Welcome to Big Blend Radio's Nature Connection Show with Lisa and Nancy Publishers of Big Blend Magazines and Nature photographer Marco Carrera. Hey everybody, so excited. September 8th, everybody marked the state. The National Parks USA premieres on National Geographic. This is a five-part series that you just really want it to be like all the parks, please. It is amazing. It takes us to Zion, Yellowstone, Katmai, the Everglades and Olympic National Parks, and we are so excited to have Jeff read join us. He's a showrunner and cinematographer, and today on this episode, because we're going to be doing three episodes on this park series because it's worthy of that. And I mean it. I mean it when you go see it, look at the episode notes. I've got a link to the trailer, so you can watch that, in fact you've even just seen it by now. If you're just listening, look at that episode link. But you're going to want to see this. Today on this episode, we're going to talk about the nature connection, the wildlife. And I think what was so beautifully done in this series is you showed the biodiversity of America. You showed so many different wildlife species and why all of them all the way down to a little grasshopper is so important all the way to bison grizzly bears. And you also showed the importance of their habitat and how biodiverse the habitat is. And the importance of plants and trees and everything. And also the threat. So welcome to the show. Jeff, how are you? Thanks for having me. Lisa, that was a great introduction. I feel like I don't need to add anything to that about our series. I'm serious, like this is so epic. I'm so you actually made me cry, like really, and watching this, you made me cry of beauty. And then like, and we'll talk about, I know you're going to be on the other episode with us talking about the indigenous people of the parks, but that, I mean all of it was just too touching because I think we, you know, our national park system is the very first national park service in the world. And we set it up and then other countries adopted and I was raised in the bush in Africa and like wildlife is everything. And I think a lot of times we think of Africa as the wildlife. And I think what you've done and everybody involved has really shown that America has incredible beauty. What do you think? Are you set out doing this? Yeah, I mean, we, first and foremost, we try to tell the stories of these places through the eyes of the wildlife. You know, these are love letters to the wildlife, love letters to the national parks. And you know, we consciously included the Everglades for that reason as it, you know, it was the 20th national park, but it was the first one that was, you know, established with the conscious idea of protecting an ecosystem versus protecting a geological wonder, you know, so Yellowstone being the first aimed at geysers aimed at the hot springs aimed at these things that people had, you know, said, we can't, you know, we can't exploit it industrial lot. You know, we can't exploit it for industrial reasons or build hotels over it. And the wildlife were sort of protected on, you know, as bycatch of that idea. And then it wasn't until the Everglades where, you know, the people who were the, you know, heroes of that park were saying, no, this is an ecosystem. You may not want to go there. It's hot. It's buggy, but it needs to be protected for the specific idea of its animals and plants. And all the national parks kind of fall suit after that. But you know, we included that one for a reason. Absolutely. We went to the Everglades in 2012 and we were there doing a podcast for a gardening expo and they said, now we're going to fly you out to do this podcast and we're like, no, no, we're road tripping. And but we have to go to the Everglades because we've been doing so much with the National Parks Conservation Association on shows, but we need to go to the Everglades and we went out and you did a lot of filming in regards to the birds out there and the threats they have from there's boating, there's also climate change. And we went out there and that's actually what started our love your parks tour. So that I think, yeah, I'm sorry. You guys made us emotional, so like, I'm sorry, you're going to put up with me now, but I'm just kidding. But because I think what the Everglades is so fascinating because it has so many threats with at the same time, you know, but you showed this just incredible beauty in the plants, which I really appreciate it because I remember seeing rameleons out there for the first time and going, oh my gosh, you know, people are buying this from Home Depot, but here they are here and I remember when the gardening guys go, says to me, no, no, that just probably landed there from a hurricane. I'm like, dude, no, there's orchids, there's bromeliads, there's all of these things happening and there's some, there's hardwood forest, there's all of this biodiversity happening in your backyard and you're not getting it, you know, yeah, and that drives the ecosystem there. Absolutely. So vegetation is, you know, it's driven by the, by just tiny elevation changes throughout the park, 10 feet or so over, you know, 100 miles up high in the dryer areas, you have the hardwoods, like you said, in the