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

Summary

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The MeatEater Podcast

Episode 814: Photographing Wolf Kills, Underwater Beavers, and Other Impossible Shots
Host: Steven Rinella
Guest: Ronan Donovan
Release Date: December 29, 2025

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Main Theme

This episode features renowned wildlife photographer Ronan Donovan, known for his breathtaking images of beavers under the ice, Arctic wolves, and chimpanzees. Host Steven Rinella and Ronan discuss the obsession, logistics, and ethics behind capturing images of elusive wildlife behaviors, and how immersive storytelling can drive conservation and deepen human-nature connections.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Ronan Donovan

• Background: Wildlife biologist turned conservation photographer; National Geographic explorer and fellow.
• Notable Projects: “Kingdom of the White Wolf” for Nat Geo, and iconic underwater photography of beavers.
• [03:32] "Do I got that right?" — Steven introduces Ronan and sets up the discussion around wildlife photography.

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2. Underwater Beavers: Capturing the Impossible

• The Assignment: Capture beavers accessing their winter food cache beneath ice for a Nat Geo story on beaver ecology.
• Challenges: Took three winters to succeed due to murky water, timing, and beaver sensitivity to disturbance.
  • First winter: missed the window, ice was melting, water was filled with sediment ([07:57]-[09:09]).
  • Developed a live-feed system using GoPros and lights drilled through the ice ([09:43]-[13:49]).
  • Stakeouts were lengthy and punishing: "For the Beaver one, maybe like 16 hours, something like that." ([18:53]).
  • Safety: warns about weak ice over beaver runs leading to falls through the ice ([26:06]-[26:50]).
• Result: Only a handful of keeper images after 100+ hours on the ice.
  • [22:06] "Trying to show. Because every stick in this picture, the beaver’s placed. And the idea that they engineer the landscape so profoundly..."
  • Beaver adaptations, lodge construction, and winter survival explained.
• Notable Quote:
  • [15:00] Ronan: "Like, I love that image. It's the beaver with a stick in its mouth and a curved tail... But for people 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."
• See also: Safety discussion about thin ice over beaver runs ([26:06]); falling through the ice anecdotes ([29:03]).

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3. From Troubled Youth to Biologist

• Background: Ronan shares his difficult youth: multiple felonies at 13, saved from juvie by outdoor wilderness therapy (Outward Bound–style program).
  • [30:00] "How bad? I got a couple felonies. Yeah. When I was 13."
• Transformation: Wilderness experiences set him on a new path; later studied business, then environmental science and wildlife biology ([40:53]).
• First field gig: Spotted owl surveys in Yosemite, sparking his love for wild, intact ecosystems ([41:07]-[44:05]).

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4. Chimpanzee Behavior and Predation in Uganda

• Field Work: Lived a year in Uganda, documenting chimpanzee societies for research and Nat Geo ([44:45]-[51:03]).
• Behavioral Insights:
  • Chimps are territorial, social, and hunt in groups — sometimes as a coordinated pursuit.
  • Describes a graphic chimp hunt: "This picture is of a group of female chimps...tearing apart the remains of a red colobus monkey." ([46:41])
  • On observing chimps border patrolling quietly, hiding from humans:
    • [52:23] "And do the chimps hold tight when they're hiding?" Ronan: "Yep. They just watched. They knew what they were doing."
  • Chimp physical power: "Chimps, roughly, it's like five times our strength. Their bone density is roughly twice as dense." ([53:10]).
• Debates and Fascinations: Group muses on primate strength and violence, Phil's "big ape guy" segment is a lighthearted highlight ([61:25]).

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5. Wolf Photography in the High Arctic

• Setting: Ellesmere Island, Canadian Arctic — a land that feels "stuck in time" ([75:17]).
• Behavior: Wolves here are unafraid and curious due to lack of human persecution; often approach photographers.
  • [77:08] "That's their main deal — they want to play keep away with you, like, straight up..."
  • Anecdote: A wolf stealing his $10k camera, leading to a chase—only “fun while you’re chasing.” ([78:05]).
• Logistics: Months-long expeditions, living and camping on the land, following wolves on ATVs for weeks at a time ([80:14]-[81:03]).
• Wolf-Hunt Observations:
  • Wolves’ muskox hunting: calculated, sometimes brutal ("doesn't feel good...anything that doesn't die quickly" – [88:33]).
  • Muskox defense: forming an unbreakable rosette; calves are preferred wolf targets ([91:13]).
  • Wolves’ rest: "Once they kill, it's basically hides in 12 hours... they chill for like 15 hours" ([92:32]).
  • Physical proximity: claims of being at arm's length from wolves at times ([93:24]).

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6. Reflections on Conservation, Storytelling, and Animism

• Shifting Focus: Ronan is moving beyond collecting rare images to exploring how photos and stories can build connections between people and wild lands or animals, and promote conservation ([105:55]-[113:32]).
• Philosophy:
  • Emphasizes human health, sacredness of nature, and ceremony.
  • Encourages animism: “Animism is like a human right... ceremony is as well.” ([109:54])
  • Documents tribal projects reacquainting people with buffalo, ceremony, and wild places.
• Tension & Progress: Discussion on modernity, indigenous knowledge, and material culture vs. lost intangible traditions ([116:29]-[120:32]).
• Notable Quote:
  • Steven: "Oftentimes the way that it moves is... like a writer is going to do a thing, let’s find a photographer to go along with it. Do you have... the power where you could say, 'There’s an image I’d like to get — it’s so good you ought to find a writer'?" ([121:26])
  • Ronan: "Yeah, I mean, that happens. I don’t claim to be... of that prowess, but the Nat Geo stories, I’ll pitch something and then they’ll assign a writer..."

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7. Wildlife Photography as Livelihood

• Economics:
  • Work is mainly assignment-based (Nat Geo Magazine, grants); “all-in” budgets may stretch over years ([96:58]-[97:32]).
  • Pressure to deliver: if images don’t pan out, future work suffers ([98:39]).
  • On impossible or misunderstood assignments: humorous anecdote about being sent to photograph “the man who swims with beavers”—which turned out to be an exaggeration ([101:03]-[103:20]).
• What’s Left to Capture?
  • Dream shot: “a mountain lion coming in from the tree, jumping on the back of a bull elk…” ([123:34])
  • Recently spotted a family of cougars near his home ([124:16]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Stubborn Image–Making:

  • "[It] took like three winters of trying." — Ronan ([08:01])
  • "How many hours you spent on the ice? ...Probably over a hundred." — Ronan ([25:29])

• On Chimps’ Strength and Violence:

  • "Their move is they dig... They glove you, they take your fingers off. And for men, they rip off your balls." — Ronan ([54:19])

• On Human & Wolf Domestication:

  • "I look behind me, [Graymane's] coming and the other wolves are coming behind him, and I realized... this is what we've done for a long time. This is how this would have started domestication." — Ronan ([84:02])

• On Conservation and Documenting Ceremony:

  • "Animism is like a human right. And I think ceremony is as well." — Ronan ([109:54])
  • "Hundreds of people show up. And it's like, that's it to me in a lot of ways." ([114:07])

• Fun Exchanges:

  • [61:25] Phil: "Big primate guy, big ape guy, big primate... I can show you tons of ape images on my phone."
  • [122:38] Phil: "You could take an 8th grade essay and attach it to that and somebody’d be like, this is the best thing I've ever read."

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Topic | Speakers | Timestamp | |-------------------------------------------------|------------------|------------| | Intro to Ronan Donovan | Steven, Ronan | 03:32 | | Beaver Challenge: Three Winters for a Shot | Ronan | 07:57-15:00| | Under-ice Stakeout, Beavers, Safety | Ronan, Steven | 18:45-26:50| | Ronan’s Troubled Youth, Wilderness Therapy | Steven, Ronan | 30:00-40:53| | Biologist Years, Yosemite, Early Photography | Ronan | 41:07-44:05| | Chimp Society & Predation in Uganda | Ronan | 44:45-51:03| | Chimp Power, Hunting, Primate Fascinations | Steven, Phil | 53:10-62:25| | Arctic Wolves, Stealing Cameras, Following Packs| Ronan, Steven | 75:17-86:22| | Wolf Hunts: Muskox Prey, Watching a Kill | Ronan, Steven | 88:03-93:00| | Economics of Wildlife Photography | Ronan, Steven | 96:58-98:56| | What’s the Dream Shot? Mountain Lion Kills | Ronan |123:34-124:16| | Philosophy: Animism, Ceremony, Reconnection | Ronan, Steven | 105:55-114:07|

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Further Resources

• Ronan Donovan’s Work: ronandonovan.com
• Instagram: @ronan_donovan
• Traveling Museum Exhibit: "Wolves"—comparison of Yellowstone and Arctic wolves
• Recommended Books: "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer, "Pretty Shield," "Eagle Voice Remembers"
• Animus Valley Institute: For rewilding and nature-based ceremony (see [107:58])

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a masterclass in field biology, wildlife photography, and immersive conservation storytelling, blending Ronan’s technical challenges, close encounters, and reflections on the bigger role of stories in rekindling respectful relationships between humans and wild places.

To view Ronan Donovan’s photography and ongoing projects, visit ronandonovan.com and follow on Instagram.

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Transcript

[Ronan Donovan]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

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[Ronan Donovan]

And if you need help, we could.

[Steven Rinella]

Recommend a shop for you. Ask for O'Reilly Veriscan today. Auto parts.

[Ronan Donovan]

Foreign.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

You can't predict anything. Brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no compromise. Gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light.com that's F I R S T L I T.com joined today by wildlife photographer extraordinaire Ronan Donovan. If you ever. I don't know man, when. If you ever look at National Geographic, right, or stuff like that, or some super like amazing wildlife image that pops up and it makes its way all over the place. 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 muskox pictures which were everywhere for a while. That's this guy, the wildlife biologist turned photographer filmmaker, did Kingdom of the White Wolf for Nat Geo Film series. He's a National Geographic explorer and storytelling fellow and describes Himself as a conservation photographer. Do I got that right?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, it all sounds great.

[Steven Rinella]

And what we're talking about is who intro to us was one of our camera guys who's a vision, who paints his pictures with visual imagery, Rick Smith. And I was talking about how me and Rick get in a lot of fights. One of the biggest fights I've gotten about with Rick Smith was about a white T shirt. We were filming one time and we were in Hawaii, and I had on a white T shirt. Rick's like, you can't film in a white T shirt. And I said, watch me. And we got in a fight about it. I wore the white T shirt. And to this day, when I see that footage, I'm like, wow, you really can't wear a white T shirt.

[Team Rubicon Representative]

You can't do it.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Phil]

The camera guy would write about the visuals.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Ronan Donovan]

Our.

[Steven Rinella]

We have another guy, Seth, who comes on the show all the time. And Seth and Rick aren't exactly aligned on certain political issues.

