Translator: Zeddi Lee Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So I want to you take into a place where humans really aren't supposed to be:
the inside of an occupied bear den.
(Laughter)
Now, bears elicit a certain fear response in most people,
and that's something that we're supposed to have.
Hundreds of thousands of years of concurrent evolution with bears
have taught us that they and other predators
are animals to be avoided.
So, my friend Corey Arnold took this photo with National Geographic,
and you can't see my face,
but I promise you there's a look of terror on it.
I wasn't happy to be in there with this bear,
and he wasn't happy to have me in there with him there.
This particular bear needed a new battery in his GPS collar.
So, for me to do that,
(Laughter)
I had to get within a couple of meters of the bear,
where I have a pole that has a syringe on it,
and inject him with that.
So in the US we have a saying: "Don't poke a sleeping bear,"
and that's literally what I was in there to do.
(Laughter)
Luckily for me, everything went fairly smoothly.
I was able to change out the battery,
and more fortunately, I was able to leave the den in one piece.
So, a lot of wildlife biologists do have stories like these,
whether they're working with dangerous animals
or they're working in conditions that can be really hazardous -
bone-breaking arctic cold or searing desert heat.
It can be a really challenging profession.
And on top of those challenges,
you also have to deal with this kind of tedious stuff
of writing papers and reports and research, and crunching data.
To get through those kind of things,
there's something critical that wildlife biologists need,
and that's passion.
Passion is what helps us through those experiences,
and it's also what helps us fight a battle
that's really becoming incredibly lopsided.
So, I grew up in Montana,
which was a wonderful place for an animal lover to grow up,
surrounded by different wildlife.
And in particular, there is a pond system near my home,
where my brothers and I would go,
and we'd catch frogs and turtles and snakes,
and look for all sorts of different animals.
In particular,
there's one species of frog, the northern leopard frog,
that was really plentiful,
and in a given summer, we'd see thousands of these frogs.
And then over a matter of just a few years,
I went from seeing thousands of leopard frogs to absolutely none.
And as a little boy,
that kind of being witness to a local extinction like that
was really hard for me.
This was an animal that had brought me a lot of joy
and taught me a lot about the natural world,
and suddenly it was gone.
And I think in my mind,
extinction was something that was really relegated to dinosaurs,
and seeing it happen to an animal that I loved
really created a paradigm shift for me.
And I realized that nature isn't infinite
and it's something that we do need to protect.
So, fast-forward.
I'm in my 30s.
That's that same bear,
after we managed to get him out and change his collar.
I've worked with bears for about eight years,
and then I've also been able to host a little show with Great Big Story
called "Mission Wild."
And during that time,
I've been able to see a lot of different wildlife biologists
and the species they work with,
and really see the ins and outs of wildlife conservation.
And I want to take you guys
through a few of the things that I've learned.
So, we're going to start with the pangolin,
so not penguin - "pan-go-lin."
It looks like a Pokemon, but it's an animal,
I promise you.
(Laughter)
They're really cute.
They live throughout Southeast Asia and in Africa,
and their main distinguishing feature
is this armor of scales that are made of keratin,
and when the pangolin feels threatened, it rolls into a ball,
and even the largest predators aren't able to break that defense,
so it's really effective,
and it's made them so they have no natural predators.
But unfortunately, those very same scales
are worth more than the price of gold on the black market
for their use in traditional medicines in both China and Southeast Asia.
And you know, setting aside the importance of culture and tradition,
there simply aren't enough pangolins to fulfill that demand,
and they're being killed by the hundreds of thousands.
Hundreds of tons of pangolins are killed every year to fill this need.
And there's a really haunting image by Paul Hilton,
who is a wildlife conservationist and photographer,
and it shows thousands of dead pangolins
that have been discarded after having their scales removed.
So, this is a huge problem.
They joined tigers and elephants and rhinos
as species that are being pushed to the brink of extinction
through the illegal wildlife trade.
And we don't know how many pangolins are out there,
so we could see the loss of this species in the next 10 years even.
So there's a lot of things that are being done for pangolins.
