Latest / Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson / He Speaks Raven – Talking to the Wild and Eavesdropping on Animals with George Bumann | EP 25 Live Free Ride Free

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He Speaks Raven – Talking to the Wild and Eavesdropping on Animals with George Bumann | EP 25 Live Free Ride Free · Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson

• 0:00
  Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for joining us.
• 0:01
  Welcome to Live Free, Ride Free.
• 0:03
  I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of
• 0:06
  The Horseboy and The Long Ride Home.
• 0:08
  Before I jump in with today's guest, I want to say a huge thank you to you, our
• 0:13
  audience, for helping to make this happen.
• 0:15
  I have a request.
• 0:16
  If you like what we do here, please give it a thumbs up,
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  like, subscribe, tell a friend.
• 0:22
  It really, really helps us to make the pro.
• 0:24
  To find out about our certification courses, online video libraries,
• 0:29
  books, and other courses, please go to rupertisakson.
• 0:33
  com.
• 0:34
  So now let's jump in.
• 0:39
  Welcome back to Live Free, ride Free.
• 0:42
  When we talk about self-actualization so much of it has to do with how one
• 0:49
  orients oneself on the planet towards the other denisons of the planet.
• 0:56
  One can think so much of self-actualization as the self,
• 1:02
  but the self is nothing, if not something in relation to other.
• 1:06
  And that other is not always human.
• 1:09
  So my guest today rhymes with human, but sounds something like this.
• 1:26
  George, welcome to Live Free, ride Free.
• 1:28
  What was that?
• 1:29
  Who are you and what do you do?
• 1:32
  George Bumann: Thank you for having me, Rupert.
• 1:33
  That was a common raven, which if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you
• 1:37
  probably know this bird is a large black, glossy corvid family member.
• 1:43
  And it just said that this is my home.
• 1:46
  This is my place and I appreciate it.
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  If you stay on your side of the fence,
• 1:52
  Rupert Isaacson: would that Raven be saying that to, to another
• 1:55
  raven, or would that Raven be saying that as equally to me?
• 1:59
  George Bumann: To other ravens, you know, that they are the largest
• 2:02
  songbird in the world and as unsung like as that may sound, that is
• 2:06
  in fact functions as their song.
• 2:09
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, that sort of
• 2:10
  George Bumann: sounds to me a bit
• 2:11
  Rupert Isaacson: like the sort of industrial metal singer of the, of
• 2:14
  the avian world m partial to indeed.
• 2:17
  Perhaps they
• 2:17
  George Bumann: are.
• 2:18
  Yes.
• 2:19
  Yes.
• 2:19
  It's appropriate observation.
• 2:21
  Rupert Isaacson: If, if the Raven were to see us on the other side
• 2:25
  of that fence and was to vocalize, what in your experience would it be
• 2:32
  likely to vocalize and, and, and why?
• 2:37
  Yeah,
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  George Bumann: sure.
• 2:38
  It would, it would say this,
• 2:47
  Rupert Isaacson: and that's milk, no sugar, please.
• 2:50
  Isn't it?
• 2:50
  When a raven's making you a cup of tea.
• 2:52
  I think I've,
• 2:53
  George Bumann: yes, they will do that in those situations, but more often
• 2:56
  as we experience here in Yellowstone near our home, it's when someone pulls
• 3:00
  out the Cheetos or the bag of crisps as they call them in, in many parts
• 3:04
  of the, of Europe there, the, that extra notes and they're a little bit
• 3:08
  faster, is a bit of possessiveness that's conveyed through those sounds.
• 3:14
  Rupert Isaacson: Do you think the raven at, at this stage, if I hear that,
• 3:17
  is the Raven saying, I would like to share those Cheetos with you, sir?
• 3:21
  Or is the, is the raven according to other Ravens saying
• 3:24
  potential Cheetos on the ground?
• 3:26
  Or some mixture of the two.
• 3:29
  George Bumann: Well, that is most often the sound you hear, the, the
• 3:34
  residents give when something really good enters their field of view.
• 3:39
  So in, in other words, that would probably most likely equate to
• 3:42
  mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.
• 3:46
  I'm sort of
• 3:47
  Rupert Isaacson: about it and a little
• 3:47
  George Bumann: bit worried that someone else not yours.
• 3:50
  Mine.
• 3:51
  Rupert Isaacson: Wonderful.
• 3:51
  Sounds like me.
• 3:53
  Alright.
• 3:53
  Well, George Booman you've got a jolly interesting life and I think where
• 4:00
  I would like to start is I want to start with a book that you've just
• 4:05
  put out eavesdropping on Animals.
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  What a wonderful title.
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  I like the fact that it's eavesdropping and not listening because I often
• 4:19
  get that sense of stumbling into conversations in the wild, in nature
• 4:25
  that maybe are happening outside of me.
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  And I'm lucky enough maybe to overhear, but I can't necessarily claim to
• 4:40
  be a part of the conversation.
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  I'm not a hunter gatherer.
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  I'm not living at that depth in nature.
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  So I think the eavesdropping part of your, of, of your title is.
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  Quite indicative of us in the modern age because in many ways I
• 4:55
  feel that's what we can hope for.
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  Why did you write this book?
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  What does it mean to you?
• 5:02
  How did you come to write this book?
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  You can clearly articulate the vocalize vocalizations of animals and
• 5:09
  interpret them to a very good degree.
• 5:12
  George Bumann: Yeah.
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  Rupert Isaacson: But this is switching it around.
• 5:13
  Talk to us about this.
• 5:14
  Why'd you do it?
• 5:16
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 5:16
  The, the real drive for it, Rupert, was just this sense and experience
• 5:22
  of my own that I always felt outside of what nature was doing.
• 5:28
  I grew up on a lake in, in upstate New York state here in the us and there just
• 5:34
  seemed like there was this veil between me and the world of the deer, the beaver, the
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  water snake, that there, there were things going on and they knew things about me
• 5:46
  that I couldn't tell how they knew them.
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  I would go just as a boy to track the foxes.
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  When the lake would freeze, I would hike across the, the frozen lake into
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  the swamps and follow fox tracks.
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  And one day I came upon this set of tracks that I learned enough at that
• 6:03
  point to know that these were fresh.
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  These were so fresh that they'd literally just probably happened minutes before.
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  And I could sort of back calculate in my mind where I was when this fox.
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  Did this skid move where it basically came to a screeching halt on the
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  icy snow in of the swamp, and took off in the opposite direction.
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  It knew I was there and I had no clue it was there.
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  And how did it do that?
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  How is it possible that these creatures are, are understanding the world
• 6:38
  beyond mine by beyond what I perceive?
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  And it just frustrated me.
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  I, I went through all the things that I knew to, to get closer to nature in
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  that area and in that culture I grew up in, I fished, I hunted, I I trapped.
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  I did all these terrible things I don't do now.
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  They taught me a lot.
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  I even went through a bachelor's and master's in wildlife ecology
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  that didn't feel the well.
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  And what I've come to realize over the last two and a half decades of
• 7:07
  guiding and teaching others here in Yellowstone is that it is sound, it is
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  sight, it is our senses on the whole that are our doorway into this space.
• 7:21
  But if and only if we know how to use them and how to direct them you
• 7:27
  know, there is this separation we have from each other these days with
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  computer technology and other devices and things that isolate us even when
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  we're sitting next to one another.
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  Say nothing of, you know.
