened one time or they can write about things that don't happen. Yeah. They can write about how I tried to like do blank, but I 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 beaver keystone species story around beavers in the Grady Elson area and it hinge around this guy named Billy Burton who the writer thought swam with beavers. Like Billy told him a story from when he was a kid. One time this is what came out afterwards that like he checked out a beaver lodge when he was a kid just kind of like swim up into it and like checked out the beavers. Got the beavers with him. Just, you just like looked, I think it was like maybe one or two times it happened. When he was a kid and Billy's an adult and maybe relaying the story to this guy in a social setting and the writer pitches it. And so the man who swam with beavers. The editor is like, I want opening spread double page Billy swimming with beavers. And I was like, okay, cool. There's a guy outside of Bozeman who swims with beavers. Like I didn't know about that, but he's got habituated to beavers. I'll go check it out. So show Billy, show me around with a writer walking around and show me where the beavers are and all the stuff, the writer leaves. And I'm kind of just casual. I'm like, so Billy, when do you swim with the beavers? Let me know when to get to my camera. And he, yeah, he looks at me and he's just like, well, what the fuck are you talking about? Like we don't, I don't swim with beavers. They're wild animals. They're scared of me. Like what do you mean? I was like, well, the writer says, like, well, 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 got to 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. Was that right? And so Billy's, he's a good friend. Yeah. He's a really interesting guy. He's a lot of habitat restoration. Huge ranches around the West and he's a very interesting guy. Like him a lot. But yeah, that was a funny assignment where I had to call, I'm actually told the editor. I was like, that this thing isn't true at all. That's not really on you though. It wasn't on me. No, but I took the burden of like, can I'm, yeah, can I make this a story? Can I salvage it? But yeah, I've had some other projects where it'll be like a, you know, fashion, something they'll want me to do. Okay. Yeah. So. I, for years I traveled with photographers for magazine features. As long as that strange relationship we guys got along. Yeah. Yeah. It was really, I'd be in the field with a lot of amazing three weeks with David Quaman wrote the story on human chimp collision in Uganda. And he wrote the story on that and we did three weeks in the field together. It was a dream. Right. Yeah. All right, everybody. If you're getting fired up for spring turkey season, you're going to want to hear this. Man, I'm Tony. I'm fired up. 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The giveaway ends one minute before midnight on Monday, April 13th, 2026. So you got all day that day, but it ends right before midnight. Gobble, gobble. What kind of wild stuff you got coming up? Like for what kind of pictures you're trying to get now? Yeah, I've shifted a bit in kind of the relationship of how I'm working and what's that mean? Well, it means like I've stopped going to the Arctic in ways that I don't enjoy. Like going on the kind of the drive of you're there to do one thing and it's to like film. And I've started to try to understand more about like the reason I get in this was around conservation. The reason is to try to educate people about wild spaces and to hopefully have them be around for generations to come. And a lot of what I realize now is so much of it is just around like human health. Like how well are humans in an area, whether it's adjacent to national parks or even like in a country, like how connected are we as an American nation to the natural world in a way that allows it to sustain itself for a long time. So what that looks like to me is like being more on the land with people, being more around like reconnecting nature in a relational way, in like a sacred way, like what is sacred to humans now in the natural setting. A lot of that is, I think it's kind of lost in a way, but people are trying to rekindle it. There's cool work going on by like Bill Plotkin, who's an author. Martin Prechtow is kind of this interesting thinker around like how do we rekindle our innate relationship to natural world as like the human animal. Like our psyches are totally honed for it to be to learn from like essentially animism, every culture in the world came from like an animism relationship. I was trying to explain animism to my kids. Are you? Yeah, what are you? I was trying to explain to you. How do you approach it? What's that? How do you approach it? Like what do you say? Well, we, it's hard to get there because we get there from a Judeo-Christian understanding and try to walk backwards. Yeah. It's in there still. Like, yeah. They would tell you if you asked them, does your dad lecture you by animism and they would say yes, he does. That's great. I mean, I think it is like, I think that is like one of the paths forward for like sustaining long-term, this idea of conservation, which is kind of just a, yeah, what people understand around saving wild places and wild things. You know a good way to get into animism? It's not really, it's a 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 in the rivers, arts, arteries, the atmosphere is its lungs. You follow me? Yes. 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 mountains alive. You know, it's got heat, it's alive, it's got, it's got things living on it, parasitic things live on it. You know what I mean? There's all sorts of functional relationships. It's got things going on. Makes weather, harvests the weather. Right. Oh yeah. That's it. That's stuff like that. Yeah. And then, and then that is, like there's a relationship there that's essentially always waiting for humans to step into. Like the book, Breeding Sweetgrass speaks to that. Yeah. Every indigenous land-based community that I spent time with, that is how it works. And oftentimes that looks like you go on to land, you fast, you do these experiences where you're actually in conversation, you're listening, you're asking, you're speaking things, things that we can't speak to each other. 