[Crin]

Say that 10 times.

[Steven Rinella]

For instance, Covid respond. They had very different views on what would be an appropriate response to Covid. And my God, did 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, you just hear those two like, Yeah, me and Rick about came to blows over white T shirts. But he. He introduced us, and here you are.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

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 his irrigation ditch, but then they drained the ditch. And I was explaining they make mistakes. Like, he thought he was cool and could build like an under the ice environment here.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because he's planning on for four months, whatever. Yeah, he's planning on. He's trying to figure out, how can I live where I Never go into the open air. And then you drained his spot.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Now he's in a tough position. That's a tough position because he's got to strike off cross country in the winter.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

I was like, he made a bad mistake.

[Ronan Donovan]

Probably not long for this.

[Steven Rinella]

He made a bad mistake, and then he's gonna be like, get killed by a yard dog.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, yeah. Cougars, whatever it is. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

The assignment came through, and it was with the writer, Ben Goldfarb, who's great.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

You should totally have him on.

[Phil]

Really?

[Ronan Donovan]

He's really interesting. He's presented in Bozen a few times. Great science communicator. Funny, easygoing guy, and very well researched on all things beaver. And he's got a new book that was about Crossroads, which is also another interesting topicology. But, yeah, he.

[Steven Rinella]

One of our colleagues, Mark Kenyon, had him on his show. Yeah, about the road stuff.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Crin]

Oh, there he is with Dan Flores.

[Steven Rinella]

Yes.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yep. Small. There you go.

[Crin]

I mean, there's a picture of it.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, I'm sure there are buds.

[Crin]

You can tell.

[Phil]

Sounds like you're late to the.

[Steven Rinella]

He needs a haircut. Let me see that.

[Crin]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, that's Dan.

[Crin]

That's Dan.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, so go on.

[Ronan Donovan]

So, yeah, the story got pitched, and it was kind of like a benefit of beavers on dry landscapes, kind of a story 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 accessing their winter food cache. And it took, like, three winters of trying.

[Steven Rinella]

Are you serious?

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Let me. I just want to tell people.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

If you're listening, you're screwed. No, we're going to do our damn. We're going to do our.

[Phil]

No, it'll be a rich.

[Steven Rinella]

Yes. This is mostly. The vast majority of our audience only listens. Okay, I'm sorry.

[Phil]

And they'll still have a wonderful experience.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Crin]

Yes, please do.

[Steven Rinella]

You'll see the image.

[Crin]

Time to do it.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Phil]

Meteor Podcast Network. YouTube channel.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Not the regular media. Yeah, Meteor podcast network. If not, I'll do my best to say what you're seeing here is a beaver.

[Ronan Donovan]

This is a beaver underwater.

[Phil]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Tell me why.

[Ronan Donovan]

Scheduling, basically. I started in.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, no, no, too late. Like, the ice is running.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. March. Okay. So it was like a warm March. And it was. Everything was starting to melt. And so you get runoff and you get sediment buildup in the water column, basically. And I was at the site along the Rocky Mountain front in depuyere, just this cool little ranch that's up against public and was putting this system under the ice. And it's this whole elaborate setup where it's like, I gotta drill test holes. Just a small little chainsaw hole through the ice to put a GoPro underwater with a light to be able to just, like, parasite, see what's going around and see what's going on. Like, where. What's the underwater world like?

[Steven Rinella]

Do you mind if I real quick tell people something?

[Ronan Donovan]

Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

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 it takes them a while to realize they don't need to do all this. They're like, oh, we got to make a food cash. Yeah, the beaver's 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 until he realizes he doesn't need to go through all this. Yeah.

[Phil]

It's like someone who grew up in the Great Depression.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Phil]

Stuff and cash in their mattress, you.

[Steven Rinella]

Know, like, why does my mom clip.

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Crin]

Boarding.

[Steven Rinella]

So a beaver. So this is. This is about the north. A beaver needs to have deep water. They like deep water anyways. That's where they escape. But they need to have deep water in the winter because everything's going to freeze. So they'll have a lodge or a bank den with a submarine entrance where they can Come in a hole underwater and then go up into a cav that they excavate out of a riverbank or the shore of a lake or whatever. Or they create a dome shaped lodge and they have a cavity in there that is somewhat insulated. And they can live up in there for food because they can't get out of the ice until they. They're very good at busting up through the ice. But when they can't get out of the ice, they start collecting all kinds of twigs and small things, willow, whatever they get that they like. And they weighed it down with big heavy logs so that it pins it all down. And then throughout the winter they can just go to this cache. And then they usually have the cache right in front of their lodge or right in front of their bank den. And usually skirting in on the left or right side, they have a Runway and an entrance up into their hut or bank den. And that's their food pile. And a food pile can be the size of a parked truck.

[Phil]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And there's a surface plate, like you can spot them until you get a couple feet of snow. You can spot the food cache, but it's like an iceberg for whatever's sticking up. What's the formula with the iceberg? Like 10% of it or something?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. 30, 70, something like that. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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 6, 8ft of water. Because they excavate all that mud out to build that lodge and it creates this big deep pool and that's their refuge if, like under the ice where their caches. So trying to get a picture one going about his business down there is what we're talking about.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Trying to set it stage.

[Ronan Donovan]

It's a good setup. Yeah, I think it is. I mean, it's like one of the coolest things that an animal does in the way of like caching food for months and months. Like, there aren't very many other animals that can do that. Like, you know, a lot of carnivores cache, but they get discovered pretty quickly by birds or other carnivores. But like, beavers have this thing where they're able to just store. Yeah. Way north like in Alaska or edge of the Arctic. I mean it's like. Yeah. Six months plus of food that they need to cache in this form of. And it's just the cambium, like it's just this little tiny bit. And they're mainly just. I think a lot of it's just maintenance, you know, where they're just like feeding the micro gut biome in their stomach enough to like alive versus like I don't know if they necessarily are gaining weight. It's just kind of like a maintenance thing. And so these beavers that I was focused on trying to get these pictures, like the beginning, it was just murky water sediment you'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 hills coming in. Yeah. So the first one like picture now. Yeah. The next couple pictures here, Phil.

[Steven Rinella]

So that's your setup.

[Ronan Donovan]

That's the setup. Yep. That's kind of the crazy light setup. Underwater camera, live feed to a laptop. And you know, beavers are mainly nocturnal and that was what I was going on. So it's basically a lot of cold nights doing that.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yep. It's great idea.

[Phil]

It looks like a ice fishing setup.

[Crin]

Without the shanty to keep you warm.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Let me hit you with one thing about this. Just because it's 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 ax and holes through the ice.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And they're already pretty lethargic. In the winter you might not see activity three or four days because they spook so bad.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

They were pretty curious even like. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, really? Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. Because they. They're basically.

[Steven Rinella]

That's the first night. The first year.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, I'd be happy with that.

[Ronan Donovan]

Well, yeah.

[Phil]

Working on different sets of standards here.

[Steven Rinella]

Steve. The pose is cool.

[Ronan Donovan]

Like I love that image. It's the beaver with a stick in its mouth and a curved tail. Like you can kind of tell it's a beaver. But the people that are listening, it's just like a. You could just throw a Whole bag of gravel and sand and. And mud into the frame. And you can kind of see a beaver through it with the ice on top.

[Phil]

It could also be a rat that.

[Ronan Donovan]

Had drowned in here. If you think it could be a rat or a beaver, then my editors are going to be like, that's not going to work.

[Steven Rinella]

So they're like, so that's like a dead rat in your tub. Yeah, exactly.

[Ronan Donovan]

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 cash already and they were already getting access out of the ice.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They'll start going and pressing. Yeah. Up with their head and body to start trying to find any way to bust out. Because everybody says they get sick of it. Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

I mean, you can see this is all like sediments on top of the sticks. And I was. So this is, this was learning curve for me. Was like way too late. The beavers were already actually doing more excavation up creek. So I would literally be there watching at night get through all that set up, be freezing my ass off, and then see like a brown wall come through the frame and realize that there was a beaver up creek. Just like digging, excavating. Yeah. Just doing a bunch of stuff and then it's done for the night. There's like no settling at all.

[Steven Rinella]

And you see like all kind of trout blasting by.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, you'd see some trout. So this site had some really good brook trout. Next picture you can see same kind of sight. Beaver coming by, being curious. Getting closer, getting closer. So this was the first year.

[Crin]

Are you manually.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, this is all triggered.

[Crin]

You're like, oh, okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, really? It's live?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, it's live.

[Steven Rinella]

Live. But it'.

[Ronan Donovan]

It is. Yeah, yeah, it's a live feed. So it's not like, like a motion triggered camera system that are like camera traps that I use for photographing wolves or other things. Bears where you're not there at all for those pictures, but for this. Yeah, I'm there. That laptop setup is. I'm seeing what's happening. I have ambient lights that are constant, that are low.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

So I have a. I can see what's coming in the frame. I can see the beaver coming in. And then I trigger the actual camera.

[Steven Rinella]

So all these. You're like, you're hit. You're like wham.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I just assumed when I saw the images. Yeah, when they came out.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Nice. Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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 meant 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ronan Donovan]

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 a top side. So this was a whole system that developed with this guy, Tom o' Brien at National Geographic Photo Engineering.

[Steven Rinella]

What was the longest stakeout you ever did?

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

I mean, how many hours? Sorry, how many hours? I would do like stakeout.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Single stakeout.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

It's long sit.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Are you serious?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You'd make a good ice.

[Phil]

There's a bunch of Wisconsin deer hunters and the hair on their neck is standing up right now.

[Ronan Donovan]

Six or seven pictures filling your back.

[Steven Rinella]

He's wasting a lot of talent. Yeah. Because he could be a phenomenal ice fisher. How long you been here? Sixteen hours.

[Ronan Donovan]

I've never. I think I've been ice fishing once. That's all I needed. Yeah, that picture here, this was like the 3.0 setup. So I Had like a little kind of like high tech hobo camp. Had a little bit of weather protection there.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, he's got. I see two by fours. I see walled aluminum. I see a beaver lodge. I see a ridge rest, a tarp tent. Yep. Tons of wires.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

So you're moving to, you're. You're picking your beaver ponds based on clarity.

[Ronan Donovan]

Only that basically. And I realized too, you're like, I.

[Steven Rinella]

Need beavers in a clear spot.

[Ronan Donovan]

And the pond, like I initially was like, I'm gonna start a pond. It's gonna be great. They're gonna be contained. I know where they are. You can see the cache. But the pond, the sediment in the pond is crazy. Like it never settles and there's all these tannins. There's no water flow. Basically. Like you think of like, you know, Great Lakes area. Those ponds are brown tea water essentially.