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  Larger societies in in your, our town, our, our, our nation.
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  But that's amplified even further when you jump across the species divide.
• 7:53
  What is that rabbit doing right now?
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  Rupert Isaacson: How end, how did you end up going from
• 7:58
  New York over to Yellowstone?
• 8:01
  You, you clearly went to college.
• 8:02
  You, you're an eco boy.
• 8:05
  Yeah.
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  You learn your environmentalism also with a bit of hunting and fishing, which
• 8:09
  honestly is our biological imperative.
• 8:13
  I feel It's not a terrible thing as long as one does it with respect.
• 8:16
  It's who we are.
• 8:17
  Mm-hmm.
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  But yes, if, if we don't need to do it, perhaps we can interact
• 8:21
  with animals in another way.
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  But how did you end up coming to the, to the sort of iconic American West there?
• 8:29
  And again, why, what are you, what are you trying to communicate
• 8:36
  to us about this place?
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  Because I know that your interaction with nature isn't
• 8:42
  just about the big wilderness.
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  Talk to us about how, what's your, what was your trajectory that got you there?
• 8:49
  George Bumann: Yeah, so I grew up in the land of my ancestors.
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  My family went back to the second settlers in that area of New York state.
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  And, and that has its own interesting history.
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  But when I went to graduate studies in Virginia.
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  I went to study predator, prey, ecology of birds.
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  And I enjoyed it greatly, but as I said, it did, didn't quite fill the void.
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  I did, you know, some publications and help with a popular press book and things.
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  I met my wife there and as often as the case, we move great distances
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  when we meet a girl or a guy and, and she had worked here in Yellowstone.
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  I was done with academia for a bit.
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  I, I wasn't sure if I fit there.
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  Or in the research world I had inclinations that
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  way, but I needed a break.
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  So I followed her where she was following her passion back to, so we
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  moved here and she became the campus manager of a field school out there
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  in, I think you've probably have been there, a Lamar Valley in the northern.
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  I know Lamar Valley.
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  Yes.
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  So we lived there.
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  There of America.
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  Yeah, precisely.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  We lived there for first few years and I was trying to figure it out, you know,
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  I was really trying to, to, in some ways probably even find my way back to
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  the sense of community I had among the people in the landscape I grew up in.
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  You know, everyone knew me, I knew everyone.
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  I went to Virginia.
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  Very few people knew me, got to know some people.
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  But when we moved to Yellowstone, we weren't around people.
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  No.
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  Not there.
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  That's, that's no, not there.
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  And not then in, in, in large part.
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  And so it, it was the, a togetherness and a desire to feel of a place that really
• 10:37
  kind of codified my, my approach to how I, I started out there in Yellowstone.
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  It, I was teaching, I taught longer than I've done anything.
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  Helping people connect in one of those powerful ways was, was through sound.
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  But I needed it for myself to, and the most common species, the most common
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  non-human residents there that we saw and interacted with were ravens.
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  And so every day they were there, they were part of life.
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  They weren't interacting in the, you know, handshaking way and exchanging, you know,
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  notes and, and food or anything like that.
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  'cause that's of course not allowed in the park.
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  But they were a constant presence that drew me outward
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  from myself, you could say.
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  And what they revealed to me was fantastic.
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  The ability to know that the wolves may have just made a kill over
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  on the, behind that one ridge.
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  That the otters are fishing along the river right there, right now.
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  That there might be an owl in the tree over there.
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  Do you wanna go see it?
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  Okay, let's go.
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  Oh my gosh.
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  Indeed it is.
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  And so through these birds who just.
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  Are easily dismissed along with any other species.
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  Think of what you encounter regularly, whether it's a city or a wilderness.
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  Pigeons.
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  Squirrels, you know, they have a life, they have a world unto themselves.
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  They have culture.
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  They might have what we can call language that once we slow down
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  enough to see that it's there, we begin to receive those gifts.
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  Rupert Isaacson: There's lots, I've been to the Lamar Valley and it's one of
• 12:17
  the most charismatic places in the USA.
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  It's one of the only places in the world where you can sort of see wolves out
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  in Plainview and that sort of thing.
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  It's, it's extraordinary.
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  But it's also full of charismatics.
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  The word other, you know, iconic birds.
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  There's, you see bald eagles there, there's all sorts of interesting smaller
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  birds, lots of other corvids mag pies.
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  Crows.
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  Why the ravens?
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  Is it because they're the most like us in a weird way?
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  George Bumann: They are intelligent and, and maybe that's part of that mystery.
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  We're always
• 12:52
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:52
  Drawn
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  George Bumann: to the mysteries of the world around us.
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  And, and the more complex sing, the more tantalizing they are.
• 12:58
  Right.
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  And ravens have this mystique.
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  You know, I was a birder for, for many years, and when I grew
• 13:04
  up, the idea of birding was.
• 13:06
  Ludicrous, unless you were a grandmother sitting there watching
• 13:09
  the feeder, you know, you didn't go out for a walk just to watch birds.
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  So I didn't really learn about that and participate in that until I
• 13:17
  was at the university and then just was taking hook line and sinker.
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  And I had been writing down the Raven's name for years along with all these
• 13:27
  other names, but that's where it stopped.
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  They were just names.
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  They weren't minds and meaning and revelation.
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  And when we moved to Yellowstone, they're big, you know, it's easy to be
• 13:46
  pulled in by the big and loud things.
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  You know?
• 13:49
  They're not shy to get relatively close to you too.
• 13:51
  They, yeah, yeah.
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  Especially if you, you're, you're starting to eat lunch,
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  and so it was an easy starting point mm-hmm.
• 14:01
  For me.
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  And so I didn't read any of the, the Raven literature, you know, coming
• 14:09
  outta that academic background.
• 14:10
  I, I made a very clear decision.
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  I did not wanna read anything about ravens.
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  I wanted to see for myself what these birds were doing before I
• 14:19
  dove into any of the, the, the other behavioral, you know, work out there.
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  I just wanted to see what I could find in.
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  In association with these birds in this place, in this moment.
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  And, and that's really just how it started.
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  And it started very simple.
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  You know, they were always sitting or discovered that there was always two and
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  they were sitting on the corral fence top.
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  As I got up each morning and as I was doing chores and getting ready to guide
• 14:49
  people on a trip, there was the Raven.
• 14:53
  I'd go for a walk and there was the raven.
• 14:55
  I'd be brushing my teeth and out the window there was the
• 14:59
  raven and always the same Raven.
• 15:02
  Or when you say the raven, I didn't know collective raven.
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  I didn't know that was a thing.
• 15:07
  That was part of the adventure is what, what is this?
• 15:13
  How far do they range?
• 15:14
  Does this thing claim title to this whole Lamar, Lamar Valley,
• 15:20
  or is it just right here?
• 15:21
  It was a
• 15:21
  Rupert Isaacson: single Raven, or it was a group of ravens, or it was a, because
• 15:25
  they, they seem to be as solitary as their social and social as their solitary.
• 15:29
  George Bumann: It was almost always two.
• 15:31
  Okay.
• 15:33
  It was almost always two.
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  And, and over time I discovered that this pair who sat together,
• 15:39
  presided over this place.
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  This was their home, just like it was my home.
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  Except there weren't fences or clear cut boundaries of a road or
• 15:49
  anything that defined their space.
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  Their space was defined by something much more abstract.
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  What was it Defined by sound.