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 and in time, like when my dad grew up, it wasn't even available. But there's also things that people don't speak to other people about ever, but you can speak to the natural world about. So where is the work in this for you? I mean, this seems like, like, this seems like we're talking about, retirement thing. Well, I mean, ultimately, it's like the thing that I am most excited about now is this idea of like, how do you reconnect people to the human animals that we all are in like a holistic way? Like, I think the modern wellness movement is just tapping into all these things that makes a healthy animal. Like get a lot of sleep, eat whole foods, exercise, don't have chemicals, don't spend a lot of time sitting around, socialize. Like this is just like, if you break down the human animal, that's those are things that feed us. Yeah. Like there's the psychologist Francis Weller, who talks about the primary versus secondary satisfaction related to the human psyche. Primary satisfaction are like storytelling, ceremony, ritual, connection to food, dance, song, like the creative expression of humans and those feed communities and have for tens of thousands of years. And then you have secondary satisfactions, which is what a lot of modern behavior is stuck in where it's like ambition, materialism, these things that are not rooted in like long term human health of like communities inside in societies. And for me, again, like getting back to like the reason I got in this work was to try to generate change in some way towards like healthy futures for everybody for all life, essentially. And the work in this for me, a lot of it is like personal, like trying to understand what that my relationship is the natural world, going on the land and doing doing a four day fast in a wild place and being in one place doing essentially like a vigil and seeing what comes out of that like a brain shifts into a different way of being you start to think differently, experience differently, sensory experience becomes differently going into ketosis where you're burning fat instead of ingesting calories. And then spending time with being invited into communities, going to Sundance for the first time last year with the crow, being part of sweats where you're like, the whole idea around ceremony for me, I didn't I wasn't engaged in that at all as a kid, we didn't have any form of organized religion or spirituality other than like, being a naturalist like being outside being curious, we would do like nature journals or withdraw and again, there was no hunting, I was curious about it, I would kill things, I would borrow 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 is like taboo is a bad thing, like the idea of like religion is this thing that's done wrong to the world that was kind of like an idea. And again, I don't come from an organized religion background. But animism is this thing that's like available to all humans, like it is like a kind of like a human right. And I think ceremony is as well. And like, now is this time where I'm trying to bring that into life in a way that with hunting this year for the first time, I hunted an animal in a way that was new to me and saying to him while he died, decorated him adorned him, and then went through a practice of yeah, no way of trying to honor him in that way, versus, yeah, the last four years of learning to hunt and doing it just kind of however it came. And like there's this idea around. Yeah, Robin roll Kimmer has a quote around ceremonies 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. 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. You're still gonna take pictures? So yeah, still taking pictures. Yep. Yeah, I mean, I was just on the nominee reservation a couple weeks ago, and they're doing some cool stuff with getting Buffalo back on land, calling homecoming. So that kind of ties into what you're talking about though. It exactly doesn't want to talk about. So it's so you're 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 reengaging or continuing to engage around wild wild spaces and wildlife. Yeah, because I think like these places these like very far off wild places are like they hold again that idea of like a regulated nervous system landscape the idea of going back in time. It's amazing to be able to walk around with wolves in a place that you don't have to worry about it like I can't do that in Yellowstone or anywhere around here. I wouldn't want to do it ethically because those wolves will get hammered during hunting season. And they do around Yellowstone every year. These wolves kind of get a little used to people, get shot. And ultimately it's like coming back to yeah, how do I use the skills that I have and I've created through photography and storytelling to like elevate some of these interesting stories. And yeah, the monomony story is amazing. There's a group called Medicine Fish there. It's a tribal nonprofit that uses youth work and empowerment, basically like rekindling their animism relationship to the natural world through song and ceremony and a buffalo herd now that they have 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 be on the planes here in animate relationship. We can read about it. And I brought some books for you all that maybe you've heard of them or read them, but like Pretty Shield and Eagle Voice Remembers. They're these ethnographic interviews with elders in the 1930s. I've read a lot of those, but I haven't read those ones. Yeah, they're great. And it's just the stories of like pre-contact. I liked in Hide Hunters how you touched on like you painted the picture for the listener around like what the buffalo meant to the planes people. And so we're rushing away from that in a lot of ways as a collective modern dominant culture. This idea of like that was primitive. There was a negative connotation around this older ways of living that it was dangerous, that it was unpredictable, that it was unhealthy. And so then we're rushing towards like the technological world that like none of us know what's going to happen. 