One of the groups that I was able to work with a little bit
is the African Pangolin Working Group,
and they have a really unique way of assessing the supply of pangolins
while we're kind of waiting for hopefully a cultural shift in the demand.
So what they do is they set up stings,
where they pose as buyers for pangolin scales -
well actually, for live pangolins -
and they arrange a meet with poachers.
When those poachers show up, they're promptly arrested,
and they face some pretty serious jail sentences,
sometimes over 10 years.
The pangolin is then confiscated, and it's taken to a hospital.
Now, often these pangolins go through some pretty intense torture
while they're in the care of those poachers,
and so they have to recover from both physical and psychological trauma,
and that can take some time.
They also have to learn how to be a wild pangolin again.
And so I was able to go on a little walk with this pangolin,
who was in that process,
and he was learning how to find termites and ants again.
And once he completes that process -
I believe he's still going through it -
he'll be released back in the wild,
and the biologist with the African Pangolin Working Group
will continue to monitor his situation.
They're actually learning a lot about pangolin natural behavior
through this process.
And most importantly, they're setting a precedent for the poachers
and for the criminal organizations behind them:
that people really do care
and that pangolins aren't something that they can continue to take
without consequence.
They're also educating a lot of people
about an animal that not too many people know about.
Okay, moving on to an animal that I've been able to work with a lot -
polar bears.
Polar bears are an incredibly charismatic animal.
We've all heard about them.
But they unfortunately find themselves
in the crosshairs of the global climate crisis.
Polar bears are sea ice obligates.
This means that they rely on the sea ice for everything;
most importantly, they use it as a platform for hunting seals.
Without the sea ice, they simply can't catch seals,
and they're forced to wait on land and fast
and wait for the sea ice to refreeze.
So those fasting periods are getting longer and longer,
and with it, the polar bears are getting more malnourished,
and malnourished bears
means that they're having reduced cub litter sizes, fewer cubs,
and we're even starting to see die-offs in adults.
Some of the world's leading polar bear biologists
think that there's the possibility
we lose the species in the next hundred years
if things don't change.
So that's saying, like, my grandkids
might grow up in a world without polar bears,
which is really devastating.
Luckily, there are some things that are being done for polar bears.
While we're kind of tackling this huge climate crisis,
there are certain problems
that are affecting populations of polar bears
that we can work on.
And I was able to work on one of those projects
both with Brigham Young University and Polar Bears International,
where we were looking at ways that we could protect polar bears
that decide to den and raise their cubs
near oil industry.
So, that project took place in northern Alaska,
which if you've never been to northern Alaska,
it's a really hard place to work.
I've seen temperatures of -55 degrees Celsius.
With the windchill, it gets a lot colder than that.
I've gotten frostbite on most of my fingers,
and once I even froze my eyeball completely solid.
Lost my eyesight.
Had to, like, frantically put my palm on my eye
and wait for it to thaw out,
and luckily it did, and twitch for like two months after that,
which was super annoying,
but I got my eyesight back.
Thankfully, you know, I was able to work, though,
in a really incredible environment:
I got to see the northern lights multiple times,
I got to see incredible wildlife like these musk oxen or this arctic fox,
and of course, I got to work with polar bears.
Our project specifically was looking at ways
that we could both create and enforce rules
for polar bears that decide to den near oil industry.
And those rules were put in place
to help the oil industry give these bears the space that they needed
so that they had the best possible chance of raising their cubs to adulthood.
So this is a bear that decided to den right next to some industry stuff;
and we shut everything down, gave her the space she needed,
and she raised this cub and was able to take it out on the sea ice.
So now we're going to talk a little bit about African Wild Dogs,
another animal that I was able to work with.
They're a wild species of dog,
they live throughout Sub-Saharan Africa,
and they're pack hunters.
They're incredibly good at it.
They're not just pack hunters,
but every animal in that pack
has a dynamic role and they all fill it super well.
These wild dogs -
they're also called "painted dogs" -
they have success in about 80% of their hunts.
So, for comparison,
lion prides will have success in about 30% of their hunts.
So they're incredibly successful predators,
which unfortunately puts them
at direct odds with another successful predator,
which is us.
Competition for game, livestock depredations, habitat loss
and disease transference from domestic dogs
has led to huge declines in wild dog populations.