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  It was defined by sound.
• 15:58
  Okay.
• 15:58
  And I remember clearly one day hearing them well, the, the typical call
• 16:05
  is the one I did at the beginning.
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  It's those three notes.
• 16:13
  But one day it transitioned to,
• 16:23
  and this was different, and this is the, the diamond in the rough that we all hold.
• 16:28
  If we just put in enough time to figure out what's normal, what do
• 16:32
  you expect when you see those ravens?
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  Or what do you expect to hear when you spot those ravens and this diverged?
• 16:40
  So, and this is different.
• 16:42
  Why is this different?
• 16:43
  And immediately one of those birds took off from the archway corral fence and
• 16:49
  launched itself across the valley and proceeded to chase this other raven.
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  With great ferocity.
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  It was trying to, to grab it in the air and push it down toward the ground.
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  And the other one was, you know, just doing everything it
• 17:02
  could to get away from this.
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  What I discovered was the resident pair, this was their territory, and there
• 17:09
  was this acoustic, no trespassing sign that's represented in those three notes
• 17:14
  that was violated, and the violation was followed up with the chase.
• 17:20
  But also this sound that from then on forward, I'm like, oh my gosh, every
• 17:25
  time I hear that, now I know someone's not where they're supposed to be.
• 17:29
  And someone who, who rules over that airspace is chasing them off.
• 17:33
  So I'd know immediately, okay, there's a raven, there's two ravens
• 17:36
  actually, if we look, oh, yep.
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  There they are.
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  One chasing the other.
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  The, the one behind is the territorial bird.
• 17:42
  The one in the front is the interloper.
• 17:46
  And so immediately the, the world starts expanding, right?
• 17:50
  To see it from the perspective of this big black bird.
• 17:55
  Rupert Isaacson: Few questions immediately spring to mind.
• 17:56
  Do ravens usually live in pairs?
• 17:58
  Because yeah, sometimes one sees them solo, sometimes one sees to
• 18:01
  see them in big, almost parliaments.
• 18:03
  Um mm-hmm.
• 18:04
  And then the other question is, if they're that territorial,
• 18:09
  what was that interloper doing?
• 18:12
  And actually a third question, why didn't it challenge and fight back?
• 18:18
  Or might it have done in another context?
• 18:22
  George Bumann: Yeah, that's a really good question.
• 18:24
  So typically they are territorial in the sense of for nesting purposes,
• 18:30
  you know, they kind of preside over an area so that they can garner the
• 18:33
  resources to take care of their young.
• 18:35
  Mm-hmm.
• 18:36
  So they're, they're most commonly holding down the fort, shall we say,
• 18:41
  when, when the, the stakes are high, you know, they're bringing on the next
• 18:45
  generation, passing on their genes.
• 18:48
  But there are times you're right, where you'll see 3, 6, 8, 10, hundreds.
• 18:53
  Hmm.
• 18:54
  And these cases like right now here in our, our neck of the woods,
• 18:58
  you'll see that surrounding big food sources and birds, as we now know,
• 19:05
  there's been a research project that I, I was involved in peripherally
• 19:09
  to study ravens here in Yellowstone.
• 19:11
  You, and you would think that this wilderness environment, the birds
• 19:15
  are staying in the wilderness, they're feeding only unnatural
• 19:17
  foods, and it's not the case.
• 19:19
  They are commuting daily, 20 to 30 miles each way.
• 19:24
  To access food in areas outside of the park and surrounding communities.
• 19:29
  So for instance, when I was going to Lamar to teach this program, I was passing the
• 19:35
  Ravens who were going the other direction past me, leaving their territories,
• 19:39
  going out to the area around my home.
• 19:42
  So we were actually trading places as they were coming to take Oh,
• 19:45
  coming traffic on the community.
• 19:47
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 19:48
  So there are things like the dump, there are things like the sewage
• 19:51
  treatment plant where they grotesquely scour the, the fats that, that, that
• 19:57
  come off of the, the settling ponds.
• 19:59
  But mostly it's to take advantage of human hunters killing game
• 20:04
  outside of Yellowstone, so on the national forest lands.
• 20:08
  And so they're hoping that they will encounter, you know, the, the
• 20:11
  room pile and the organs left behind from hunters of elk and bison.
• 20:16
  And then you'll see these birds com converged by the hundreds, you
• 20:21
  know, 2, 3, 4, 500 in some cases when food supply is really big.
• 20:27
  And then they can
• 20:27
  Rupert Isaacson: be very
• 20:28
  George Bumann: cooperative or at least tolerant.
• 20:31
  Tolerant is probably a better way to put it because they're
• 20:33
  definitely these squabbles.
• 20:34
  And if you hear the sound such as,
• 20:40
  right, that, like, that's the sound of a raven saying, get off my back buddy.
• 20:44
  Don't, don't, don't peck my eyes out.
• 20:47
  You know, this is, I have every right defeat at this carcass that you do.
• 20:50
  And so as you learn these sounds, you start getting that window into
• 20:54
  their world where they definitely do cooperate, but conditionally.
• 21:01
  So like a great example is this call, how,
• 21:06
  ah,
• 21:09
  and now at your home in Germany, in Austria Scandinavia, Russia, north
• 21:15
  America, Alaska, if you hear that sound, it is one of those sounds among the
• 21:21
  dialectics in, in, in regional variations that ravens have that is consistent.
• 21:26
  The territorial call is consistent.
• 21:28
  And that call, that high pitched call is also consistent
• 21:33
  because it's so very important.
• 21:35
  And the importance of that is it conveys the presence of
• 21:38
  food, but not just any food.
• 21:41
  It, it communicates the presence of meat.
• 21:45
  And when I did start, I ended up reading the Raven Literature.
• 21:48
  It overlapped with what I was seeing in Yellowstone Barran Heinrich, one of the
• 21:52
  world's leading authorities on Ravens had discovered what he termed the hail
• 21:56
  call, which was that high pitched ah,
• 22:03
  and the time he saw it.
• 22:04
  It was when a single raven found an entire dead moose by itself
• 22:12
  near Barron's cabin in, in Maine.
• 22:16
  And as a behaviorist, this made no sense.
• 22:19
  Why on earth would you shout out when you have found this trove of food to yourself?
• 22:27
  And so this is the, the, at the risk of ruining, you know, Ravens in
• 22:30
  winter, the book he wrote afterwards.
• 22:32
  This call was a situational use of cooperation as it turned out to overwhelm
• 22:39
  the resident birds who presided over that area that would otherwise kick it out.
• 22:45
  So the meat call, the hail call was actually used to draw.
• 22:50
  And when he first heard it, that one Raven called with that high pitch call.
• 22:55
  And Ravens came outta the woodwork and they joined it
• 22:58
  to feed, and it made no sense.
• 22:59
  Again, why would you share?
• 23:02
  You built, you make this wonderful dinner, and before you and your family
• 23:05
  eat, you invite the h You know, the, the, the local rugby team did dine first.
• 23:10
  You know, that makes no sense.
• 23:12
  You know, you don't get any.
• 23:14
  But what he found was, yes, these were young birds.
• 23:16
  These were non territorial birds who were kind of floating around and if they found
• 23:20
  something in someone else's backyard, they knew that if they gave this high
• 23:24
  pitched hail call, it basically brought in the rugby team and the football
• 23:30
  team and, you know, the gymnastics squad, so that the ravens who would
• 23:35
  otherwise kick them out were overwhelmed.