[Steven Rinella]

And then just the nature of a beaver pond. Yeah, you could have like a crystal clear trout stream and then you get in to the dam like, like dams that. Beaver ponds have a very short life cycle because they set, they, they load up with sediment so fast. They're like, they're a sediment trap.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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 like put it around your eyes and you can kind of see what's going on.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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, sediment whenever they go by.

[Steven Rinella]

And in some ways, you take that as a bad sign. Like if you chop a hole and look down in there and you can see the runs have sediment, It's a sign that they're in there.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So if it's too clear, you might be like, oh, right, what's happening?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, there's no activity. Yeah. So this site was great. And that was the picture that ended up being the one that we selected. And.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. God, that's awesome, man.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. Just trying to show. Because every stick in this picture, beaver's placed. And the idea that they engineer the landscape so profoundly that they create this, as you said, refugio for themselves throughout the winter where they can stay safe and fat and happy and warm. I mean, the structures of lodges are basically like adobes. They mud them. They make them incredible.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

So this beaver right here, is he. Did you catch him drawing. Is he drawing that off the feed pile, or is he still working on the feed pile?

[Ronan Donovan]

Drawing that off.

[Steven Rinella]

So the feed pile, he's nabbing that out of his feed piles on the.

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

So he's taking that sucker up in.

[Ronan Donovan]

There to take it in for a.

[Steven Rinella]

Snack, little grocery, and then he'll boot it back out.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yep, exactly. Come and discard it.

[Steven Rinella]

So that. That big pile below him of all those sticks that have had the bark stripped off, that's all stuff he's kicked out of his lodge. But he's going up in there because he's got to get up into a thing you don't think about.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He can't eat underwater. Right. He's got to drag that stick up in somewhere and find a little pocket up in a bank, den, or lodge to chew it.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

What's cool, too, is how if you catch one on land, you know, he's very vulnerable.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean, you can pick him up by the tail. I don't recommend it, but been 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 is kind of his. But you look at that sucker in the water, it looks like a porpoise.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean, so graceful. Yeah. Yeah.

[Phil]

I mean, there's no straight line on there. Just all curves and.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, they swim fast. And, you know, human Olympian can swim underwater, and they just do it. That little flick at the tail, it was amazing how fast they would. Because they're pretty slow. Like, generally under the water, they're not unless they're scared. They're just kind of, like, cruising. And there's a previous picture where they're kind of, like, torpedoing, where it just kind of, like, do a little tail flick and then just. Just tuck and just be perfectly buoyant in the middle of the water column.

[Steven Rinella]

Let's see a couple more crews, I think. Are these all the beaver ones?

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

I wanted to see more of your, like, total keepers.

[Ronan Donovan]

I mean, I just showed two.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So in the end, you don't have, like, 20 that you're super happy with?

[Ronan Donovan]

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, really water clarity and. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So how many hours total, if you.

[Ronan Donovan]

Had to just take a ballpark, spent.

[Steven Rinella]

How many hours you spent on the ice?

[Ronan Donovan]

On the ice? It was probably. Probably over a hundred.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Less than 100. But not too far away.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's a. See, that's a. That's like a deadly. We should do a public service announcement.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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. Yeah. And also they're exhaling underwater. They're blowing bubbles and all those bubbles freeze into the ice. But often I will tell, like I'll be out messing around with my kids. I'll be like, watch your ass in front of that lodge because there's gonna be bad ice.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, it is a danger.

[Steven Rinella]

And it's from them just whirling around.

[Ronan Donovan]

There, whirling around, just keeping it stirred up. Just like a little agitation in the water column that keeps it like that. Yeah. I mean, when you.

[Steven Rinella]

So you were punching your boots when.

[Ronan Donovan]

You fall in like up to your elbows like those times. And with chest waiters, that gets sketchy too. And. Yeah, but yeah, most of the time I didn't lose any gear, thankfully, which was the thing that I was kind of most worried about. Even stuff like melting through the ice during that, during that warmer section like that one that I was in, in March, I went into April too, and it was like full on runoff.

[Steven Rinella]

It was.

[Ronan Donovan]

I was doomed.

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[Jenna Kim Jones]

Breaking news, everybody. Not everything is terrible. I repeat, not everything is terrible. The ripple effect with genekim Jones is proof that the Internet, it hasn't ruined humanity entirely.

[Team Rubicon Representative]

Let me start by saying it's a great day to be a gray shirt team Rubicon. You know, it truly is a team. Those folks, myself included, all had one desire, which is helping folks in disaster. Trying to be a little Bit of hope in a really, really bad situation.

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[Crin]

We give just that nugget of hope helping other people. For some of our gray shirts, it's.

[Ronan Donovan]

During a time when they need help.

[Steven Rinella]

And by helping others, it helps them.

[Jenna Kim Jones]

Listen to the ripple effect with Jenna Kim Jones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

Growing up the Great Lakes, like, we spent a lot of time on the ice, and I would kind of categorize my head. When someone said they fell through the ice, it would be. Did you get your hair wet?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. That's a good.

[Steven Rinella]

And there's only. I only fell 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?

[Ronan Donovan]

That was spooky.

[Steven Rinella]

That's a big fall through.

[Ronan Donovan]

That's a big.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

But, yeah, total. 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 Crin's notes. You were like a troublemaker when you're a little kid.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Troublemaker.

[Ronan Donovan]

How bad? I got a couple felonies. Yeah. When I was 13.

[Steven Rinella]

Is there such a thing?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, yeah. They can charge you and then. Doesn't necessarily mean.

[Steven Rinella]

So a real bad troublemaker.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Were you brought up poor?

[Ronan Donovan]

Not poor, no. No.

[Steven Rinella]

We just a rebel.

[Ronan Donovan]

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 of the Landers, but not hippies. Mom had her master's in teaching and dad was in Vietnam combat.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, your dad was.

[Ronan Donovan]

And then came home and. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

He did. I mean, he's. He's very well adjusted with it now. I think in a lot of ways. He's very open talking about anything. But for a long time, no, he just bottled it Up. I mean, he drank a lot coming back. It was hard for him coming back. He was in San Francisco. He's driving cabs, kind of like sleeping out of the cab and just a hard time coming home. And people were just like, they didn't want to hear about it, man.

[Steven Rinella]

I grew up around. My dad was World War II guy, but I grew up around so many Vietnam guys. I don't know why there's such a. I don't know, just like. But you know, if I just think about in my area around our lake, like, it'd be like, Vietnam guy. Vietnam guy. Vietnam guy. And not knowing it now. Not. Not. Or sorry. Not knowing it then, but thinking back now and be like, oh, yeah, man. There was a lot of like, I was born in Sep. I was born in 74, dude. There was a lot of tension about that when I was a kid that you just, you know, your kid, you don't conceptualize everything.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I remember my dad saying, it's different for them. My dad 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.

[Ronan Donovan]

No.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's still. It's still like a palpable memory for that generation and those of us. Yeah. Raised by. My dad's definitely, I think has pts.

[Steven Rinella]

What. What year were you born?

[Ronan Donovan]

I was born in 83. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So he's like, it wasn't old. Like the war wasn't old.

[Ronan Donovan]

No, no, no. I mean. And it wasn't something he didn't start talking about until he went back, actually. I mean, he has like a beautiful relationship now with Vietnam and he's been back maybe like 15 times.

[Steven Rinella]

Kidding me.

[Ronan Donovan]

He has started NGO or. Yeah. Contribute 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, really?

[Ronan Donovan]

He was on those river patrol boats, like the Apocalypse now boats.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, My.

[Phil]

My father in law was the. Worked on one of the barges that service those boats. And he went back like two years ago to the village where they were anchored.

[Ronan Donovan]

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 internment 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, really?

[Ronan Donovan]

We went and met him, and, yeah, it was cool. The guy was. 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. It was very healing. It's been healing for my dad a lot in that world to go back and have that relationship.

[Steven Rinella]

But you ran pretty wild.

[Ronan Donovan]

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. The impetus for what I was doing, stealing stuff, was all about, like, how to fit in, like, how to be cool, how to try to get friends. And I just. I was bigger than most kids when I was younger, just taller, kind of fell into, like, a bully role and started to just, like, act out as a way of getting attention. It was like a negative feedback loop. And there was trouble at home. My parents got divorced. You know, there was some abuse, and I would act out in school. And then, like, stealing stuff just became, like, an easy progression. 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 rural Vermont, and people don't lock their car doors.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ronan Donovan]

And it was like middle school, spring break, walking around the town near where I grew up, and just, like, stealing stuff and then started stealing bigger things. The two felonies were. I broke into a truck and stole someone's shotgun. God. Some guy's, like, antique. It was like, his grandfather's shotgun. Feel bad about that still. He got it back.

[Steven Rinella]

That's good.

[Ronan Donovan]

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, doing stuff. And, like, breaking. Entering is like, an automatic, automatic felony. Yeah, that feels misdemeanor, like, and so much of it was, like, this idea around stealing.

[Steven Rinella]

Brian Harmon stuff, whatever.

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ronan Donovan]

Where they'll just, like, they'll build, push the boundaries because they're not given those guardrails necessarily. And so I was. Thankfully, my parents stepped in. My dad was now a bound instructor for years, like an outdoor experiential learning program, and was like, all right, we just gotta send Ronan to the wild again. And I grew up rural kid, you know, run around and we didn't hunt. Grown up. My dad didn't want to have guns around the house, but we didn't eat meat either. And I grew up vegetarian. We ate fish sometimes. But my parents sent me out to Oregon to this, like, wilderness therapy camp.

[Steven Rinella]

This is after you got in trouble?

[Ronan Donovan]

This is after I got in trouble, yeah. The courts, like, I had enough. I had the four misdemeanors and two felonies. And there's like a point system around if you, you know, do a certain number of things, you can have to go to juvenile detention center. If you do a certain amount, it could be the judge's discretion. And I was in that judge's discretion realm.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

The judge was satisfied with it.

[Ronan Donovan]

The judge was satisfied with that. We won't send them to juvie. Send him here and we'll reevaluate when he gets back. And so, yeah, I went out when I was 13. I had my 14th birthday under like a tarp tent. Like, it's kind of like a hoods in the woods idea where you're stripped down of, like, all your identifying possessions. We're wearing, like, fatigues, army surplus store stuff. And you're sleeping under just like a tarp tent. And I was the youngest kid. The rest were, yeah, 15, 16, 18 year olds and a lot of, like, hard. There were some hard dudes and there was co ed too. There were some women too, that were just from inner city world. And Just like, somehow found some way to get to this camp. And basically it was like putting you through a series of trials. You do like a week long physical intensive where there's 14 of us, and we would carry like a. We had two stretchers, wilderness stretchers we had to carry that had like 250 pounds of our gear and water and community supplies. And so seven of us would have to carry one, and the other seven would carry the other. You do. I think the first day we did like, less than a mile in, like, flat prairie of. Of southern southeastern Oregon. And then, you know, kind of got our stride a little bit, and we could do like, you know, six miles maybe in a day. And then you did a week long solo.