middle, you have, you know, these more wet loving plants you get mangroves. And then there's, you know, it's hyper organic, like you said, underwater too, the mangrove systems are, it just, it's absolutely crazy, especially during the rainy season, when everything fills up and you can poke your head underwater and it's nice cool water, it's pretty amazing to be in. Yeah. Well, you talk about water. Let's go to Katmai. You did some amazing footage of grizzly bears hunting salmon underwater. Like, so how did you, like, how did you do all this, like, and how long did it take? How many, because I know you couldn't be out there all everywhere at once, right? So you, I know you worked with different photographers. How did you guys actually get, I love that you did the aerial parts of it too. Like the photo behind me for those watching versus listening, you see what I'm talking about, that's the Everglades, but if you go into the Everglades, you're in it, whenever you're in a park, you're in it, you're seeing the trees, which is awesome, you're within the forest. But seeing it from above and you did such amazing aerial photography, drone photography, however you did it all, you gave us this scope that we will never be able to see on our own going as a park traveler and understanding this critical, you know, play these critical places, why they need this protection and everything. But that footage underwater, like, what's, how did you guys do all that stuff? I know no one's just sitting there snorkeling, right? No, no. To have I was filmed primarily by two just world-class cinematographers that's John Shire, Dawson Dunning, and they are two of the people that you would, they'd be at the top of the list of somebody to go film bears in Alaska, right? They know bears better than anybody that I've ever met, they've observed and been alongside bears a huge amount and they're world-class cinematographers and they know how to build and create custom camera systems. So that underwater system was, was a Sony FX6, which is, which is a standard prosumer level camera. It's a good camera, but Dawson built a, he modified a few different camera housings he found, put a huge front port dome on it so he could do those kind of those 50/50 shots that we call them. And so you can see above and below, he had a motorized pan tilt head underwater so he could control it from far away, run a wire and then he'd walk out in the water, set it down and watch from a monitor from, you know, a safe distance. He was still pretty close, but far enough that he wasn't going to get run over by the bears who are generally not, you know, aggressive there, they've, they've got plenty of food. You don't want to be messing with them obviously, but they won't. If you stay out of their way, you're, you're in a pretty good situation there. But if you're in their way, they, you know, that's a hundred pounds running at you hitting you if you're, if you're standing there. And so he was willing to sacrifice his camera if it came to that, luckily that happened. And yeah, we ended up with those unreal shots. So, but that's the thing you guys all with what you do have to understand nature and have, have that patience of watching and learning. So you become biologists in a way, like, yeah, you definitely do like this most important part of science. Or one of the most fun parts in my mind is just that observational level of observing to learn. And, you know, it's, it's straight up. The more hours you spend alongside these animals, the more you learn and the more you can read body language behaviors, you can predict their behaviors. You can understand what's stressing them out, which is important to us to make sure we get authentic behavior and make sure we're not causing issues with the animals. So we're able to back off, even if it's not these obvious signs of stress, if they're, you know, for bears, if you're hearing jaw clicking, if you're hearing huffs, if they're chatting with their cubs a lot, they may back off and just say, okay, you guys do your thing and we'll be over here trying to film, you know, less shy bear and John and Dawson can really do that really well. Well, that I wanted to touch on all this because you have incredible footage that is just mind-blowing, right? And the aerial photography, I think, is also, there's a wildlife sanctuary out in Colorado that I think did this amazing thing, they're like, okay, they rescue animals even from hurricanes and wildlife and they've been doing it for gazillions of years. And they didn't want it to be like, here we are as a zoo. And so what they did is they took the rescue animals and they wanted the education component with people. I mean, they had bears from circuses and Hungary or Russia that were, they had to get off of smoking cigarettes because that's what they were doing in a service. And so they had to detox these bears, which were, they're not happy. But they didn't want them to be zoo animals, so they created this skywalk, so you're above the animals looking down, so know your photos look like, you know, no great stuff, not like what you're doing, there's a difference. But the animals are like, you're like a plane in the sky, so we really don't care. You're not in my trajectory right off in my face every day, like I'm