• 23:38
  Which is a fascinating interplay that, that shows the
• 23:41
  intelligence of these creatures.
• 23:44
  Rupert Isaacson: So was that one raven that was then driven
• 23:48
  out by your resident Raven?
• 23:51
  Do you think?
• 23:51
  One of those semi juveniles cruising, looking for a territory?
• 23:58
  George Bumann: That's why I didn't
• 23:59
  Rupert Isaacson: fight back.
• 24:00
  George Bumann: Yeah, it didn't fight back.
• 24:02
  Usually the,
• 24:05
  in any case, when a bird chases another bird, the one in the back has the
• 24:08
  upper wing, upper hand, upper wing but
• 24:12
  Rupert Isaacson: you can
• 24:12
  George Bumann: turn
• 24:12
  Rupert Isaacson: around and get behind them or you could, but you,
• 24:15
  you do see birds when they're in combat in sometimes doing that.
• 24:18
  And sometimes it's clear that one is no, I'm just gonna defend
• 24:23
  myself and get outta here.
• 24:24
  And the other, other time it's like, no, I'm gonna try and get on top
• 24:26
  George Bumann: of you.
• 24:26
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 24:28
  It's a complex thing and it matters who it is, you know, whether
• 24:31
  it's a juvenile or an adult.
• 24:32
  And that's one of the neat things I feel like I've found since.
• 24:37
  I was able to step behind some of those layers of the natural world is
• 24:41
  to realize they're all individuals.
• 24:44
  They are really genuinely individuals in the way we are.
• 24:48
  So, you know, I was just talking about this with a friend about grizzly bears.
• 24:52
  It's not always the biggest grizzly bear who dominates the carcass.
• 24:56
  Sometimes it's a smaller one who just has the attitude that others don't
• 25:02
  wanna mess with the dog in the fight.
• 25:04
  It's fighting the dog.
• 25:05
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 25:06
  Bingo.
• 25:07
  Exactly.
• 25:07
  That's the rick, Rick McIntyre Wolf eight.
• 25:10
  Right.
• 25:11
  The, that, that amazing.
• 25:12
  Yeah.
• 25:12
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 25:12
  Rupert Isaacson: Of that.
• 25:13
  Yeah.
• 25:13
  Small male who seemed to somehow kick butt all over.
• 25:18
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 25:18
  Yeah.
• 25:18
  Let's, by rights he should make, yeah.
• 25:20
  And he started out as a subordinate.
• 25:22
  And, and so the, the context in which these non-human individuals find
• 25:27
  themselves brings out these qualities and characters that, you know, we often
• 25:31
  see in ourselves when you go away to college, when you get a new group of
• 25:35
  friends, you know, the dynamic shifts.
• 25:37
  And that's one of the most beautiful things I think, to watch
• 25:40
  over time, is the trajectory of a life of a non-human individual.
• 25:45
  You know, we've had the chance to do that with individual elk and bison and wolves
• 25:50
  in, in some of the cases of the wolves, been able to watch generationally traits
• 25:54
  and characteristics that are handed from the grandmother to the mother,
• 25:57
  to the granddaughter, and to her pups.
• 25:59
  You know, just not just coat color, but the way they hunt,
• 26:04
  the way they relate to people.
• 26:06
  These very dynamic and, and I think more than anything that shows us we're not
• 26:11
  alone in the way we navigate the world, but that we are very much part of their
• 26:18
  world, whether we think we are or not,
• 26:21
  Rupert Isaacson: these ravens that you got to know, interestingly,
• 26:25
  you know, you're in a lonely place.
• 26:27
  There isn't a lot of one could perhaps, if there had been more people
• 26:30
  around, you might not have paid so much close attention to the Ravens.
• 26:34
  Mm-hmm.
• 26:35
  How long did you know them for and what else did they guide you into?
• 26:40
  Like you're mentioning the elk, you're mentioning the wolf.
• 26:44
  So they clearly opened up the world, but you must have had a
• 26:46
  relationship with them for some time.
• 26:48
  How long did that last for?
• 26:50
  How long do Ravens live?
• 26:50
  How long did they keep their territories and mm-hmm.
• 26:53
  If they seeded their territories or died.
• 26:56
  Just tell us a little bit the story and now, now I'm curious.
• 26:57
  I wanna know what happened to them.
• 26:59
  George Bumann: Yeah, yeah.
• 27:00
  It's, and it's a hard thing because it was before this study started where
• 27:03
  they were banding any of the birds.
• 27:04
  So I, many of these species, and I'm sure you've encountered this
• 27:08
  too, they, they all look the same.
• 27:11
  Yeah.
• 27:11
  And as humans, we sometimes say that even of other cultures, you
• 27:14
  know, or other cultures say that about us, that we all look the same.
• 27:17
  But of an acquaintance, Joe Huro has, you know, he got to the point after nine
• 27:22
  years of literally embedding himself with a group of wild mule deer in Wyoming that
• 27:28
  he could tell by facial features alone.
• 27:32
  And a few body features the identity of over 200 individual
• 27:36
  mule deer that all look the same.
• 27:39
  Yeah.
• 27:39
  But they don't, the truth is they really don't, when you start paying attention,
• 27:43
  and I didn't have the time to get to that level with these birds, and I don't know
• 27:48
  if I even really could, but I only had, we, were they staying there in the summer?
• 27:52
  So I basically had a season to get to know these birds.
• 27:56
  And I, if they traded places with some other ones, honestly, I don't know if I
• 28:01
  could have really identified who was who.
• 28:05
  But they can live, gosh, there might be some of the same birds there now.
• 28:08
  They can live into their teens and twenties.
• 28:11
  Well that was gonna be my question.
• 28:12
  As far as I know, they're quite long lived birds, you know, even in the wild.
• 28:15
  Yeah.
• 28:16
  Yeah.
• 28:16
  And that was one of the things that I was very cognizant of when
• 28:20
  I helped out with this Raven study.
• 28:21
  'cause they were notoriously difficult to capture.
• 28:25
  Mm-hmm.
• 28:25
  They're so intelligent and they're so, astute in terms of reading
• 28:30
  situations, but also seemingly reading the intentions of, of us.
• 28:36
  Mm-hmm.
• 28:37
  So, for instance, we started out one day in the park.
• 28:39
  We had a dead squirrel and we put it behind the vehicle we were
• 28:41
  in and hid the trap, which is this device that launches a net.
• 28:45
  You know, we covered it in newspaper, made it look like a pile of trash,
• 28:48
  you know, and we sat there for hours.
• 28:52
  And as we're sitting there, the ravens, they knew, they see the squirrel, but they
• 28:57
  would fly by and they would not just look, they would look into the car windows.
• 29:04
  They would look at us as if to say, you should be getting out, you should
• 29:09
  be going for a walk, yet you're, you're doing something different here.
• 29:13
  What, what are you doing?
• 29:14
  And they would go perch on a rock, maybe 200 meters away, and they
• 29:18
  would just sit in and observe.
• 29:21
  And they'd fly by again a little while later.
• 29:23
  And so it wasn't until we did a bit of craftiness near our home with the
• 29:28
  researchers in a place where the birds have always come for generations.
• 29:33
  There's a place where our neighbor throws bones.
• 29:36
  He is a hunting guide, and he would cut up the, the, the game that they would collect
• 29:41
  and hunt and throw the bones in this pile.