[Steven Rinella]

What's the. So I don't want to stay too long at this camp here. But what do 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. What? Why do they. Why can they not just say it? No. Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

But then what happens when you don't.

[Ronan Donovan]

Well, there's like, like, your. Your food and your kind of like the other group supplies are still ahead of you as well. So, like, you. You do kind of need. There is a motivation there.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ronan Donovan]

And then eventually the other, like, the kind of peer pressure comes in where, like, some of the kids are like, just do it. Just, let's just do this. Pick it up, do it, like, set it up. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, then you go to the next step up.

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ronan Donovan]

And they recommended to go to, like, the next step is these, like, private jails, essentially, for youth. They're called lockdowns. They're all over the country, and they require a certain level of affluence or money to be able to go to these Things because it's basically a boarding school. But you start at the lowest level and you work way up based on behavior to more freedom. And there's some of these programs that 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 very formed. Young person, got a teenager. So. Yeah, so I. That was one of the best things for me, was just going to this and that fit.

[Steven Rinella]

That fixed it.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. I mean, I didn't.

[Steven Rinella]

No more felonies.

[Ronan Donovan]

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 skipped eighth grade, went there. There's one other kid in my freshman class and my best friend there at the time, he. He had stolen cars. He grew up kind of inner city and he was stealing cars while we were there. And so I had all these opportunities. There were kids doing heroin in their rooms. It was stuff that I hadn't been exposed to when I was younger. And that change of being in the wild, essentially, it was realizing that I had no freedom. I was sent to this place and I was in trouble all the time and all I wanted was freedom. I was 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.

[Steven Rinella]

At what point did you decide you're going to study biology?

[Ronan Donovan]

That was. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. And what was your first gig in biology?

[Ronan Donovan]

First gig was doing spotted owl surveys in Yosemite National Park. So there was a fire ecology study. Basically. It was like how well the owls do in areas of burned versus unburned areas. Showed basically that there wasn't much of a change, that the owls are fire adapted. But the actual work was amazing. I mean, I grew up in Vermont, didn't have experience really in like the West. My dad brought me out to maybe a couple weeks I had in the Beartus and the Wind rivers, which was amazing. So I knew. I knew what wildness and like, the idea of an intact ecosystem and old growth forests and grizzlies and these places where wildness doesn't exist in New England in that way. And so being in Yosemite is like a. It's a dream for that. You have giant sequoias, you have huge, unbelievable landscapes. And we were. We would catch owls and ban them and monitor them throughout the. Throughout the summer and basically decide how many chicks they had. And that was kind of like the. The scope of the work. And so it'd be out camping, backpacking for 10 days on, four days off.

[Steven Rinella]

And were you into. Were you getting into photography at that point?

[Ronan Donovan]

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 photograph wildlife and the landscapes that I was like, photograph the beauty. If there was a telephone pole or a person or a car, I'd be like, there's no picture. I was super strict about it.

[Steven Rinella]

You didn't want any photos touched by man.

[Ronan Donovan]

No, I just thought, yeah, I got just enamored with. With these, like, the idea. And I think we all experienced it, this idea of, like, being in a ecosystem. It's almost like being around people that have a regulated nervous system. You know, like, we have these, you know, elders, I think, basically people who are like. You can't flap them. Like, they're just like, solid. Think about, like, I don't know any of these old timers you've been around who've seen the world and have been through hardships and are, I think, of 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 I. That's how I feel around, like, ecosystems that are. That are intact, that haven't been changed. When I say intact, hasn't been changed by, like, the modern expansion of 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 that first introduction to that.

[Steven Rinella]

So what was the work you did with chimps?

[Ronan Donovan]

Chimps? Yeah, there's picture we could pull up, it's kind of towards the end, but it's a canopy photo of chimps in a, in trees in, in Uganda. So I had a rain one lie.

[Steven Rinella]

Because there's a picture of some chimps outside the house.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, what's the lie?

[Steven Rinella]

Because it's man made, duh.

[Ronan Donovan]

Oh well that was early. Yeah, I mean, yeah, early.

[Phil]

I was still experimenting.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, I mean I showed you my high tech hobo camp. Yeah. Oh wow. The relationship to photography has changed a lot around.

[Steven Rinella]

What is that?

[Ronan Donovan]

That is a picture of chimps up in a canopy.

[Steven Rinella]

So what country are we in here?

[Ronan Donovan]

This is Uganda. So 2011 I had an opportunity to work as a field researcher for Kibale Chimpanzee Project. And they wanted me to use photography as the tool, photo video to basically create imagery around behaviors and so capturing different behaviors to create a catalog to better understand chimp behavior.

[Steven Rinella]

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?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, this is a cool tree. It's a big fig tree. We're on the equator, it's temperate, but it's rainforest at about a little over 4,000ft. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Now that I'm looking I see it's just draped.

[Ronan Donovan]

Isn't that crazy? 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 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Any pictures of that set up?

[Ronan Donovan]

Not in this deck, but you left the camera. Oh, wow.

[Crin]

You were physically there?

[Ronan Donovan]

I was there, yeah. Physically there, yeah. So that was all. Yeah. So these chimps.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, that's an incredible picture there.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

What's that dude got in his hand?

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ronan Donovan]

So this is stepping into some of the 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 as 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, it's because they're studied and most of the chimps have been around humans pretty much their whole life.

[Steven Rinella]

So is what they're holding onto there, that's a dead monkey.

[Ronan Donovan]

That's a dead monkey.

[Steven Rinella]

And the part of him that looks all gnawed on.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

What's that part?

[Ronan Donovan]

That's the part of the vertebrae poking through. So it's been broken off.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, so you happen to just catch it where you can't see where he's ripped apart.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. So this is. This went on for maybe 30 minutes. I saw the initial hunt.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. How'd they kill him?

[Ronan Donovan]

It's. It's super coordinated. Really interesting. So they'll be. They will go hunting, like they will.

[Steven Rinella]

Like me and Randall.

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

They border patrol quiet.

[Ronan Donovan]

They border patrol quiet.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Ronan Donovan]

And they do stuff where they, you know, they knuckle walk and they walk on the back pads of their feet and they'll be walking and you'll see them do like the like, pause where like one foot's up, one hand up.

[Crin]

Or they're like, like a pointing.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

Where they're listening and the other chimps know like, oh, I gotta listen. Yeah, it's just like a pointer where they're trying to just basically like key into something and pay attention and listen.

[Steven Rinella]

And so when they go, let's take the border patrol thing.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

It's not. So the community that I was with, they. I'd only been border patrolling with them a few times and one of the times was they were going to the edge of their border and this border was the border with like the human world, 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 to talk 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.

[Steven Rinella]

So what we're looking at is like a big block of forest with a very hard line where it goes into open cut areas.

[Phil]

Looks like you're flying over the Midwest.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

You're looking at where the woodlot butts up to the hay field.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

So they were going to patrol that. They're going to the edge of that.

[Ronan Donovan]

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. And so we're going out. It's three males that I'm with. They were all named. It was Johnny Big, Brown and Stout. Stout was like in his 60s. He was like this legendary old in his 60s. Chimps can live to be the 60s in the wild. They can live to the 80s in captivity. And so they're out moving. Johnny's up front and they just run a trail and it's just Me, the only human with them and they veer into the thick brush and I'm confused why they're doing that. And I, my job is to follow them and see what they're up to. So I'm on my hands and knees, crawling in, trying to get close to them and see what they're doing. I get up to them, the three of them are just sitting next to each other, just like, just chilling. They're not doing anything, which is confusing. Like it's mid morning and I sit with them. A couple minutes go by and then I hear human voices.

[Steven Rinella]

How close can you sit with them?

[Ronan Donovan]

Me to you?

[Steven Rinella]

What are you wearing?

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Phil]

But they've like accepted you as. Yeah, I mean they've presence in there?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, they've accepted me because they've been habituated by researchers for the 30 years prior.

[Steven Rinella]

They ignore you or they're, they acknowledge you?

[Ronan Donovan]

That. I mean that's the interesting thing about this situation where I'd only been there for like a month and so they didn't really know me, but I came with people that they know and they recognize faces better than we do. Like chimp facial recognition is, it's better than ours essentially. But you know, they, that's because again, territorial social animals, we need to be able to recognize very quickly friend or foe. Yeah, and chimps do that instantly too. And so they recognize human faces and so they knew I was cool just because I came with the other guys who were cool.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

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 him before I.

[Steven Rinella]

And they're just waiting, they're more keyed.

[Ronan Donovan]

Out, there's waiting it out. And so these guys come into view, they have no idea where they're, they pass by completely unaware the whole time. And I'm just sitting there next to the chimps.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Not turning their heads real fast or.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

But it was very much like they're on.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

They just rather go unnoticed. They just didn't want to, like, they wanted to carry on their day and not get scolded for potentially going the crop rating is what it seemed like they were doing. So that. That border patrol mentality, that was kind of what they were up to. And then they got to the edge of the forest, looked out across, mainly there's a tea plantation in this photo that you can see, which is a big kind of lighter green patch of 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.

[Steven Rinella]

If you got in a fight with one of them, he's going to beat your ass, huh?

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

They'll sink.

[Ronan Donovan]

The rest of the apes sink. And so that tells you a lot about, like, density, strength, muscle fiber, density. Like, all this. We traded kind of that robust ability to climb trees and be super burly for locomotion. And so, like, one of these chimps, people watched him. I wasn't there for it. He fell 80ft to the deck out of a tree and like, ran off into the woods. And then like, came back a couple days later and was like. Had like a little limp or something, but. But was all right. Yeah, they would mess you up. There's. There's stories I read about of, like, I don't know, in the 20s and have these, like, weird, like, traveling shows, sideshow things that would go to, like, county fairs and things. And there'd be like the pin the chimp game.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

And they'd have a chimp where they're like. I think that they took. They trimmed the claws way down or like. Yeah. Basically file them way off and then take the canines out and then you gotta.

[Steven Rinella]

And then mix it up with him.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Is that right?

[Phil]

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.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Phil]

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

[Steven Rinella]

And to pull the sack off a guy. Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

Take some force.

[Steven Rinella]

Do that.

[Crin]

No, I mean that would help us. Like you know, breaking down deer and stuff in the field.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, like chimp strength.

[Phil]

Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

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[Steven Rinella]

So let's talk about when they set out to go hunting.

[Ronan Donovan]

They.

[Steven Rinella]

There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a hunt leader, I'm. I'm assuming. And he strikes off. He knows where he's going.

[Ronan Donovan]

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. Takes a lot of energy to hunt for the meat. Takes a lot of, like, physical energy to move and to catch the monkeys that are fast. And so there's another community south of the one that I was, spent most of my time in called In Gogo, and it's this famous community. There's a documentary called Chimp Empire. It's fantastic. It's on Netflix. It focuses on that site. These researchers have spent 40 years studying that. And to your question, around, like, hunt leader, there was these, like, couple guys, couple chimps who were. They just loved 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.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

So it's worthwhile.