going to zoom their habitats are massive and awesome, they actually have one sanctuary that the animals, there's lions walking in the wild in Colorado. It's pretty cool. Yeah. And so in Colorado, so I was thinking about that while I was watching the fact that you did so much from the aerial side of it, that it didn't look like any animal was stressed and that you're backing off because we do see people in parks. And I just want to say this, please people, we love wildlife. You don't want to disturb them, there's very little places left for them to be. So we're in their home at this time, right? In a way, I know it's America's recreational place too, but as photographers, I think we're not going to be able to go where you where you go, right? You have to get all that permit stuff, which is like a whole other red tape we don't want. Yeah. Yeah. And very expensive. So we, you know, we have limited days on the ground, so you spend a good amount, you'd burn some days if you get bad weather and a lot of it's luck on that front. And yeah, like you're saying the aerial systems, that perspective is huge for us. Sometimes it's from helicopter with, you know, these gyro-mounted big cameras on the bottom of the helicopter. And those are really expensive, but worthwhile days where we go out and Katmai that was done by a pilot and a cinematographer named Daniel Zatz, who flew out of Homer, so he crosses that straight there and flies over Katmai and flies until he runs out of gas pretty much and can land and fill up at King Salmon or somewhere close. But you know, he got scrubbed by weather for a few times. And so we just try to try to hit that at the right time. He did a lot of the work in the 10,000 smokes. And then in areas that were technically outside the park, but near the park, which would be like the tidal zones off the coast, we're able to fly a drone to get some of those CNX as well, national parks, even for us, even for permanent people, don't allow drones to be taken off and landed within the national park. So we have to find ways around that and kind of work in these areas adjacent to the parks. And that kind of places it, you know, just gives us perspective there, because that aerial perspective is huge for us. And we've found a lot of animals, yeah, they don't mind it. They don't mind the sound of it, especially if they're in an area like, you know, coastal Alaska, where they're hearing planes, hearing boats, seeing those things. And in fact, they're, I think more, you know, they, they back away from a person carrying a tripod, you know, more than they would a drone system like that or anything like that. That's what I was thinking. And for travelers going in to understand that balance with wildlife to not, it's better to be as far back away as you can, right? For wildlife to not disturb them. Yeah. And we'd rather see natural behavior from far away than unnatural behavior from close up. And we want to stay safe with, you know, our cinematographers are out there. Their days away from rescue, if they, you know, if they need to be rescued. So even a minor entry can be a pretty big situation there. So we, we don't want to hurt an animal. We don't want to get hurt. We don't want, you know, to cause any issues all the way through that. So yeah, stand, you know, respectful distance. It's why we have huge lenses. That's why we, it's why we like to stay far away. And yeah, that's what the power of what you guys do. You know, these kinds of documentaries, like you're watching something that we don't get to really experience and you're seeing things in wilderness, like all the glaciers and all of that was incredible Olympic National Park. I mean, what you got to see to the biodiversity out of the five parks Zion, you know, you guys were at night filming, you know, hunt, you know, there were so many different things to be able to put together. I thought that out of, because we do want you to do all the parks, right, you know, we just want you to keep doing this like every day. So just saying, but, um, this a koi is would like you to do it, but the thing is, I think you did a really interesting mix of five parks that showed this diversity of what we have because Zion is really interesting because you can go low down and they have cool orkits too. But then you showed like the desert part of America to like, you know, the Everglades and the swarms kept my, they got rain forest going on in Olympic, you know, so Yellowstone, you know, you've showed this different topography and also explained the way the topography, the habitat relates to the wildlife, the birds, the whales, all of that, that that what to me was really important that you explain that, like the importance of why do we need this one grasshopper? Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of that was driven by our story producer, Evelyn Grenier, who's just can see the story of these places beyond kind of the little vignettes that we, you know, that TV is that we only get to show a few minutes of, of bison or wolves or anything. And so we wanted to, we really wanted the wolves are amazing. And like, you know, Yellowstone, for instance, has a character that goes beyond these many stories. It's the first national park. It's like was made for different reasons than we use it now necessarily, you know. And it was, their characters come about. We, you know, one aspect of Yellowstone is that it's this moving geological hotspot. And we really wanted to show that off. And we did that through kind of this introduction with steamboat guys or the biggest guys are in the world. You know, what drives that and it's really this evolving system that has been, you know, driven for the last 15 million years, eruption after eruption, there's been many Yellowstone in the past. This is its current form. The Everglades with it's just hyperabundance, hyperorganic area, Katmai with this like heart of volcanism that, that created the park and or transformed the park and got people interested in it. The bears were kind of a second or an afterthought in there, you know, they went there looking for the next Yellowstone, but ended up protecting this area of like unmatched viewing for brown bears and all the animals there alongside them. And so yeah, I think like, you know, finding that character in the park often starts with their origin stories. Why did they, why did they, why did we make it a national park? But then it goes beyond to hopefully we can try to figure out what brought people there forever, right? Yellowstone has been home to people for thousands of years since they could walk, you know, since the glaciers retreated from there and people could walk into Yellowstone, they've been doing so. Yeah. It's and coexisting with wildlife, right? So I think that's what you guys do as photographers and filmmakers out there. You're coexisting and the communities around are doing that. And so you're also showing like, Hey, these are beautiful things. With all of you out there doing this, I mean, as a team, right, did it change you at all in understanding climate change? Because I think that was really well done and there to understand like you're looking at this beautiful thing, you're understanding, starting to understand the symbiosis between the different creatures and even plants and all these things. I mean, there's just so much to five episodes. It's amazing. You know, just five doesn't that mess you up. It's like kind of a big five, right? It's the big five, but it's not just there's no way this was just so well done. You've got everything from, you know, you've got marine mammals, you've got everything to birds, the spoonbills, all of this, you know, even little chipmunks and stuff. But while filming this and starting to understand the race of time, did you feel that when you all kind of started putting this together and during the filming of this like the tenderness like the mother earth is don't mess with her. She's hardcore, but at the same time we are. Did you feel that sensitivity filming this? Definitely. And especially, you know, we covered the spectrum here. We were in places like Katmai, which feel like invulnerable. They feel out of reach of climate change. They feel out of reach of anything because they're still wild. There are no roads there. But then in the Everglades, we are on the front line of, you know, rising seas, rising ocean, you know, water levels there, you know, saltwater moving in where it hasn't been in the past. It's kind of the most rapidly changing for climate change and for any kind of these large existential level issues. It's hard to it's hard for our minds to ever understand that scale of time, but the Everglades you can. You know, there was a great article that inspired our story about the Spoonbills that Max Stone wrote for Audubon Magazine. And it was called, I think it's called the Pink Canary and the coal mine, which we did further. Yeah, yeah. I heard that part. Yeah. And so he was an advisor on this episode with us and we chatted with him and he was pivotal to that Spoonbills story because we needed to be working alongside the National Audubon Society and Audubon's Everglades Science Center, and they're the ones that got us out there and able to see, you know, these Spoonbills among their nesting areas. And yeah, you know, that one was lucky because the Spoonbill nesting, you know, it collapsed that season. It's just a matter of getting too little rain or too much rain. There's, you know, a movement of Spoonbills going north up into the lands where they can feed better, they need that very specific water depth. And so their nest sites collapse, they move up and up into kind of more central Florida almost out of the Everglades often. And so we're seeing that change, we're able to witness that change from year to year. There are scientists like Jerry Lorenz who have been working on that for a couple of decades now and are able to show enough data to say, this is a piece of climate change. This is a reaction to climate change that's happening before our eyes. And it's, you know, there's there's a hundred other stories that they could tell along those lines. But yeah, it's rare to find that thing that you can grasp within a single season, especially our glimpse and, you know, we're in Montana, our production company. And so we don't, we don't think about the Everglades every day. And so it's to be able to go there, witness it, see this change. It's a pretty big deal and then understanding the history of the park as well, how, how much it has changed based on pretty