• 29:44
  So I knew these birds were coming to this, this bait pile.
• 29:47
  They were not afraid of it.
• 29:48
  So we set up the trap.
• 29:50
  And lo and behold, Matias is a wonderful fellow who is one of the lead
• 29:55
  researchers from Austria that at that time he was at the Max Plank Institute.
• 30:00
  And we launched that net and captured 23 Ravens at once.
• 30:07
  Two of them escaped, so we're down to 21.
• 30:09
  But still, Mathias says in that smooth Austrian accent in, in, in
• 30:14
  English, he says, I've never caught this many, you know, literally I'm
• 30:19
  on the phone with my wife, Jenny.
• 30:20
  I'm like, bring every, every pillowcase, every sack he had, he had a couple
• 30:24
  cat carriers and some pillowcases.
• 30:26
  I'm like, bring everything to the, to the pasture at the neighbors quick.
• 30:30
  You know, we've, and literally this, this net looks like a, you know.
• 30:35
  A, a container of bouncing burnt popcorn, like these birds are just exploding outta
• 30:41
  there and we finally bagged them up and we're all bleeding because even though
• 30:45
  this bird is not a raptor per se, you know that big sharp hooked beak, they
• 30:50
  have a small hook and they will cut you.
• 30:53
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, I was gonna say, I, I would wanna wait
• 30:55
  in there in full armor, I think.
• 30:57
  George Bumann: Yeah, pretty much.
• 30:58
  Yeah, pretty much.
• 30:59
  But you couldn't work very well with gloves on, so you had to, you know,
• 31:02
  they'd very delicately get the net out from behind their tongues so you didn't
• 31:06
  hurt them and get their, the net out from between their, their toes and claws.
• 31:11
  So you just had to open yourself up to it.
• 31:14
  But through that process and the process of weighing them, measuring them, putting
• 31:20
  the transmitters on the leg, bands, I knew that these long lived birds know
• 31:28
  us, even though we can't tell them apart as individuals, they know us.
• 31:34
  And John Mars left, who is one of the lead researchers on that same project,
• 31:38
  had done a study in, in Washington that you might be familiar with, with they did
• 31:42
  crow crows close relative of ravens, and found that they identify us as individuals
• 31:49
  and they remember, and they pass it on.
• 31:51
  They talk about us, and they would harass this masked figure who
• 31:55
  captured them, even though the, they took the mask out for a walk on the
• 32:00
  campus of Washington's university of Washington campus once a year.
• 32:05
  They captured once, remember this, they captured one time
• 32:08
  and let all the birds go.
• 32:10
  Every time they wore the mask that they did when they captured
• 32:13
  the birds every year thereafter.
• 32:16
  And it's been like 17, 18 years now.
• 32:19
  The crows would go bananas.
• 32:23
  They would harass that person and ignore everybody else.
• 32:26
  So through this process I had, this was before Covid, I had a
• 32:29
  handkerchief on, I looked like a bank robber, you know, over my face.
• 32:33
  I wore clothes that I didn't normally wear.
• 32:35
  I wore shoes that I didn't normally wear.
• 32:37
  'cause if there was any chance of pissing off the locals, I didn't
• 32:41
  wanna be recognized as the guy who was messing with him because in I talk
• 32:45
  about this in the book, a friend of ours didn't take those precautions.
• 32:49
  Nobody else did, in fact, and she.
• 32:53
  Went to a local cafe in town, like two and a half miles from the capture
• 32:58
  site and where we did the measuring and all the, the workup on the birds.
• 33:03
  Two weeks later, two and a half miles away, she comes outta the cafe
• 33:07
  with a scone and a coffee, okay?
• 33:10
  And this, this raven shows up and it takes this sideways hop toward her
• 33:16
  like you're gonna gimme some of that.
• 33:19
  And the moment she spoke.
• 33:21
  Now, keep in mind, most of the birds didn't see us anyway, or very little
• 33:26
  because they were in a, a cloth sack that would keep them safe, keep them calm.
• 33:31
  But they were listening as well as watching Shauna said, oh, what do you
• 33:38
  think you're doing to this Raven, who was sidling up for a piece of her scone.
• 33:43
  And the moment she spoke, the thing went ballistic.
• 33:46
  It screamed in a way she'd never heard a raven scream.
• 33:49
  And it jumped into this spruce tree just 20 feet away and just screaming at her.
• 33:55
  And meanwhile, these other ravens join it and start screaming at her, and
• 33:58
  they follow her all the way down the street screaming, shame, shame, shame.
• 34:03
  Yes.
• 34:04
  And she knew, she had noticed it had leg bands and a transmitter on its back.
• 34:08
  So this was one of the birds.
• 34:11
  She helped work up at the study site and it remembered.
• 34:17
  Not her, her outward appearance, it remembered her voice.
• 34:22
  It only did this after she spoke.
• 34:25
  So in addition to being all covered up and wearing different clothes, I was
• 34:27
  trying not to talk just on the chance.
• 34:30
  And they found this in elephants too.
• 34:32
  Like they, they know us way more than we realize.
• 34:38
  Rupert Isaacson: So the eavesdropping is two way.
• 34:40
  They're eavesdropping on us.
• 34:41
  We are eavesdropping on them precisely.
• 34:43
  And they're, I guess the subtext of that is there really is no us
• 34:47
  and them, we're all part, we're all part of the same species habitat.
• 34:53
  There's a lady where I'm sitting right now in a large village, small
• 34:59
  town in Germany called Eden Hausen.
• 35:01
  There is a park across the street from us which is also, it, it, it's also farmland.
• 35:09
  It's sort of half park, half farmland, and then it goes
• 35:11
  out to the forest in the park.
• 35:13
  But it's sort of a public place where people walk.
• 35:16
  There's a lady who goes and she feeds the crows.
• 35:19
  And I've been watching her for seven years and she shows up.
• 35:27
  The crows are all lined up.
• 35:28
  They, they see her coming and she has an individual relationship with each one.
• 35:34
  And if you show up there, she'll introduce you.
• 35:38
  And I, a bit like you have realized that I.
• 35:43
  Pretty sure they know who I am.
• 35:45
  And therefore, I want to mind my P's and Q's a little bit because
• 35:49
  I, I don't want to get mobbed.
• 35:51
  Walking through that, and my wife Eliana, who you just met for this podcast out
• 35:55
  where we keep our horses, she started to bring things for the crows because we got
• 36:00
  the idea because a friend of mine during Covid in London decided to grow decided
• 36:05
  to grow garlic on his balcony, and he put window boxes out, and he came out
• 36:11
  one day and found the garlic, dug up from the soil, placed still in the soil, but
• 36:21
  inside where the garlic had been a peanut.
• 36:26
  And this happened over all times.
• 36:30
  And, you know, all kind what's going on?
• 36:32
  All kinds of theories.
• 36:33
  Everyone's, he texted me about it, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 36:36
  I've got no idea because, you know, you're an nature guy.
• 36:39
  Rupert, you know, got window box in Hackney London.
• 36:43
  No, no idea.
• 36:44
  You know, squirrel.
• 36:45
  I don't know, but it doesn't sound like squirrel.
• 36:46
  Yeah.
• 36:47
  Why?
• 36:47
  And why, why is it taking something out, Rupert?
• 36:49
  Anyway, of course, he watched and watched, and watched and watched.