[Ronan Donovan]

So it's worthwhile. And there's opportunity and there's opportunities, 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. But then they'll be, they'll send up kind of these like, beaters, let's call them, that are like little smaller chimps maybe that'll go up. Younger chimps that still know what to do and they'll kind of try to flush them. Some of the big males will go up too.

[Steven Rinella]

So they hear. They hear or see Another monkey up working in a tree. Yep. And not the big dudes, but some other dudes.

[Ronan Donovan]

Sometimes the big dudes would go up and they would.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, how would, do you have any idea how they, how would it be conveyed? Like, hey, you go up there.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Decisions get made. I mean, they look to each other. You know, it's kind of like, like they gaze, follow, they look to each other. They look up. If one's looking up, they'll look to like, think of like dogs that look to you really quickly to make a decision. Yeah, that happens. I've seen 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 might do.

[Steven Rinella]

In trouble about this or not.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. Seen it with wolves, seen it with chimps, see it with gorillas. And in this situation, you know, it gets pretty crazy quick where you have 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 branches that are thinner.

[Steven Rinella]

You have.

[Ronan Donovan]

Oh, you have chimps that are breaking and lunging. I mean, it's like these guys are. Chimps are unbelievable athletes, of course. And they can jump and fly through the trees in a way that is just kind of terrifying to watch.

[Steven Rinella]

And sometimes those little monkeys would know, get out where. Try on something that they can't support and.

[Ronan Donovan]

But the chimps would even just jump, jump and like jump these big gaps. And a lot of times I saw where the chimps would grab a monkey and then chuck them down and then there'd be other chimps below. Oh. And then it's like then they would, they would deal with them then and.

[Steven Rinella]

Really?

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

The male out of the tree.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yep. Throw them down. Yep, yep.

[Phil]

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

[Steven Rinella]

You're a big ape guy. Oh, yeah. I don't know that. Never told me that. Can't be that big guy.

[Phil]

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

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

So I come to Phil yesterday. 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.

[Ronan Donovan]

We did.

[Steven Rinella]

About chairs.

[Phil]

The Chair company.

[Steven Rinella]

Check it out. So highly recommend big ape Apes didn't come up during yesterday's lunch, Steve. But they have come up multiple times.

[Phil]

I can show you tons of ape images on my phone. Big or anything. Guy, big gorilla guy, big chimp guy. Gives me not so much monkeys.

[Steven Rinella]

Crin you where.

[Crin]

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

[Steven Rinella]

I've got pictures of me.

[Phil]

They're behind glass, of course, but real big ape guy.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Phil]

No, I love this guy.

[Crin]

Ape guy. State guy.

[Phil]

One of my dreams. One of my dreams is to go watch apes in the wild. One of my wildest dreams.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, you sit next to the right guy.

[Phil]

I know, I know. That's what I'm saying.

[Ronan Donovan]

I'm.

[Phil]

I'm all fired up about this. I love it.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, they're amazing.

[Phil]

Chimp empire. Chimp crazy.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. You see Chimp empire, huh? So good.

[Steven Rinella]

You've got a shirt with a big monkey on it, Randall.

[Ronan Donovan]

Or a big primate of some.

[Phil]

Yeah, monkeys have tails.

[Ronan Donovan]

Sorry.

[Steven Rinella]

I have several shirts. Like entry level ape information.

[Phil]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Sound like an ape guy.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, sounds like an AP guy.

[Steven Rinella]

He's a big estate sale guy.

[Ronan Donovan]

Okay.

[Phil]

Renaissance man.

[Steven Rinella]

Some people say hot dogs, estate sales and apes.

[Phil]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I want to get to white wolves and musk ox. Let's. Let's talk a little about chimps when they catch it. Well, here's another question I got about this. Is it partially competition, the desire for them to kill the monkeys? Like, you know how wolves, they run into a coyote? If they can get them, they're going to get them. Because why have him Running around, you know, like, why have another guy out there killing stuff?

[Ronan Donovan]

I think it's. I think it's taste, like. I think it is both like the taste for meat and also they go for like the intestines and the undigested plant matter.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

Like kind of this like neon green plant matter.

[Steven Rinella]

So they kind of relish it.

[Ronan Donovan]

I think they. Yeah, I think that they seek it out. I think it is like a preference thing. I think.

[Steven Rinella]

To what degree do they. Do they eat it?

[Ronan Donovan]

Because like the competition thing, just to button that up, I think it's like there's so much food, like equatorial jungle monkeys eat leaves and also fruits. But it's like chimps can dominate the fruiting tree all day long. And like that tree that I was in in the previous picture, almost no monkeys came to it. Like a few.

[Steven Rinella]

They want it. They get it.

[Ronan Donovan]

They get it. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's kind of like maybe you can think of it as like grizzly bears around here versus brown bears up in coastal Alaska where it's like they don't fight too much about territory. There's so much abundance. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

So they'll eat just bone?

[Ronan Donovan]

No, they'll. They'll kind of be scraps, like hide scraps. That. That female monkey that was in the picture, she was pretty well cleaned up. And so this is the female chimps that got this afterwards. And the males, they go for the choice meets the organs. They'll go for the intestines, like I mentioned, lungs, liver, brain too. They'll crack open the skull.

[Steven Rinella]

How do they get into that skull?

[Ronan Donovan]

They just.

[Steven Rinella]

They can bite their way into it.

[Ronan Donovan]

Oh, yeah, yeah. So like, that's the cool thing about chimps, like human evolution. I don't know. We. There's a book called Catching Fire. Richard Wrangham, who's the man that I was doing this research for, he was at Harvard for his career. He studied under Jane Goodall. He has a great book called Catching Fire that is about, like, how cooking made us familiar with that word.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

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 attach to. So they can have a massive bite force. Chimps have that. A lot of apes have that. We don't. Our jaw muscles grow up just kind of like around our temple. If you just like, clench your jaw, you can just feel it above your temple. Chimps jaw muscles go up top so they can just like. Yeah, they can mow a skull if they need to. And chewing for, you know, six hours a day, something like that. And so they will pull out organs. And, you know, monkeys are alive for a lot of it, not a lot of it, but, like, the beginning to be a couple minutes in. And 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.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

No, this was in, like, a Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition that it won one of the commended awards a few years ago.

[Phil]

This is a surreal image.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

And no, I think it's like the other images are kind of. It's a group of chimps sitting around and there's a monkey in the middle. And it's like a little more like quieter of a scene. This one has some of that energy. There's emotion. There's obviously like, hands touching the monkey hands in a way. That female on the right is obviously warning and having a conversation with the. The chimp on the other side there. So I think that this image, to me, just brings a lot of the energy to the scene in a way that some of the other images didn't necessarily.

[Phil]

And the canines on that.

[Ronan Donovan]

Oh, yeah, the chimps. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So is that that monkey's tail sticking out?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, that's flapping down.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep. Got it.

[Crin]

Almost like it's just like. Like it's hide.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Crin]

It's holding it together, but it's wrapped.

[Ronan Donovan]

Around and they tore it apart after this. Like, it was in two pieces pretty quickly.

[Crin]

Is the bottom right like guts or ape?

[Phil]

It's a prolapsed anus.

[Crin]

Yeah, I was gonna say.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Crin]

Not part of that monkey.

[Ronan Donovan]

Not part of that Monday? No, no, that's just. They get a visual sign. A lot of apes get a visual sign, and primates in general, of when females are in estrus.

[Steven Rinella]

Did you ever hear that argument? This is a good one, man. Did you ever hear the argument that one of the things that leads to human monogamy and permanent occupation between a breeding male and female human is that there's no outward display. There's no outward display, so you have to always be around.

[Crin]

Interesting.

[Steven Rinella]

You can't time a male, can't time his comings and goings. Like you got to stick around, be there, present. There's no outward display and other males wouldn't look and know they can't look at a human female and know that she's an estrus. Does it make you uncomfortably talked about like a beast?

[Ronan Donovan]

No.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, good.

[Crin]

Those things don't bother me, you know.

[Steven Rinella]

Me like a beast.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, it was a good book, Sex at Dawn. Yeah, it just analyzes like the human sexual relationship from like.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, like why do we.

[Ronan Donovan]

Cheese.

[Steven Rinella]

That's a favorite. Rick. We talked about Rick Smith earlier. Remember one day we're talking about all this and Rick Smith said human. He was, he was talking about humans. Rick always likes to talk about humans. Like he's describing a wild animal and he said we're monogamous mostly. Yeah, we're a monogamous species mostly. Yeah, we strive toward it. There's a strong pull toward it. Yeah. You know.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Not monogamous.

[Ronan Donovan]

No, most apes aren't and most primates aren't. But they will do. They'll do these things called like concert ships where they'll like a male, a high ranking male, not even always hiring, but he'll try to like build a relationship with a female and then when she's at her peak cycle estrus, they'll like move out and go kind of like hide for a couple weeks and just be gone from the rest of the group. And then the rest of the males kind of lose their mind and try to find them, but most of the time they do. Yeah, yeah, they'll go on patrol.

[Steven Rinella]

And why do they want to find them?

[Ronan Donovan]

Because they want to breed. They want to breed her? Yeah, I mean the females, they want to be with every male possible.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yes, he'll take off with the female.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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, chimpanzees aren't that big, but that's, that's rare. Most of the time it's like, yeah, it's a. The top males will. But they'll share. It's not like the male will dominate.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ronan Donovan]

The, the breeding.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

They have no known paternity.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yes, correct.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

You did? Okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So even at this time, you recognize photography as a thing?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, I did. And I didn't know. I didn't know what my. Like, I didn't know how to tell stories. Like, I would just go for like one off pictures, you know? Okay. 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 Wrangham, he knew a photographer named Tim Layman, who was also a researcher turned photographer. He also did canopy work. He worked for National Geographic and sent Tim some of these pictures. And Tim was like, yeah, you should show these in National Geographic. Here's the name of the editor, Kathy Moran. Here's her email. Here's like two sentences attached to pictures and then a gallery link to maybe like 30 images. And then wait. So that was. Yeah, that was like 2011 is when I spent the year living in Uganda photographing the chimps for research. And then there was a couple years in between. I worked for like a production company out of the Midwest with a guy named Jeff Simpson, who's like a. He was like a whitetail hunter for a long time. Like a sitka athlete, whatever, whatever they call them.

[Steven Rinella]

And you took pictures of deer?

[Ronan Donovan]

I did like essentially like sponsored content videos with like Corey Jacobson and like Jim Hull 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

So that was after this.

[Ronan Donovan]

After this. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They had to seem pretty, like pretty tame, the people. No, I mean just the whole get up after coming out of Uganda.