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. Sentinel Island, there are some. Typically, people accept it, they want it. To go and say to go and say it somehow, we've become like that it's a shame that we walked away from these things when again and again and again cultures all around the world, you say to them, would you like food like a guaranteed food supply? Yes, we would. Would you like cellular service? Yes, we would. Would you like, I remember reading this thing even from the 70s, 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 70s or 80s, you can make it less likely that my baby will die. I'm in. Always. It's a little bit 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 and they will continue to typically want it. I think, I think a lot of times it was, it was forced. Like, I don't think there was necessarily like a choice. Ah, man, if we'd have to do a whole other show, I'll take you on, I'll take you on on that one. Sweet. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of times there was a little bit of a bait and switch, but typically you can show up on the shore and you can lay out the goods and initially people come. But, but I also think what you're saying, they're interested in the goods. I think we're kind of sitting in the same, in a way like they're interested in the tools. Yeah. Yeah. They want to maintain the material. They want the material. Yeah. They want to maintain their, their way of life perhaps. Well, in a way that, yeah. But I think they want, yeah, they want guns. They don't foresee. They want ammo. This is the beginning of the, 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 in 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, I think I'm not trying to counter what you're saying. I'm just saying this is something I've wrestled with. Definitely. I've intellectually wrestled with this whole bunch. Yeah. I think the tool specifically, but I think like the way of life, I don't necessarily think that everybody wants. Like if they, there's probably a baked, there's a baked in, let's say there's a baked in nostalgia. But later you're like, man, should we have done that? Yeah. You're also not necessarily talking about material culture. You're talking about in that trend, transformation or transition, you're talking about losing intangible, 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 like human experiences and that that that have been lost in some ways. Yeah. But even if the, even if the product, we're getting so far off, even if the product is religion, people initially are curious. They're initially curious. Just it happens again and again and again all around the world. They're initially curious. Everybody was animist. Virtually everyone was animistic. They became, they became monotheistic. We'll say this for the next show. I got one last question for you. It's a business question. If we look at, this is going to sound insulting, but it comes from me being a writer. Oftentimes the way that it moves is, like it moves it, that there's sort of like a writer is going to do a thing. Let's find a photographer to go along with it. Do you get to, are you at a point in your career where you're the dog and the writer's the tail? Do you follow me? Do you have, do you wheel that power as sort of like a premier wildlife photographer where you could say there's an image I'd like to get? It's so good. Y'all to find a writer. 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 all pitch something and then they'll assign a writer or I'll come with a writer or advice. So it will be that the image leads. I mean, National Graphic is, I mean, it's definitely an image magazine. I see. It's like you hook people with the cover if they don't say on the newsstands anymore, but if you hook people with the cover, they'll go through it. This is what they, you know, this is what they say people do with it. Like look at the pictures and the picture, interesting, then they'll read the article more. That's kind of how they speak to it. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. It's like, yeah, the photographer is the dog, the writer's the tail. Because I would always imagine the writer as the dog and the photographer is the tail. And you need both. I mean, it's like, you need both. I mean, I, I don't know. I don't think it should be the way it was when I was doing it. I think that in some ways, like looking at the wolf stuff, if someone said to me, Hey, you can look at these pictures or you can read with this guy, I'm like, I'll go with the pictures, please. Like on that shit. Yeah. And you can take an eighth grade essay and attach it to that. And somebody would be like, this is the best thing I ever read. This is a transformative piece. Yeah. If I was an editor, and someone came and said, uh, look, man, I'm going to get all these photos of all this crazy stuff. I'd be like, we should probably find a writer to go with. I mean, it 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 tail. I need it all. No, but who gets to be the tail? I know. Who gets to be the dog, who gets to be the tail. Yeah. Well, so I, I like, I got one last question. If, if, okay, I think of the whole world, the depths of the oceans, whatever, the whole world, if you could get a picture of one thing that you know to be a thing that happens, right? Like a sperm whale, grabbing a giant squid. Like one thing that you know occurs, what would you get the picture of? What's the next beaver under the ice? Yeah. Yeah. What comes to mind, I was in the Elson just a couple of weeks ago and read through the scene, like found a big bull carcass of elk with some research that they knew was there. There's a Tom mountain line that been feeding on it, the collared one they knew was there. And I ended up like tracing back the whole scene. And like, I would love to get a cool, like a good image of like a mountain lion. Like coming in from the tree, jumping on the back of a bull elk and going through that world. Yeah. That's a tough one. That'd be a tough one to get. But not impossible. This morning, the first few inches in this deck we didn't get to yet. I saw a family of cougars this morning on a walk. Six miles from here. They just killed a mule deer. My neighbor's kid, they got a bull. And when they went back up to get, they left some meat hanging in a tree. 