• 36:53
  It was one day he was coming home, getting out of his car, and he saw
• 36:58
  the raven, the, the, the crow fly in.
• 37:01
  Dig off his garlic and put a peanut in it.
• 37:03
  And then he is like, well, why?
• 37:05
  And where are they getting the peanuts from?
• 37:07
  So then he gets obsessed, of course.
• 37:09
  And it's covid, so there's nothing else to do.
• 37:11
  So, which is great because, you know, this is a time we can actually observe nature.
• 37:15
  And he begins to follow.
• 37:17
  And he followed one basically through the neighborhood, and he saw
• 37:22
  that they were going to the local Turkish delicatessen where they had
• 37:29
  bags of peanuts outside in sacks.
• 37:32
  Oh, wow.
• 37:33
  And they were waiting till No, and they were sweeping, they grab one.
• 37:36
  George Bumann: Hmm.
• 37:37
  Rupert Isaacson: But then they were going and depositing it in his window box.
• 37:43
  What were they saying?
• 37:44
  Were they saying, well, we think you put that there for us, the
• 37:47
  garlic, but we don't like garlic.
• 37:48
  So here's a suggestion about some things we might like.
• 37:51
  Or were they saying, we think you put this garlic here for us.
• 37:54
  We don't like it, but it's the thought that counts.
• 37:56
  So here's something for you.
• 37:58
  None of the above,
• 38:01
  but fascinating,
• 38:03
  George Bumann: very fascinating.
• 38:04
  Rupert Isaacson: The, the, that's sort of my question is,
• 38:06
  you know, ravens in the wild?
• 38:08
  You mentioned wolf, you mentioned elk, and I hope you'll take us back there.
• 38:11
  But most people, of course, live in urban situations or suburb situations,
• 38:16
  and of course, they're surrounded by nature and surrounded by wildlife.
• 38:19
  Our, our mutual friend Craig Foster, talks about walking around London and
• 38:24
  observing where slugs have gone on paving stones and eaten the algae.
• 38:30
  That's growing on the paving stones.
• 38:32
  And he can, he's learn to identify not just the trails, but the tooth marks
• 38:37
  because they're extremely similar to those of the slugs and the sea slugs that
• 38:42
  are on his kelp forest in South Africa.
• 38:44
  And he's there feeling, you know, overwhelmed and
• 38:46
  freaked out by the big city.
• 38:48
  He hates it.
• 38:49
  And then he starts to get his tracking eyes on and he's realizing, oh my gosh,
• 38:53
  I'm actually surrounded by wildlife.
• 38:55
  Yeah, eavesdropping on nature.
• 38:57
  TT take us into the city.
• 38:58
  Now.
• 38:59
  Take us into a more suburban setting.
• 39:03
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 39:04
  Wonderful questions and, and wonderful lead in, because
• 39:06
  nature really is everywhere.
• 39:07
  You don't have to live next to the, the great kelp forest of South Africa,
• 39:12
  like Craig or next to Yellowstone.
• 39:14
  There's wildness everywhere that is, that is the, almost with the hallmark of
• 39:21
  life as it fits in all the places that it possibly could, whether it's a plant,
• 39:27
  a, a, a microbe, a, a bird, a mammal.
• 39:32
  And they make due.
• 39:32
  And in some cases, being near people is actually way more advantageous than
• 39:37
  being without, you know, they found that raccoons, for instance, in some places in
• 39:41
  the United States are, are far more well off in suburban and urban environments.
• 39:47
  They learned to cross streets.
• 39:48
  They learned to use intersections.
• 39:50
  They also come along.
• 39:51
  My Uber driver the other
• 39:52
  Rupert Isaacson: day was a raccoon actually.
• 39:53
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 39:54
  Was really?
• 39:54
  Yes.
• 39:55
  And did he, did he keep both hands on the wheel or was it he didn't need to.
• 39:58
  He was just driving by ESP.
• 39:59
  Yeah, they're more intelligent.
• 40:03
  Rupert Isaacson: As you know, if you followed any of my work, I'm
• 40:05
  an autism dad and we have a whole career before this podcast in helping
• 40:13
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• 40:17
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• 40:20
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• 40:22
  Or are you somebody with neurodivergence?
• 40:25
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• 40:30
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• 40:32
  So I reached out for mentorship, and I found it through an amazing adult
• 40:37
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• 40:40
  Temple Grandin.
• 40:41
  And she told me what to do.
• 40:43
  And it's been working so amazingly for the last 20 years.
• 40:48
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• 40:52
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• 41:01
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• 41:06
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• 41:09
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• 41:12
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• 41:15
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• 41:19
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• 41:22
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• 41:26
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• 41:35
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• 41:42
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• 41:43
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• 41:48
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• 41:52
  George Bumann: So, you know, the, the bottom line is you, you can interact
• 41:56
  with these things, these non-human intelligences everywhere, really.
• 42:00
  And so let's step into a park.
• 42:03
  Let's say you're, you're living in a park.
• 42:05
  And because I know North American species a little bit better, I'll,
• 42:08
  I'll use that as an example where you might be out it outdoors before light.
• 42:15
  It's dawn and you hear,
• 42:23
  so a great horned owl is there somewhere in the distance.
• 42:27
  And let's, let's actually add another, a different owl in, because this one is,
• 42:32
  is perhaps a little more instructive,
• 42:41
  the Bard owl.
• 42:43
  And before you can even see, before the sun has come up, you know, in most.
• 42:48
  In most likelihood, there is an evergreen tree, or forest, a
• 42:52
  component to the forest in the park.
• 42:55
  Okay?
• 42:55
  So that the sun comes up or it's getting close to sunrise, and you hear, you
• 42:59
  know, perhaps if it's a big enough park, you'll hear, teach, teach, teach,
• 43:04
  teach, teach the sound of an oven, bird, which is a type of war garden.
• 43:09
  It's an oven.
• 43:09
  Bird, yeah, it's a very small bird.
• 43:12
  And they make a nest that's kind of a globe with a side entrance,
• 43:15
  like an old fashioned bread oven.
• 43:18
  And they only nest in mature continuous forest.
• 43:24
  Whereas if you hear, we, we, we, as the sun is just starting to creep up that
• 43:31
  gray cat bird, you know that there's a brushy area, perhaps somewhere over there.
• 43:37
  You hear the rattle of a kingfisher.
• 43:39
  You know that if you've never even been to that place, that there's a stream or a
• 43:43
  river or a pond where there might be fish and this, this bird is looking for that,
• 43:48
  or just simply the sound of amphibians, frogs calling, there's a wetland, there's
• 43:53
  a marsh, there's some other habitat there.
• 43:57
  And so in, in many ways, I think sound is better than vision.
• 44:03
  We, we, we default to vision, but sound can go over, around and even through
• 44:09
  objects that we can't see through.
• 44:13
  And by a way of engaging not just our ears, but you know, learning
• 44:17
  to, to see through our noses, learning to see through our fingers.
• 44:20
  We discover things that we walked right by in places we thought we
• 44:25
  knew, perhaps for our whole lifetime.
• 44:28
  And by starting to listen to these wild conversations, you realize a,
• 44:32
  you're, you're surrounded by these other living beings, but that they're
• 44:37
  also telling you very important things about what your shared space is Like.
• 44:46
  Rupert Isaacson: So in June, I was, I was in London at my mom's house and
• 44:49
  my mom, like, your mom's a a artist, a sculptor, and she has a studio out back
• 44:55
  of the house and there's bed in it.