[Phil]

A year in Uganda.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Chasing chimps.

[Ronan Donovan]

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 live in a research camp. You hear elephants at night and you would just put on your backpack and go out for the day and like follow chimps and see new things every day. I'm super into birds and it's just like a magical place for birds and reptiles. Amphibians. Yeah. Like, see these cool snakes and it was amazing. Yeah, I loved it.

[Steven Rinella]

Let's talk about the. The Arctic stuff. Phil, can you jump us to arctic stuff? Yeah. Ronan.

[Ronan Donovan]

Word is that at the beginning or the end here? Yeah, towards the end we could do maybe that like silhouetted wolf.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, scene. So. So where are we at here? What's going on? Like where are we at in your career and where are we at in. On the earth?

[Phil]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Because that could be a mammoth.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Phil]

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

[Steven Rinella]

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, nondescript shape of hair and horn. That was some great descriptive narration there. Yeah, I think, I think the audio.

[Ronan Donovan]

Only listeners will be pleased. Yeah.

[Phil]

They might be getting the better end of the deal.

[Ronan Donovan]

They might be.

[IBM AI Representative]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

I made it sound better than it is.

[Ronan Donovan]

So we are. We're at 80 degrees north. We are on the furthest northern landmass in Canada. It's called Ellesmere Island.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

And this photo's from 2018. So this is. Yeah, a couple years into my career, I think I officially started working for National Geographic in 2014 on a 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 Meech. And so cover image of National Geographic is like a white wolf kind of jumping between two ice floes. That was in the 80s, if you remember that one. And there were a couple other articles on it. And the draw to this place is that it is stepping back into that relationship where wolves aren't scared of people. And the allowance for that is basically like the same principle that I.

[Steven Rinella]

Because they're habituated.

[Ronan Donovan]

Not necessarily because they're habituated. They do see human settlement. There's like a weather station nearby that they can go visit if they decide to and, like, pee on stuff. And it's kind of just like a recreational outing for the wolves to go there. But it's mostly kind of the. My understanding of the wolf world from time here and reading is like, this is how wolves were even around here. They were curious. I mean, Lewis and Clark journals and Audubon journals. Dan Flores talked about it in his podcast. He did for years.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, Lewis, Clark, the killed one with a stick.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Really.

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

So not even something that smells good?

[Ronan Donovan]

No, it smells like me. Like, one of the first meetings was for me with this pack. I called them the Polygon pack because of these cool polygon tundra formations that are that far north. And their den was close to that and had a camera on the ground. The wolves, they do the surrounding thing, which is what freaks people out. And they're just catching scent. They're just being curious. So they're just like, there's three wolves just satelliting me at, like, 20ft, 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 had an understanding of it. And this one female darts in and grabs one of my other camera. There's like a big, big, big bodied camera. It's like a ten thousand dollar thing.

[Steven Rinella]

And grabs the.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

They're kind of like a sneak attack. Like in and out.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. Just darts in quick and it's. And it's gone. And I find myself foolishly like running after like as if I'm gonna catch a wolf. And I got big boots on. It's like on the tundra. It's all hummocky and. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

And so I stop, do the kind of like walk away look over the shoulder. And she starts following me. I let her get maybe like five feet away. And then I like turn around, jump and clap and yell. And she startles and drops the camera and coming back. And then you understand what that relationship is. But. But yeah, this place is.

[Steven Rinella]

So you don't need to go look for them because they'll come find you.

[Ronan Donovan]

They'll come find you. Yeah, yeah. You basically like set camp there and they'll come check you out.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. And you don't place a bait for them.

[Ronan Donovan]

There's no bait, there's no lure.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean as part of the work. You don't like. It wouldn't be. You'd place a bait.

[Ronan Donovan]

No. And there's no need. You know, it's like this. Basically the wolves. It's kind of like the chimp world where you're like I can follow them. We. When I'm up there. So I've been up there for like productions. This was during that series Kingdom of the White Wolf that you mentioned early on film for Nat Geo, also an assignment from the magazine in that same time. And you're 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 of stuff. I see thousand pounds of food. I'm up there with a couple people. We have a base camp. You have 5,000 pounds of fuel, you have four wheelers. It's daylight all summer until like August 30th and 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Setting up camp or always coming back to base camp.

[Ronan Donovan]

So the first time went up there I was with a team that they had a base camp all the time and these little dinky like 250 ATVs and I just saw that there was this amazing opportunity where like you bring up bigger ATVs, 500 or 7 hundreds and you camp off your ATVs for extended period of time and then you can follow the wolves.

[Steven Rinella]

Like not have to do big round trips.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, not to do big round trips. And like they go hunting and they can do like 60 miles over the course of two days.

[Steven Rinella]

You're Ms. Stuff.

[Ronan Donovan]

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. We have to do it together. We have to defend territory from other wolves and we have to hunt together.

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[Jenna Kim Jones]

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[Team Rubicon Representative]

Let me start by saying it's a great day to be a gray shirt team Rubicon. You know, it truly is a team. Those folks, myself included, all had one desire, which is helping folks in disaster. Trying to be a little bit of hope in a really, really bad situation.

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[Crin]

We give just that nugget of hope helping other people. For some of our gray shirts, it's.

[Ronan Donovan]

During a time when they need help.

[Steven Rinella]

And by helping others, it helps them.

[Jenna Kim Jones]

Listen to the ripple effect with Jenna Kim Jones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Steven Rinella]

How many wolves are on Ellesmere in how many muskox?

[Ronan Donovan]

There was an estimate 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Like 200 white phase wolves.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. Because they're all through Nunavut. They're in Greenland. This is not. This is a Yellowstone wolf. But yeah, there you get a view of this.

[Phil]

Yeah, look at that place.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, it's a cool landscape. This is a. This is a story.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Phil]

It almost looks like blood on surrey breaks.

[Steven Rinella]

Got blood on his floor.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

God, what an incredible picture. He's wet.

[Ronan Donovan]

He'S gone through. Yeah, a little creek earlier, but he's got a little bit on him. He's got a little blood from a hare, Arctic hare that he had hunted earlier. They coordinated to try to hunt this big. The hares up there will group in groups of a hundred, like pure white hairs. Pretty cool to see on the landscape. But yeah, this scene was one where I was up there with teams for multiple years. Film 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. Was just up there to walk around with them as much as I could, which is think would be very much. But ended up being every day spend 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 Graymane, he's got that 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 I realized that this one stage, that Greymane, and he's running next to me, we're both running towards musk oxen. And it was this very quick realization of like, oh, this is what we've done for a long time. This is how this would have started domestication. You'd have wolves that were curious, unafraid of humans. You'd be out hunting the same exact animals and you'd bump into them like this and you'd build a relationship probably. And the wolves would realize quickly that, oh, these guys throw projectiles because anyway, still that they hunt musk oxen 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 in to the herd and. And get food.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, well, how is, how is this island, how is the island administered?

[Ronan Donovan]

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 as part of Ellesmere. I mean they like, technically it's all within Nunavut, but the Canadian government still, like, there's a military base in the north, there's a weather station. There's one habitation on the southern end that's maybe like 150 people called Greece Fjord is the furthest habitation in Canada. But they were moved through colonial imperialism. Idea of having, like, people being born on all your sovereign lands or whatever they call it by colonialism. So they brought people from mainland Quebec and just like dropped them off on this pretty rough part of the island on the southern end and basically were like, good. Like, good luck. Didn't tell them how long they were.

[Steven Rinella]

Going to be there.

[Ronan Donovan]

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 Caribbean population, sub subspecies of Piri caribou is like, totally tanked in the north and in Nunavut and Muskoxin and marine mammals, too, is what they hunt now.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

But they. Those guys don't make forays up here to hunt. They hunt wolves. There's a 900 bounty on wolves and none of it.

[Steven Rinella]

They hunt wolves down where they're at. Yeah, got it, got it. Oh, wow.

[Crin]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So now we're looking at a very distressed young muskox, 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, I don't know, three, four wolves. Ripping them all, kind of tearing them up.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, these are.

[Steven Rinella]

What an image.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, these are the.

[Steven Rinella]

You feel bad for watching stuff get killed like that.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

God, they don't.

[Ronan Donovan]

The wolves. Yeah. No. Why would you. I mean, hunters. I mean, it's like I've been out with professional hunters and takes two hours for an animal to die.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

So it's, you know, It's. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

But, you know, in. In the Wood Buffalo National Park, I think that they. 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.

[Ronan Donovan]

Per pot for a buffalo. Yeah, totally.

[Steven Rinella]

But it's a whole dance. It's a dance and it's a lot of, like, preamble.

[Ronan Donovan]

It's slow motion. It's not all, like, melee.

[Steven Rinella]

No, no. A lot of, like. A lot of sitting, watching, seeing what's going on.

[Ronan Donovan]

And that's how.

[Steven Rinella]

A lot isolating.

[Ronan Donovan]

That's how these would unfold too. Okay. You could technically be hunting for. I've seen six to ten hour hunts, but they're sleeping for half of that. And they're just seeing.

[Team Rubicon Representative]

Watch.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. They'll pressure them, disengage, pressure, disengage, and do that whole deal.

[Steven Rinella]

Because the muscles collecting who they want.

[Ronan Donovan]

They need them to. They either need to startle them and get them to scatter. So, like, they'll hunt the wind a lot and hunt. Like, one of the first times I saw this was I'm with the wolves, traveling. I'm on the four wheeler. They're heading off. They're in hunt mode. And they. Suddenly I can see the landscape in front of me. But it is. It's kind of like central Montana breaks. There's little dips and swells and coulees. And suddenly the wolves are at full tilt and I can't see anything ahead of them. And then we get over this little depression and then there's like a muskox in there.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, they knew.

[Ronan Donovan]

They smelled it. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

So if they pull up on those bulls. Yeah. 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?

[Ronan Donovan]

They test, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Is anybody injured? What's going on?

[Ronan Donovan]

They want to.

[Phil]

Someone's playing on a bad ankle, you know.

[Ronan Donovan]

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. You'll get up to them. They'll be like, laying down. Let's say there's like a bull that's ruminating, laying down. And they'll get them to stand up. Okay. And get them to whirl if you want.

[Steven Rinella]

They want to see what's going on.

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. And they like that image we looked at. They're on a calf.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yep. That's their preferred.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. That's their after.

[Ronan Donovan]

I mean, it's. They. So they're trying to siphon them off. They. They want the musk oxen to stampede. I've never seen buffalo do it a little bit. You know, Cape buffalo do it where they actually stand their Ground against lions. Buffalo do a little bit with wolves here where they gather up the group together. But the muskoxen are real good at that. I mean, that's their move.

[Steven Rinella]

Is they just not breaking the group?

[Ronan Donovan]

Not breaking the group. If they can hold it, then like the wolves can't do. They basically can't do anything. And especially.