The range used to extend throughout Africa,
and now they're confined to a few strongholds,
and we have less than 6,000 wild dogs left in the world.
They're critically endangered.
Now, again, I was able to work with a group
that's doing some really interesting and fascinating wild dog research.
And what they're doing
is they're taking dogs from these strongholds,
where they're doing really well.
They'll take females from one and males from another,
and then they combine them
and put them in a place where they historically existed
to form a new pack.
And it's a wild dog range-expansion project.
Now, it's not as simple
as simply taking them from one place and another place
and putting them together and hoping that they're friends.
If you did that, they literally would kill each other
as soon as they came out of the sedation.
So, they have a really fascinating method
for making sure that pack gets established.
And what they do -
you'll have to watch that Mission Wild show I told you guys about
to see the whole process -
but what they do
is they take each female and they take each male
and they physically rub them together,
and I've got to do this.
When they're sedated,
you're rubbing them together,
and you're putting their spit on each other,
and you're just making sure
they smell as much as they possibly can like the other dogs.
That way, when they wake up,
they recognize, or they see these dogs that they don't necessarily recognize,
but they can smell them on themselves
and they think, "Okay, maybe this is a friend.
I guess I won't kill it."
(Laughter) (Applause)
You laugh, but it really does work,
and this Endangered Wildlife Trust group
and my friend Cole,
who's working on this project,
have seen some great success with their range expansion project.
So, this begs the question why.
You know, why should we care about wildlife?
It's 2019.
We're all emotionally exhausted.
We all only have so much emotional bandwidth.
So why wildlife, you know?
Why support biologists that are crawling into bear dens
and freezing body parts they didn't know they could freeze?
Why care about an animal
you just learned existed five minutes ago?
So I think there's multiple answers to that.
But I think, you know, you have the ecology
where each and every animal occupies a role in its ecosystem,
and when you take that animal out of that role,
it can really create huge effects that we don't necessarily understand
until that animal's gone.
But I think even more importantly is how animals affect us as people
and how they're important to the human condition.
You know, there's wild spaces that are endlessly important to us
because they teach us a lot about the complexities of life and joy,
and those wild spaces just aren't wild anymore
when you remove their inhabitants.
I was lucky enough to grow up in bear country,
and some of the wildest places I've been
were homes to really big populations of bears.
When you're hiking around bear country,
you have to really pay attention to your surroundings;
and because of that, all your senses are heightened
and, you know, your smell's heightened,
the colors are brighter, the air is crisper,
and it really puts you in touch with nature
in a way that you can't normally get.
I really can only get those feelings
in places that are home to these wild populations of animals.
It's something that really connects you to the natural world,
and it's endlessly important.
And I think we've failed as the most intelligent beings on Earth
if we let these species disappear,
and I think, you know, we're forfeiting up something
that evolution has taken millions of years to create,
and to me that's like losing the most precious works of our literature.
But luckily, there really is still so much more to preserve and protect,
and you don't have to be a wildlife biologist to do it.
So I have a few tips for people
that can help you in this fight to save wildlife.
So one of them is just to think about the way that you spend your money.
Try to do your research,
and don't contribute to these companies
that are contributing to these kind of problems:
wildlife trafficking, habitat loss, climate change.
Do your best to avoid giving those companies your money,
and then they'll see where your priorities lie,
and they'll try and meet those desires.
Next, and I think probably most importantly,
is we need to elect politicians that care about the health of our planet.
And, you know, we have politicians in place
that might not understand the crisis that we've created
or care to understand it,
and we need to replace them
with politicians that know and understand the science.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause continues)
Finally, I think getting out into nature and kind of reforging those contacts,
reforging that emotional connection to nature,
is really important.
If you live in the city, go to a park.
If you can get to a national park, go.
If you can get to the wilderness, go.
And when you reforge that connection,
you'll start to care about it naturally,
and you'll naturally make the decisions to protect it.
And my job would be impossibly depressing without hope,
but by seeing people like yourselves here,
educating yourselves,
it gives me hope for the future of wildlife
and for the future of humanity.
Thank you.
(Applause)