slight sea level changes over time over the last couple of thousand years. So when the, you know, Betty Osiela is in that episode and she's Mikasuki and her ancestors would have been there before the Everglades were the Everglades, you know, 3,000 years ago, Florida was double the size and they would have been in a dry interior and the Everglades would have been somewhere else. And so just in their generations, that it's been a park that's created. And it, I think within, you know, our lifetime and certainly the art, our, you know, descendants lifetime, it'll, it'll rapidly change and could collapse and yeah, there's plenty of that stuff going on. And so it's a good way to work. Yeah. I mean, that's what you're saying. All those stories, thousands of stories, how hard is it to actually narrow it down even for, you know, a episode that's 44 minutes, you know, and 50 seconds, isn't it? Yeah. You guys had it on the nail and everyone. Yeah. And just like, what? To the frame. We, yeah, the TV, we go to the frame. So wow. Yeah. It's incredibly hard to nail down what we're going to do. We all have kind of, you know, there's this balance of showing the highlights from, it's hard to do a Yellowstone show without showing wolves and, um, oh, but that was epic. I mean, you guys had a chase on the bice. I mean, that's amazing. Yeah. And from our favorite pack, the Wapiti pack and this white female that has, that led the pack for years and years and she's just unreal. And I was lucky enough to film that scene with, oh, right on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. With our executive producer, Thomas Winston. And he was there and we, you know, that was a cold minus 15 morning. So, um, you know, so some of the scenes come about by us being in the park and they unfold in front of us. So we are in Yellowstone. We do Yellowstone often at our backyard. Nice. We're able to go there and say hear about wolf activity. And if it's a beautiful scene like that, then then that becomes the through line of the show. And so there's some things that unfold like that. We knew we wanted wolves anyway. And then there are things like the Lubbock grasshopper and the Everglades, which is, you know, something you see all the time there. Everyone in South Florida is familiar with the lovers and they're all over the roads all the time. They, they're, they're unavoidable. But um, to capture that behavior, that was us saying, how do we do an alligator story that is different that's not the alligators? If you watch them in the wild, they're rarely, um, they're really doing much. They're often sunning. They're often underwater. Uh, you know, we, they're not these violent, you know, ravenous hunters out there that, that, that are that fit with their reputation there. We see these gentle sides of them and how can we show that? How can we show them motherly thing and we tried with a panther? You got a panther? Yeah. And that's Carlton Ward. Dude. I was like, I was like, no way. Everybody stop. Stop. And that's Carlton Ward who's a, who's a camera, who's a Florida native and, um, camera trap expert. And he's, he's the one to be filming Panthers and Gators, like all, like, yeah, seriously. Yeah. Yeah. And he's, he's been out there for years and years doing it, probably put in more camera trap hours than anybody I know by far. Uh, and he said, how much bug spray did you all go through? We, what's funny is we don't, I, I try not to do much of it. Yeah. And then I wonder for years, I'm scratching. I broke down a few times. Yeah. Um, I, I've tried to stay away from it as long as I can. It's not great for our cameras to have that stuff on your hands and to be touching the stuff. And so we use a lot of nets, body nets and head nets, but our hands are exposed all the time, um, on the camera and they get hammered, they get hammered. And so I, I broke down and, and you use indeed, I tried the thermo cell stuff. I've tried every organic thing and it's like, oh, cinnamon, no, it won't lavender. Yeah, it's going to be straight, straight up poison. That's the only thing that works. And yeah, I thought at one point, we could just kind of, when we lived in, in South Africa, we used to say, just cover your body and rum, but that didn't work, but you were happier. Yeah. That's, I think it just ingested in, but you got, I mean, like when you think about the panther and, and that is just really lucky. So for him to be able to do that, he has got to learn like we were talking about. So it's like science and movement. And the patience of that. And I think, you know, when we're watching what you've done, I mean, all of you put together the work, it just, it's like, how do you even cut something out? Cause like you just want to keep looking at that is so cool. You've got otters. You've got, I mean, the, what you showed about American, the plant life, again, I think it's something always left out the habitat. We've done so much on wildlife conservation, I always go without the habitat. You haven't got any of it. You've got to build the habitat and protect that first, right? You guys are so lucky with it. And I just feel like we as, as travelers going in have to look at how much work you guys do and get in ladies too, right? In having that patience of waiting for that and we're