[Steven Rinella]

Is that right?

[Ronan Donovan]

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 muskoxen 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.

[Steven Rinella]

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?

[Ronan Donovan]

You get three or four days, depending on like how big the animal is that they take down. I mean, once they killed this animal, it was basically like hide in 12 hours with, there were six adult wolves.

[Steven Rinella]

But then they chill for a couple of years.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So here we got a pup and I'm assuming a female.

[Ronan Donovan]

That's. That's Gray, Maine still, when he was a yearling. Okay. Just big brother.

[Phil]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. Muskox leg.

[Phil]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

How close are you there?

[Ronan Donovan]

Closer than me to you. Like half a dozen me to you. This is like a wide angle lens. This is after.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't care.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Would they draw the line at you touching them?

[Ronan Donovan]

So I would set boundaries. Like, I would bop them like nose like, hey, you gotta give some space, you know. I'd stand up and walk towards them or push them a few times like this. The previous photo here. There's a another hunt scene where this is in the dark. 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'd 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 him. And they're obviously not worried. But one time in that melee, the muskox 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 went back in the system and started to hunt again.

[Steven Rinella]

You ever grab into that meat and eat it yourself?

[Ronan Donovan]

This one I did. It was the only time I did it. Yeah, I cut off some back strap. They were away, the wolves, the other three members and the pups were just over the hill and they were howling after they killed the muskox calf. So they were gone. I didn't really want to have them see me taking it. I felt like there was some like, yeah, some like betrayal around that dynamic. But yeah, it was, yeah, pretty, pretty beautiful scene to be able to have some easy meat, man.

[Steven Rinella]

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?

[Ronan Donovan]

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, you know.

[Steven Rinella]

And how often is a photographer trailing after these wolves?

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

They want to photo. Yeah. Get close to wolves.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ronan Donovan]

And, and, and then there's film crews that go up there. And so then like there was a crew up there just this past year, the big, like Disney project. And so there's. Yeah, there's still people that go there.

[Steven Rinella]

So it's kind of. We'll get. It'll get like a little Yellowstone Y where it's just like people hanging out, filming stuff.

[Ronan Donovan]

It's so expensive to get there. That's the thing that prevents human presence is it's just like, you know, it's astronomical. And so it just becomes a thing where people just don't got it.

[Steven Rinella]

Logistically tough.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

So if you're a professional wildlife photographer and it takes so long to get the good images, like walk me through the economics. What 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?

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

No, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Oh, I don't mind doing that. And that.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

But go ahead. So that includes like all your expenses. I mean, that's over. That's stretched out over three years. It's not like a full time job for that period of time. So it's like a week here, a 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. Yeah. For the whole story. And then the other store. The other way I do things is through grants.

[Steven Rinella]

But the problem here's what I don't get about it. If we hire a camera guy and we're going to do something, we know there will be footage.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yes, Right.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They're. They're rolling the Dice.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because you could come back and say, it's all mucky. Yep, yep, got it.

[Phil]

That's why I won't ever get an assignment from National Geographic.

[Ronan Donovan]

You need.

[Phil]

Need a body of work. Right.

[Steven Rinella]

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 gonna spend blank days and you're gonna get what you get.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

I understand.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. You don't.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You're not the guy that gets it.

[Phil]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Phil]

You charge X for your heart, charge X for your hunt, and whatever sort of nice or shitty accommodations you put together for the client is like. Comes out of that money. And then if you don't kill, you know, animals with your clients, eventually stop getting clients.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. I think it's something.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you get easy assignments?

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

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 easiest assignments I had was, like, a commercial assignment for a cell phone company in Kenya, Safaricom. And they wanted a series of wildlife images of, like, endangered species in Kenya, and also, like, a video compilation to go with it. And so they came to me with it. I hired a good friend named Bob Poole, who grew up in Kenya, who's 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. It was no pressure. It was just like. Knew we were gonna 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. With hyenas. It was like socializing with hyenas. This lone female wild dog I sent at the research, they're like, we don't ever see this. That was just a fun assignment because there's not any pressure.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Phil]

The Sasquatch photos aren't gonna.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, the Sasquatch photos. Or we want a snow leopard.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know. Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

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. Don't happen.

[Steven Rinella]

They can write about how I tried to, like, do blank, but they can.

[Ronan Donovan]

Write about tall tales. Yeah. They can write about, like. Yeah. Myth and all these things. So this writer pitched a story about basically, like, a. Like, a beaver keystone species story around beavers in Grady Olson area. And it hinged 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, swam up into it and like, checked out the beavers.

[Steven Rinella]

Got to be parties with him.

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

And so the man who swam with beavers.

[Ronan Donovan]

The editor's like, I want opening spread, double page Billy swimming with beavers. And I was like, okay. Like, cool. There's a guy outside of Bozeman who swim with beavers. Like, I didn't know about that, but he's got habituated beavers. I'll go check it out. So I show up. Billy showed me around with the writer walking around. He's showing me where the beavers are and all this stuff. The writer leaves, and I'm kind of just casual. I'm like, so, Billy, when do you swim with the beavers?

[Steven Rinella]

Let me know when it gets my camera.

[Ronan Donovan]

And He. Yeah, he looks at me and just like, well, what you talking about? Like, we don't. I don't swim with beavers. They're wild animals.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, they're.

[Ronan Donovan]

They're scared of me. Like, what do you mean? I was like, well, writer said. He's like, oh, maybe I told him that when I was younger, I did a thing. So then I had this whole kind of afternoon of like, what do I do? I gotta tell the editor this story is not possible. And Billy became a dear friend, and I just talked to him yesterday, and I actually used his late father's bow to hunt my first archery elk this year.

[Steven Rinella]

Was that right?

[Ronan Donovan]

And so Billy's. He's a good friend. Yeah, he's a really interesting guy. He's a lot of habitat restoration and huge ranches around the west, and he's very interesting guy. Like him a lot. But. Yeah, that was a funny assignment where I had to call. I actually told the editor. I was like, that this thing isn't true at all.

[Phil]

That's not really on you, though.

[Ronan Donovan]

It wasn't on me.

[Steven Rinella]

No.

[Ronan Donovan]

But I took the burden of, like, can I'm.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

It was rare that I'd be in the field with photographers. I did an amazing three weeks with David Qualman. Wrote the. Did a story on. On human chimp collision in Uganda.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Phil]

Great.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

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[Jenna Kim Jones]

Breaking news, everybody. Not everything is terrible. I repeat, not everything is terrible. The Ripple Effect with Jenna Kim Jones is proof that the Internet, it hasn't ruined humanity entirely.

[Team Rubicon Representative]

Let me start by saying it's a great day to be a gray shirt team. Rubicon. You know, it truly is a team. Those folks, myself included, all had one desire, which is helping folks in disaster. Trying to be a little bit of hope in a really, really bad situation.

[Jenna Kim Jones]

It's like magic, you guys. So put down your doom scroller and pick up your faith in humanity and join me, Jenna, for the ripple effect. It's a reminder that you can start a ripple that changes everything. You really can.

[Crin]

We give just that nugget of hope helping other people. For some of our gray shirts, it's.

[Ronan Donovan]

During a time when they need help.

[Crin]

And by helping others, it helps them.

[Jenna Kim Jones]

Listen to the Ripple Effect with Jenna Kim Jones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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 a American nation to the natural world in a way that allows it to sustain itself for a long time? So what that looks like to me is like being more on the land with people being more around. Like, yeah, reconnecting nature in a relational way in 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 some cool work going on by, like, Bill Plotkin, who's an author, Martin Prechtel, who's kind of this interesting thinker around, like, how do we rekindle our innate relationship to the 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.

[Steven Rinella]

I'm not trying to explain animism to.

[Ronan Donovan]

My kids, are you? Yeah, I was trying to explain how do you approach it?

[Steven Rinella]

What's that?

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, it's in there still. Like. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

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 familiar with this idea? Imagine that. You imagine the earth. You imagine the earth as an organism and the rivers are its arteries, the atmosphere is its lungs. You follow me?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

And then you can kind of get to. Through that you get to an idea like. Well, let's say we imagine like that the mountain. The mountain's alive, you know, it's got heat, it's alive, it's got things living on it, parasitic things live on it. You know what I mean?

[Phil]

There's all sorts of functional relationships.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, that's stuff like that. Yeah. And then, and then that, that is like there's a relationship there that's essentially always waiting for humans to step into. Like the book Braiding Sweetgrass speaks to that. Yeah. Every indigenous land based community that I spent time with, that is how it works. And oftentimes that looks like you go on the land, you fast, you do these experiences where you're actually in conversation, you're listening, you're asking, you're speaking things. Things that we can't speak to each other. We talk about modern day therapy and it's wonderful that it's available and that people are accessing it and that it's a conversation that is had in a time. Like where 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 the natural world about.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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 the things that feed us. Like there's the psychologist Francis Weller who talks about the idea of primary versus secondary satisfactions related to the human psyche. Primary satisfactions are like storytelling, ceremony, ritual, connection to food, 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 and societies. And for me it like again like getting back to like the reason I got in this work was to try to generate change in some way towards like healthy futures for everybody, for all life essentially. And the work in this for me, a lot of it is like personal, like trying to understand what that my relationship is the natural world, going on the land and doing, doing a four day fast in a wild place and being in one place, doing essentially like a vigil and seeing what comes out of that. Like our brain shifts into a different way of being. You start to think differently, experience differently. Sensory experience becomes differently. Going into ketosis where you're burning fat instead of ingesting calories and then spending time with being invited into communities. Going to Sundance for the first time last year with the crowd, being part of sweats where you're like the whole idea around ceremony for me, I wasn't engaged in that at all. As a kid. We didn't have any form of organized religion or spirituality other than like being a naturalist, like being outside, being curious. My mom, we would do like nature journals where we would draw 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 like out of curiosity without having like an actual guidance around it. And then as an adult I've always kind of thought about like ceremony as like taboo is a bad thing. Like the idea of like religion is this thing that's done wrong to the world that was kind of like an idea. And again I don't come from an organized religion background but animism is this thing that's like available to all humans. Like it is like a kind of like a human right. And I think ceremony is as well. And like now is this time where I'm trying to bring that into life in a way that with hunting this year for the first time I hunted an animal in a way that was new to me and sang to him while he died, decorated him, adorned him and then went through a practice of. Yeah. In a way of trying to honor him in that way versus yeah. The last four years of learning to hunt and doing it just kind of however it came. And like there's this idea around. Yeah. Robin Roll Kimmer has a quote around ceremonies. How we remember to remember how we remember the important things in life and whether it can be anything. It can be these like. Yeah. Marking graduation or a step into a different place. It's like how do we spend some more time with it to make it like an actual life changing event to our, to our community and to ourselves.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You still gonna take pictures?