• 44:57
  So I sleep there and I woke up to this across the roof and I say, oh, squirrel.
• 45:05
  Yeah, it's like
• 45:08
  Scrabble, Scrabble, Scrabble.
• 45:09
  I say, not squirrel.
• 45:13
  And I look up at the skylight, there's a fox scrambling as if it's digging.
• 45:21
  At the skylight, and I'm looking up at him up at his belly.
• 45:27
  I've never had that perspective on a fox before.
• 45:30
  In fact, I don't think I've had that perspective on any wild animal ever.
• 45:35
  It's not fully grown.
• 45:36
  It's about a, it's probably about eight months old.
• 45:38
  It's quite skinny, but it's, it's semi adult and it's obsessively
• 45:44
  scrambling at the skylight.
• 45:45
  Like, what do you want you, that's not gonna give it's glass?
• 45:51
  Is it play?
• 45:53
  And then at a certain point it curls around and curls around and
• 45:57
  goes, and it lies down to sleep.
• 45:58
  And I'm looking up at this from underneath at this sleeping fox.
• 46:05
  I'm there for a few days.
• 46:06
  It cra I'm taking pictures.
• 46:08
  I'll, I'll send them to you.
• 46:09
  The third day I realize it's a family up there and they're living up there.
• 46:13
  They're living on the roof.
• 46:16
  Because I guess there's all kinds of stuff to eat falling down on
• 46:22
  there from the various local trees.
• 46:23
  There's probably insects, there's probably spiders, there's probably
• 46:26
  wood lice, there's probably ants.
• 46:28
  Turned out there were a big nest of ants up there.
• 46:31
  And that's what they were scrambling for.
• 46:33
  George Bumann: Mm-hmm.
• 46:34
  And the
• 46:34
  Rupert Isaacson: ants began to fall through the, later in the
• 46:37
  summer the tile, the, the, the, the, the old ceiling and it.
• 46:42
  Turn.
• 46:43
  And now of course they got the time.
• 46:44
  Now my mom curses them because they lift the tiles off.
• 46:47
  The same fox is looking for the ants.
• 46:49
  It it was one of those moments similar to what you described when you realize,
• 46:53
  oh my gosh, there's this whole world going on here in this place that I think
• 46:58
  of, in this entirely human context.
• 47:01
  George Bumann: Mm-hmm.
• 47:02
  Yeah.
• 47:02
  Rupert Isaacson: But it's compared wilderness.
• 47:05
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 47:06
  Yeah.
• 47:07
  It's it's where you find it.
• 47:09
  And I've had some of the most remarkable encounters with wildlife
• 47:12
  in the most unlikely places, you know?
• 47:15
  Can you give us an
• 47:16
  Rupert Isaacson: example?
• 47:17
  George Bumann: Gosh.
• 47:19
  Well, a simple one is just knowing that there's a cat on the loose.
• 47:24
  You know, I was hiking with my wife along the, the CNO canal after we'd
• 47:28
  gone to meet her family in Maryland.
• 47:31
  And we just went for a walk on this old railway that had been
• 47:34
  converted to a hiking path.
• 47:36
  And, and the hill kind of drops down the grade, drops down toward the
• 47:39
  canal, and we're at such an angle we couldn't see all the way to the water.
• 47:43
  But all of a sudden, a re small bird just jumps up on a, a stick, maybe,
• 47:48
  you know, half a meter off the ground.
• 47:51
  Cha cha cha cha cha, just making all kinds of noise.
• 47:56
  And I knew in an instant that there was something dangerous.
• 48:00
  Something of concern right close by.
• 48:04
  So we crept closer and looked and looked and finally got a look over
• 48:06
  the berm and here's a domestic house cat just, you know, doing
• 48:11
  its thing, hunting along the canal.
• 48:14
  And that's one of the real beauties to me of, of this eavesdropping is not
• 48:18
  only do you have the ability to find animals that you, that were invisible
• 48:24
  before, but you step into their world.
• 48:26
  And our friend Craig is great at, at talking about this, is that
• 48:29
  you, you're not just studying the octopus or the sea ice.
• 48:32
  You're, you're, you're seeing what eats them.
• 48:35
  You're seeing what they run from, you're seeing what they feed on.
• 48:38
  You're seeing where they hide at night.
• 48:40
  You're seeing where they go through the sand in, in, in, you know, stormy periods.
• 48:46
  You just, you, you step into their world and to me that you can't not help but
• 48:52
  begin to be more aware, certainly, but also empathetic for what these wild
• 48:58
  creatures go through to just survive.
• 49:02
  And we, we live very posh lives, very cushy existences
• 49:07
  compared to our ancestors, but.
• 49:09
  If you want a window into that, just look at what your foxes have
• 49:13
  to do to get by to raise their kids.
• 49:16
  Look at what that pigeon, how far that, if you get to identify that one oddly colored
• 49:21
  pigeon and realize, you know, sort of like your friend trying to narrow down where
• 49:25
  the crows were going, you realize that they're traveling over a very vast, you
• 49:31
  know, bit of ground to, to make ends meet.
• 49:34
  And, and all the travails they run into, you know, there's other
• 49:37
  members of their own species that push them off and, and push them
• 49:40
  around, or that they have to avoid.
• 49:42
  You just, you just step into a new world and the place you've always been
• 49:52
  Rupert Isaacson: talking about.
• 49:52
  Craig, you know, one of the
• 49:56
  interesting things that came up in our last conversation, it's
• 49:59
  actually on this, on this podcast.
• 50:01
  So for those listeners, go check out the second podcast with Craig Foster was
• 50:07
  that wellbeing, psychological emotional wellbeing in a human tied up with nature.
• 50:15
  Like, why is it that we feel so good in nature beyond the fact that
• 50:19
  we're our organisms and of course we're designed for planet Earth.
• 50:22
  And so, okay, we're gonna do better out there than we do behind a screen, but.
• 50:31
  This thing of you, you, you talk about the travels they go through, but often
• 50:35
  it seems to me that the natural world really is it That's true abundance
• 50:40
  and that animals, and of course wild people are so competent gaining
• 50:49
  sustenance unless some environmental condition really shuts them down.
• 50:54
  Or someone built a housing estate right where they live or whatever.
• 50:59
  George Bumann: Mm-hmm.
• 51:00
  Rupert Isaacson: That there really is kind of quality of life.
• 51:02
  And we ourselves, as a species feel really good when we are in
• 51:06
  a place of great biodiversity.
• 51:09
  'cause I think that there is something ancestral in us that
• 51:13
  goes, ah, lots of food here.
• 51:15
  I'm Okay.
• 51:16
  Lots of abundance.
• 51:18
  You live in one of those places, you live in Yellowstone.
• 51:23
  What do you feel is the state of the mental health of, say yourself?
• 51:33
  Just take yourself as an example and put yourself in different phases of your
• 51:38
  life, in different times of mental health.
• 51:43
  What do you feel these places of abundance give us?
• 51:49
  What do you notice in the.
• 51:51
  People that are attracted to these places that come, you know, Yellowstone
• 51:55
  is this massive tourist attraction.
• 51:57
  People want to be there even in a day and age of completely sedentary culture.
• 52:03
  And, you know, we're all overweight and we're all this and we're all
• 52:06
  that, but yet we are drawn in vast numbers still to these, these places.