all going off into parks playing selfies. And that's not the best for wildlife. It isn't. It's the best behavior to happen with that. So can you share any tips for people going into parks? I know we're going to do a whole thing on park travel, but as a nature photographer and wildlife photographer, what can we do as park lovers, park travelers to be better? You know, enjoy it. Yes, share it, but maybe not and don't hurt the wildlife while we're doing it or the plant life. Yeah, I think, you know, that one's hard for us because we are often, you know, in the city. You're in the places where we're not allowed to be, right? So stay on the path always, but not with them. In some ways, we don't get a lot of special treatment. We don't get to have like, you know, backstage passes and so we're, we're, but we get caught in the same trap of being, okay, what's the biggest, most showy thing? What's it known for? Let's go after that and ignore everything else and aim for that with our cameras. And I think one way to really experience these places is to just let yourself be distracted by, you know, things that weren't on a bucket list necessarily. So Yellowstone being a great example of saying, we want to go see Old Faithful, but there are 300 or something other geysers in the same geyser basin and hot springs and like, let yourself risk missing Old Faithful, if you need to, to find something that, that is not necessarily the top item on the guidebook. So I want to tell people about it and Yellowstone often is a tiny little feature called Black Sand Pool and it's about a 15-minute walk from Old Faithful and it's just this turquoise pool that every once in a while will bubble like every few minutes. But if you lay down on the ground right there, you can feel underneath you, there is some sort of geyser event erupting in underneath the ground and boulders being thrown around there. And so you feel it rumble and everybody calls it thumper that I know of and so you can kind of feel it. And it's this little treasure that I take to people to all the time and it's great and it's really, it's really fun. I'm sure other people know about it and some I forgot who shared it with us, but you know, I've found stories in the, you know, the ground squirrels and the mountain bluebirds and things that people might drive buying Yellowstone and those are great little stories to focus on. I would say if you can get away from anybody you're traveling with just for a few minutes, like even once a day, even in the morning, you know, being in nature alone is one way to really experience it without having the distraction of kind of trying to entertain or be entertained by the people around you or watch something. And I know that's hard for traveling families, especially, but yet those moments in nature alone have been some of the most special moments where I've been the most connected to whatever I'm experiencing because I don't feel like I need to have a conversation or anything. And that's one way to do it. And then finally, I'd say, you know, in the Olympic episode, Gordon Hampton is our human story there and he experiences these national parks through sound. And he's an acoustic biologist, I guess, a psychologist, maybe he would call himself and he specializes in finding places that are unpoluted by human sound and God, that's so hard. I'm trying to do that. I'm trying to do that is do sound recordings because there was many people that cannot see a park, right, visually. And everywhere I go, I hear like an oil Derek next to snow geese, like in a park in Texas and I'm going, the sound, I wanted to ask you about sound pollution because I think it's like a hidden pollution that none of us are getting because we're also used to sound pollution. We go to a park and we may not realize what the animals are going through. And as soon as I started to record it, I'm starting to think we're in trouble with that. Yes. So yeah, absolutely this, you know, this noise pollution that we hear is a huge part of what we we've started to notice more and more. Oh, by the way, you did roll good noise pollution versus sound pollution. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I need to elevate what I'm saying now. Yeah. Thank you for that. We actually talked about that in writing this distinguishing sound versus noise. And so, you know, yes, it's a pollution that is actually pretty insidious, I guess, against animals that really live in these parks and it affects everything from bird migration to bats to just, you know, everything. And so finding quiet places is something that Gordon Hampton, who's in the Olympic episode really specializes in, and you get this like you unlock this huge landscape, this unknown world that you hadn't paid attention to before. And it's a whole new way to experience it. And he does it with these really high end microphones, but you can do it without a microphone and you can amplify it with a cheat microphone if you wanted to. And you know, we are constantly hunting for those soundscapes, these like sonic environments that are really trying to bring you into the ecosystem. And sometimes we have to go about it in creative ways. And the Yellowstone, the way to do it is to go in at night and you get a night landscape soundscape. But for