[Ronan Donovan]

Still take. Yeah. Still taking pictures. Yep. Yeah. I mean I was just on the Menominee reservation a couple weeks ago and they're doing some cool stuff with getting buffalo back on the land. Call it homecoming.

[Steven Rinella]

So that kind of ties into what you're talking about though.

[Ronan Donovan]

It exactly ties in what I'm talking about. So it's. So you're kind of.

[Steven Rinella]

That's when I said the work of it. Meaning like you can photo document.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I think places where this is happening in interesting ways or places where humans are re engaging or continuing to engage around wild, wild spaces and wildlife.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. Because I think like these places, these like very far off wild places are like, they hold again that idea of like a regulated nervous system landscape. The idea of going back in time. It's amazing to be able to walk around with wolves in a place that you don't have to worry about it. Like I, I can't do that in Yellowstone anywhere around here. I wouldn't want to do it ethically because those wolves will get hammered during hunting season and they do around Yellowstone every year. These wolves that 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 Menominee 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 plains here in animate relationship. You know, we can read about it. And I brought some books for y' all that maybe you've heard of them or read them. But, like, Pretty Shield and Eagle Voice Remembers. There are these ethnographic interviews with elders in the 1930s.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, they're great. And it's just these stories of, like, pre contact, you know, I liked in hidehunters how you touched on, like, you painted the picture for the listener around, like, what the buffalo meant to the plains people. And so. So, like, we're rushing away from that in a lot of ways as a collective, modern dominant culture. This idea of, like, that was primitive. There was, you know, there's a negative connotation around this older ways of living, that it was dangerous, that it was unpredictable, that it was, you know, unhealthy. And so then we're. We're rushing towards, like, the technological world that, like, none of us know what's going to happen, but that's it.

[Steven Rinella]

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 reject it. There are some, yeah, like Sentinel Island.

[Ronan Donovan]

There are some, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Typically, people accept that they want it. It's. It's a. It's like, I think to go and say. To go and say it. Somehow we become. We've become like that. It's a shame that we walked away from these things when again and again and again, cultures all around the world, you say to them, Would you like food is 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. Those white gas. White gas, yep. So I think number two, cash expense, 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.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Always.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

It's a little bit like. Like, I get it. And I spent a lot of time existing and I spent a lot of time exploring skill sets and exploring things of the past. But I always remind myself that it was a very 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.

[Ronan Donovan]

I think. I think a lot of times it was. It was forced.

[IBM AI Representative]

Like.

[Ronan Donovan]

I don't think they were necessarily like a choice, man, that we'd have to.

[Steven Rinella]

Do whole the show. Yeah, I'll take you on. I'll take you on on that one.

[Ronan Donovan]

Sweet.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I think a lot of times there was a little bit of a bait and switch, but typically you can show up on the shore and you can lay out the goods. And initially people come, but.

[Phil]

But I also think what you're saying.

[Steven Rinella]

They'Re interested in the goods.

[Ronan Donovan]

I think we're kind of speaking the same in a way, like, they're interested in the tools. Yeah, yeah. They want to maintain.

[Steven Rinella]

They want the material.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Well, in a way, yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

They don't foresee.

[Ronan Donovan]

They want ammo, the beginning of the metal.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[Ronan Donovan]

I don't. I don't think that they see it initially. I think it is like a natural thing. Like. And we see that anything you see, like someone with a cool system or whatever, they got some cool new tool that they are using to do the thing that we also like doing. And it's like, instantly, you can't forget that. You can't know that there's a better way of doing it in a way or more quote, efficient way of doing something and forget that. I think that is like, human nature. Like, we. We do want that, but I think I think.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Definitely.

[Steven Rinella]

I've intellectually wrestled with this whole bunch.

[Ronan Donovan]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

There's probably a baked. There's a baked in. Let's say there's a baked in nostalgia. But also later, you're like, man, should we have done that?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Phil]

You're also not necessarily talking about material culture. You're talking about in that transformation or transition. You're talking about losing intangible. Intangible things. And it's not that you, like, are working to go back the other way along this arc, but look over your shoulder and remember some of the core, like, human experiences and that.

[Steven Rinella]

That.

[Phil]

That have been lost in some ways.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, but even if the. Even if the product we're getting so far.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Even if the product is rel. 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 monotheistic. We'll save 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. Like, oftentimes the way that it moves is. 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 the. Where you're the dog and the writer's the tail? Do you follow me?

[Ronan Donovan]

Can you.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you have. Do you wield that power as sort of like a. A premier wildlife photographer, where you could say, there's an image I'd like to get. It's so good. You ought to find a writer.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

So it will be that the image leads.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I see.

[Ronan Donovan]

It's like you hook people with the COVID if they don't sell on the newsstands anymore. But if you hook people with a cover, they'll go through it. This is what they, you know, that's what they say people do with it. Like, look at the pictures and the picture interesting. Then they'll read the article more. That's kind of how they speak to it.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Ronan Donovan]

And you need both. I mean, it's like you need both. I mean, I. I don't know.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Phil]

And you could take an 8th grade essay and attach it to that and somebody be like, this best thing I've ever read.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yes.

[Phil]

This is a transformative piece.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

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. You need it all.

[Steven Rinella]

No, but who gets to be the tail? Who gets to be the dog and who gets to be the tail?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, so I like. I got one last question. If. Okay, 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.

[Ronan Donovan]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Like a sperm whale grabbing a giant squid, like, one thing that, you know, occurs, what would you get?

[Phil]

What's your next Beaver under the ice?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. What comes to mind? I was in Yellowson just a couple weeks ago and read through the scene, like, found a big bold carcass of elk with some researchers out they knew was there. There's a tom mountain lion. They've been feeding on it, Collared one they knew was there. And I ended up, like, tracing back the whole scene and, like, I would love to 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's a tough one.

[Ronan Donovan]

That'd be a tough one again, but not impossible. This morning, the first few engine in this deck, we didn't get to it yet. I saw a family of cougars this morning on a walk. There you go. Six miles from here.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But it had the gut pile.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yep. Yep. That's what I walked in on initially. Was confused. And there was a raven that had been calling a little bed there on the. On the right there. They had just been there, and then.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

That's cool. Wow. Oh, there you go. Poor thing.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

God, you take nice pictures all the time.

[Ronan Donovan]

Those are just cell phone images. You could hear mom just in the back there.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, there they are. Yeah. Excellent, man. Yeah.

[Phil]

Don't tell Giannis where that was.

[Steven Rinella]

No, he won't mess with them.

[Phil]

I know, I know.

[Steven Rinella]

Just a joke. He won't mess with them. If he did, he just let him go.

[Crin]

Yeah. Like everyone's gonna be hitting Ronin up for, man.

[Steven Rinella]

I'll tell you what. I was cutting Christmas trees. We were hunting trees in my family on Sunday. Hunting trees. I'm sitting with my kids. I'm not kidding you, man. Like, park. My daughter broke her foot, so she. Wait. She. I was like, you gotta wait the truck because she's got a broken foot. My wife said, I'm not gonna leave her in the truck, so I'll just sit in the truck with her, too. So me and the boys strike off up the hill. We don't go 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.

[Ronan Donovan]

Tough.

[Steven Rinella]

Every tree. You gotta tell the boys, get some sticks and whoop the tree.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Phil]

You can't judge them.

[Crin]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You can't feel judged.

[Phil]

Like looking at a deer from the back. They all look great.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. You don't know how it looks.

[Steven Rinella]

So we had to beat. We, like, beat three trees clean, and we were just sick of it, and we decided to take one anyway. I look at one point, I look at the ground and our dogs running all over. Hell, I look at the ground, and there's the brand newest, cleanest lion track. And I realized we'd kicked that sucker out of this little cluster of Christmas trees.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Brand new. Beautiful track. Our dog's like all. Our dog doesn't notice anything, you know, Like, not even. Not even like, like any sort of acknowledgment whatsoever that this has happened. Like never sticks her nose in the track. Just nothing.

[Ronan Donovan]

This just not even there.

[Steven Rinella]

It just doesn't register. It doesn't register. That dog. If we weren't there, that dog would probably be not alive anymore.

[Ronan Donovan]

Cat snack.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, thanks for coming on the show, man.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, I appreciate you having me on.

[Steven Rinella]

Fascinating world. Yeah, I can't take a picture tricking, dude. I took black and white photography one and two in college.

[Ronan Donovan]

Well, it's a good thing.

[Phil]

You could say he's more formally trained.

[Steven Rinella]

I realized I. All I had to do was take black and white photography 1 and 2 to realize I was not a visual artist.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. You don't have it. You don't have it.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, well, yeah, your stuff's gorgeous, man.

[IBM AI Representative]

And.

[Steven Rinella]

And I. I love seeing it and I got so excited about that beaver stuff. That was cool.

[Ronan Donovan]

Nice. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Cool.

[Ronan Donovan]

I'm glad you called me into.

[Steven Rinella]

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?

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Ronan Donovan]

Not my work, but.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, not. Okay, not.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, but people that want to rewild themselves and rekindle that relationship to the animate world.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ronan Donovan]

They offer experiences and.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Peruse images and all that.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I do stuff we talked about today they'd find on there.

[Ronan Donovan]

Some of it. Some of it I haven't really showed people. Yeah, but some of it's available. Yeah. I have a museum exhibit that's traveling around the country.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, thanks. It'll be in St. Petersburg, Florida next. Opens up in late March, early April, but going down for some program for that. It was in Amarillo, Texas just a couple months ago. Be in San Diego Naturalist Museum.

[Steven Rinella]

And what's the. What's it called?

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, Big, big exhibit and yeah, lots of text with it as well.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, there is.

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lots of maps and some.

[Steven Rinella]

Because they had the images.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, is that cool?

[Ronan Donovan]

Yeah. Which I'm excited about.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that'd be real popular around here.

[Ronan Donovan]

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

[Phil]

Oh, yeah.

[Ronan Donovan]

Need to do some work down there with wolves. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Ronan Donovan]

Thanks, Steve. Thank you. Thank you all. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

What a matchup we got, y'.

[Ronan Donovan]

All.

[Steven Rinella]

This is that classic HBCU vibe. Non stop action. The bed is rocking and the crowd lit. Chance echo drum beat. Everybody showing that school pride.

[Ronan Donovan]

Game like this.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, it calls for an ice cold Coca Cola. Ah, crisp and refreshing. That's a game changer right there. Yeah, that taste always hits the right note. Just like the band at halftime. And just like that, we're back at it. Passionate fans, school colors everywhere and an.

[Ronan Donovan]

Ice cold Coca Cola.

[Steven Rinella]

That's a winning combo. No matter the sport, no matter the yard. Everybody knows fan work is thirsty work. So grab a Coca Cola and keep that HBCU pride going.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Steven Rinella]

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[Ronan Donovan]

This is an Iheart podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

Guaranteed human.