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. Yeah. But it had the gut pile. Yeah. That's what I walked in on initially. It was confused. There was a raven that had been calling. It's a little bed there on the right there. They had just been there. And then that's where the lions have been laying. Yeah. That's cool. Wow. Oh, there you go. Poor thing. Yeah. God, you take nice pictures all the time. Oh, those are just cell phone images. You can hear mom just in the back there calling. There they are. Yeah. Excellent, man. Yeah. That was cool. Don't tell Yanis where that was. No, he won't mess with them. I know. I know. It's just a joke. He won't mess with them. If he did, he'd just let them go. Yeah. I feel like everyone's going to be hitting the ronin' up for hunting spot tracks. I was cutting Christmas trees. We were hunting trees and my family on a Sunday. Hunting trees. I'm sitting here with my kids. I'm not kidding you, man. You're like, Park. My daughter broke her foot. So she weighed, I was like, you got to wait at the truck because she's got a broken foot. My wife said, I'm not going to leave her 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 100 yards. And I could get into how it was terrible Christmas tree hunting. Well, you can see it right there. All that frozen ice and snow makes Christmas tree hunting impossible. It's tough. It's tough. Every tree, you got to tell the boys, get some sticks and whoop the tree. Yeah. Yeah. Because you can't judge them. You can't judge them. You can't judge them. You can't feel judge. Like looking at a deer from the back. They all look great. Yeah. You don't know how it looks. So we had to beat, we like beat three trees clean and we were just sick of it and we decided to take one. Anyway, I look at one point, I look at the ground and our dogs running all over hell. I look at the ground and there's the brand newest cleanest lion track. And I realized we'd kick 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. They'll talk like, yes, no idea what just happened. Yeah. Like not even, not even like any sort of acknowledgement whatsoever that this has happened. Like never sticks our nose in the track. Just nothing. There's not even there. It just doesn't register. It doesn't register. That dog, if we weren't there, that dog would probably not be alive anymore. It'd be a cat snack. Well, thanks for coming on the show, man. Yeah, I appreciate you having me on, Steve. It's a fascinating world. Yeah, I can't take a picture. Sure, sure you can. Dude, I took black and white photography one and two in college. Wow, that's a good thing here. You can say he's more formally trained. Yes, yes. Darker rules, yeah. Yeah. No, I realized that all I had to do is take black and white photography one and two to realize that was not a visual artist. Yeah, so I don't have it. You don't have it? You don't have it. Yeah. I mean, you've done, I should just get the audio from my captions next time for this. Yeah, I'll still be a little bit excited. Yeah, yeah. Audio prep. Yeah. Well, yeah, your stuff's gorgeous, man. And I love seeing it. And I got so excited about that beaver stuff. That was cool. Nice. It was really cool. I'm glad you called me in to talk to me. So 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? You can see it on my website, ronendoniman.com, Instagram, another place that I have a lot of presence. Yeah, also check out the Animas Valley Institute. Not my work, but... Oh, not, okay. No. But people that want to re-wild themselves and rekindle that relationship with the animate world. Got it. They offer experiences and... But on your website, they can just go proves all these years of material. Yeah, proves images and all that. Yeah, I do sell... The stuff we talked about today, they'd find on there. Some of it, some of it I haven't really showed. Many people. Yeah, but some of it's available. Yeah, I have a museum exhibit that's traveling around the country. I forgot to ask, but I wanted to ask about that. That's right. Yeah, thanks. It'll be in St. Petersburg, Florida next. It opens up in late March early April. The Going Down for the Program for that. It was in Amarillo, Texas just a couple of months ago. It'll be in San Diego, the Naturalist Museum. What's the called? Oh, it's called Wolves. It's a comparison, especially images of Yellowstone and Arctic wolves. Got it. Yeah, a big exhibit and lots of text with it as well. Oh, there is? Yeah, lots of maps and some... Because they had the images. Yeah, had the images. Yeah, need some text to go with it. Yeah, it'll come through Museum of the Rockies maybe in a couple of years. Oh, is that right? Yeah, which I'm excited about. Yeah, that'd be real popular around here. I'm excited for that. Yeah, I want to go to Colorado too. Oh, yeah. Need to do some work down there with wolves. Need some help. All right, man. Well, thank you very much. Thanks, Steve. Thank you. Thank you all. Yeah. Hunting demands preparation, persistence and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear first light. This isn't about height. It's about no compromise gear built to perform, built to last, whether it's their industry leading merino wool, keeping me comfortable through the cold and the hot, or their durable outerwear shrugging off the elements. First light is built to help you go farther and stay longer, designed to be able to move further. Designed by hunters, for hunters with a deep commitment to conservation and land access. No shortcuts, no excuses. Just gear you can count on. Head to firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.