things like geysers, that's one of the only times you're going to get in there without kind of the footsteps of tourists around you. And that's a whole way to experience Yellowstone that you haven't, you know, most people don't get a chance to do the parks open all night. And so you can go into places like Black Sand Basin or, you know, upper geyser basin and just kind of get this incredible sonic environment. If you're lucky, the stars will be out, you know, you'll, she's shooting stars during a meteor shower. I've recently that big northern light storm we had back in April or May was in Yellowstone for that because where else would you want to do it? And yeah, no kidding. That's awesome. Yeah. Like experiencing these places, there's always a way to do it that avoids kind of what people associate with a bad part of these parks, you know, a bad part of Yellowstone is crowded, especially in the summer, especially during summer vacation, the roads are jammed. So if you change your expectation a little bit from having to see all the things on the bucket list, if you find something secret, if you let yourself wander and be curious, if you let yourself do something out of the ordinary, like going at night or super early in the morning, be a little bit uncomfortable for that. That's the way to do it. That's the only way to do it. That's what we do as filmmakers and it's worked out really well. And I think that's like my best advice for going into these places. Yeah. And the nature part of it is too, you're being a little bit lighter footed for the park, you know, you're just giving, you know, it's, it's interesting, you know, we say stay on the trail and stay on the trail, everyone. And I remember we interviewed an Apache gentleman who took trails, took guides into the wilderness in the Hila wilderness area in New Mexico. And he was talking about, well, the Apache say, if, and we can't, don't do this. But this was like, if it's just like, put it in one tribe in an area, you don't carve a trail. You spread out. So it's lighter foot, nothing really touches the ground, right? Because everyone spread out. But if we try to do that with mass people and cars and stuff, no, don't do it. So that's what I'm saying. But he was talking about that. He's like, the alternative is this, you know, when you go in a wilderness area, split up and don't carve a trail, don't disturb what's going on, you know, don't step on this one piece of glass or grass, excuse me, that doesn't need to be stepped on because you might be stepping on this whole other ecosystem. And you know, it is true. Right. And, you know, in modern and other practices, like leave no trace, have adopted that, that idea. And so following that idea, if you're on a trail, single file, if you're off, spread out. And then, you know, try not to repeat your trail going back. And yeah, to constantly be in touch with your environment, to know what's fragile, to know what's durable surface, to know where to camp and to, you know, just how to live out there is, is critical because it's, yeah. Yeah. You did so much. I mean, just even caves and bats and, you know, looking at you just had the balance. Did you guys really think about that of, you know, here's this beauty. And then here's the story of the threats, whether it's disease to animals like the bats, to the climate change, things like that without it being this like, you know, alarm system. So the storytelling that you've done is, to me, very well done in that it makes you still sit and think, I'm still sitting, it's doing on it all, like, you know, I have to rewatch it all, to be honest, because it just, there was a lot and it, I just feel like the stories were done in a way of, here's beauty, here's some things to think about and let people come to their own conclusion. Did you guys think about doing that as a main way of, yeah, I think for all our stories, we often come at it from a visual perspective first is it going to be going to be visually compelling, right? And, and then we've tried to find the stakes within that story in some ways. So, you know, that may be the, the stakes of finding a mate or the stakes of being predated on or the stakes of living in an anthropomorphic world where, you know, they're always kind of on the brink of, of disease or disaster, climate change, those, those are relatively easy to find in some ways is because everything is being impacted by us here. And then usually with those stories comes somebody that's fighting against that impact scientists and conservationists that are working to make sure that that's kept to the minimum. So like Zach Warren, who you referenced in the, in the first of the Zion episode, you know, he's a cliffside ecologist exploring these, these areas that are almost like impossible for humans to, to, to reach, but not impossible for us to affect. So he, you know, he's going up there and making sure that, you know, everything's okay. And, and he's combining that with the love of rock climbing, which we found incredibly compelling. I read about what Zach does, which I think was in that conservation international magazine. He, I was like, yeah, I want to film with him and we reach out to him and say, that seems like a great story has, you know, this cool dude that's doing a job that if I saw him doing it, I, as a kid, I would have been like, maybe I'll do that. Yeah, exactly. It's inspiring. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, those are natural stories that come out of, come out of just research and, and planning out. And so like that kind of shoot, we really, we really do. And, and then other times it's, it takes some, like, it takes some work to find the stakes, you know, and we wanted, we don't manufacture them, but we, we sometimes have to dig deep to say, okay, why do we need to care about the plight of this am or plant? And yeah, and at the same time, not making it doom and gloom because it's really not that doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't work. Yeah. And so, you know, the wolves in Yellowstone are, are an example of that, that they were a recovered species that, that weren't always in Yellowstone. And they were looking so they thriving, you know, that, that, that, that set up, that scene was just like, wow, every, you know, not everyone's happy because there's, it's a hunt right now. Yeah. But it's, you know, and, and you show things that were bloody too with vultures. And I went, oh, cool. Cause I know I'm weird, um, you know, save everything. But then when there's a kill going on, I'm like, I want to film that, you know, I don't, I can't explain that to anybody, but it's a weird thing is a wildlife, but, you know, person that you respect the cycle of life and understand what's going on. And, and you want to see that healthy thing happen, but, um, in closing, what is one of your favorite, favorite animals or plants from this entire series that you went on? Oh, gosh. This is so cool to see whether it was you in person filming it or someone else. What is your favorite? I mean, it's got to be, we've already talked about it and it's got to be the spoonbills for me. And this one. Yeah. I, I, it's not an animal. I thought about much. It's not a familiar one. They, uh, they kind of captured me from the beginning when we started talking about the series as this, just this funny looking bird with a spoon on its face that is, you know, just an underdog from the beginning, having trouble getting out of its shell with this, you know, with this round bill to its, you know, overall story, its nesting habits, the fact that it lives in the south Everglades on Florida Bay. And that one was the way they sound, you know, the way they feed. They're just a charismatic little bird that I, that I now love. I'm a bird guy, so I'm always going to be most attracted to the bird stories. I think they, you know, they, they, like, if you watch a bird for an hour a day, you like have seen this entire drama unfold in front of you. They do so much with their short little lives. And so it's, uh, it's a fun to film. It's fun to explore. They always, there's always another secret kind of with, with them. I, I couldn't get enough of the spoonbills. I wish we could be out there near them. We had to be pretty quick in and out of these areas and, and the Audubon was setting up. We built these remote cameras that, that they could go up and, and set as researchers and, and film and kind of, you know, get these candid little moments. And those were risky because we had to leave the cameras out for several weeks and only one fell into the water. And that's, I think that's a win for us. And if I can add a second one, it's just the straight up abundance of brown bears and Katmai National Park. I, I was, I was lucky enough to spend a little bit of time there alongside John and Dawson filming that. And it was babies. Just unreal. Um, those babies, those cute little babies. But then the dude comes around and kind of felt like now we're in city life. The mom was getting the babies out away from the dude going, Hey, I'm checking out the mom and I could take your cubs. You know, I found like, Oh, she needs to go to another side of the street, man. She needs to go, you know, wow. All in for the salves and the cubs, the, the big boars, the big males are, are not my favorite. They're always moving around. They're always aggressive to their, to their, to the underbears. And, um, so that, yeah, I, I root for the, I root for the underdogs, the underbears and that situation. Um, I, I got to go to the 10,000, 10,000 smokes value, 10,000 smokes. And that was just the most surreal environment that I've been to. Um, it felt like the most remote place in the world and it's, it's up there. And so, yeah, those are the highlights for me and, um, looking forward to doing more, hopefully eventually. Well, this, we want the series to continue, right? Can, can we all, what, what do we need to do? Do we need to all call national geographic and say we want more. Yeah. We want more. Tell them we need more national parks. Yeah. We need, and we need. They're 63. So like you got a lot of work to do. Awesome. 63. Thank you, Jeff. Everyone again. Uh, the series is out now, uh, September 8th, starts September 8th, 2024, just in case you hit the archives, national parks, USA again, on national geographic. Thank you so much. Jeff. Appreciate it. Thanks, Lisa. Thank you for listening to Big Blend Radio's Nature Connection Show. Follow us at Big Blend Radio dot com and keep up with Margo at MargoCurera dot Etsy dot com. [MUSIC]