• 52:12
  What do you think is going on with all this and what do you think the locals,
• 52:16
  the wild locals make of us there?
• 52:20
  George Bumann: I think this is a, a wonderful, wonderful question because
• 52:26
  none of us are living in the ideal bubble.
• 52:31
  Mm-hmm.
• 52:31
  Right?
• 52:32
  None of us have the perfect life, and even if we do think of it, you know,
• 52:36
  someone looks across the lawn and sees something better and different that
• 52:40
  they, they think they're missing out on.
• 52:42
  And you know, I, this is, this is one I've thought about a bit.
• 52:46
  You know, I, I feel like the, the high point in my life as far as mental
• 52:53
  health and freedom and appreciation of beauty and the, the feeling of, of
• 53:00
  togetherness with all of the living things in my family, neighbors, fish, birds
• 53:07
  was when I was about seven or eight.
• 53:11
  And I was always out on the docks fishing.
• 53:14
  I was in, you know, we had had about an acre of land, but the,
• 53:17
  the latter half was not moan.
• 53:18
  So it was kind of feral.
• 53:21
  And that was my jungle.
• 53:22
  That was my, that was my Amazon, that was my African Savannah, like that.
• 53:28
  I escaped into that space and there weren't a lot of kids around.
• 53:32
  Not that there weren't in the area and didn't have a, a large class in school.
• 53:36
  But when I came home I had myself, but I had myself perhaps in the best
• 53:43
  way in association with that space.
• 53:48
  So there's constant, I think one of the things that truly
• 53:52
  diverse wild nature offers us is this, this sense of possibility.
• 53:58
  You know?
• 53:58
  So as you become in tune with that space, you see possibilities for the, the,
• 54:08
  you know, Maslow's hierarchy, right?
• 54:10
  That you as a, as an educator in, in the outdoors leading a backpacking trip
• 54:14
  or an expedition, you'll, you have to worry about the pe people's safety.
• 54:17
  Are they fed, are they hydrated?
• 54:19
  You know, those, those key elements that we need when
• 54:22
  satisfied, give us a sense of calm.
• 54:26
  I know we're, I know dinner's coming at the end of the day,
• 54:29
  I won't go to sleep hungry.
• 54:31
  The sense of possibility for those options is what I feel in nature.
• 54:37
  But interestingly, for myself, the progression was
• 54:43
  society culture molds us in different ways.
• 54:48
  And I would say not always for the better in, in the sense that
• 54:53
  the human world is very inwardly focused in, in a lot of ways.
• 54:58
  Indigenous cultures not so much, you know, of course they're much, they have to be
• 55:02
  because they're directly tied to the land.
• 55:04
  But for those of us in the modern world, we're, we're less
• 55:08
  and less directly connected.
• 55:09
  So it's easy to fall into this, me, me, me, my, my, my,
• 55:13
  our family versus your family.
• 55:16
  And starting in through my early teens, I, I was wanting to fit in
• 55:21
  and, and pleased those around me to do what I thought I should do.
• 55:27
  And even as I got into the university and was very good at my studies,
• 55:32
  I, you know, excelled and was honored for all those things.
• 55:35
  But I, there was this piece in me that wasn't there satiated, it wasn't
• 55:40
  fulfilled in the way those hours of free play and exploration did for me when I
• 55:49
  was in that seven to 8-year-old range.
• 55:52
  And it's taken me a long time to get back to that.
• 55:55
  I think when, honestly, honestly, when we first moved to Yellowstone,
• 55:59
  I was not in a great place.
• 56:01
  I, I, I didn't know what I was supposed to do with my life.
• 56:06
  Quite frankly.
• 56:08
  We'd moved to this new place.
• 56:09
  I knew I needed a break.
• 56:11
  I tried doing illustration work for publications, but the age
• 56:14
  of illustration, it was gone.
• 56:16
  I tried doing some writing that I tried doing watercolor painting.
• 56:20
  I was teaching.
• 56:22
  I was just, there was just this unquenchable longing for something.
• 56:26
  I didn't know what
• 56:30
  I just, and I think a lot of people are in this position where you
• 56:33
  just, you don't know what it is, but you feel something's missing.
• 56:38
  And I think this is very much a part of that very old piece that resides
• 56:46
  deep within us that longs for genuine, supportive community that doesn't
• 56:53
  judge us, that lets us be creative and odd and weird and all those quirky
• 56:58
  ways that lets us explore into our environment without, without parameters.
• 57:06
  And so the Ravens, for me, to be honest, to bring some of this back
• 57:11
  around, were my effort to start recapturing some of my youth.
• 57:19
  I.
• 57:20
  In this non-judgmental, completely open, non-directed way, that was
• 57:27
  the epitome of freedom in many ways.
• 57:30
  And we're not talking about political freedom here or economic freedom.
• 57:33
  I'm talking about personal lived freedom to just wander over that hill,
• 57:41
  to walk through that creek barefooted, just because you want to, not because
• 57:46
  you know, someone says that that is what you should or shouldn't do.
• 57:51
  And these days, I, my physical health is better than it's ever been.
• 57:56
  I think my mental health is, is, is very close to all.
• 58:00
  I'm still, you know, I think we all struggle trying to find
• 58:03
  things that give us a hand or, or a rope to our better selves.
• 58:12
  And, and nature, nature does that.
• 58:16
  I was interviewing the project veterinarian who brought the very first
• 58:21
  wolves down to Yellowstone here recently.
• 58:23
  And I asked him about the physical health of these wolves and he said,
• 58:27
  they're immaculate, they're beautiful.
• 58:29
  Yeah.
• 58:30
  Once in a while they get diseases.
• 58:31
  Parvovirus can canine virus.
• 58:33
  Sometimes they get mange, but nothing compared to the health
• 58:38
  and ailments of domestic animals.
• 58:41
  And so many of the ills of the human world spill over into our pets.
• 58:45
  You can't not have a pet sometimes and not see how our world, it's
• 58:52
  an agreement in, in some respects, but it's not in another, and it,
• 58:57
  and we suffer from some of those same things.
• 59:00
  We are domesticated humans
• 59:04
  and it, it brings a lot of baggage with it, but it's heartening to
• 59:07
  know that nature is that place where we can offload the baggage.
• 59:12
  Rupert Isaacson: It's interesting.
• 59:13
  As you were talking there, I was drawing this little diagram, so it started with
• 59:16
  the questions like, is nature optimism?
• 59:19
  And then I wrote under optimism, I wrote belonging question mark.
• 59:25
  And then when you said freedom, I wrote freedom up at the top.
• 59:28
  So then I've ended up with is nature sort of with one of those brackets,
• 59:32
  one of those squiggly swirly brackets, freedom, optimism, belonging.
• 59:39
  In fact, is it possible to have those things really without nature?
• 59:48
  George Bumann: I've never had to answer that exact question, but
• 59:52
  in my, my snap response is no.
• 59:58
  Rupert Isaacson: And it's interesting that you bring up wolves.
• 1:00:01
  I was lucky enough in the nineties to go and report.
• 1:00:06
  Very, very early on the Wolf Ry introduction in Yellowstone.
• 1:00:09
  So I got to see a bit of that, and I've gone back a few times
• 1:00:14
  and seen how they've thrived.
• 1:00:17
  But it seems to me that if there's a species that really typifies that
• 1:00:22
  in a way that almost reflects human society a little bit, it's wolves.
• 1:00:28
  What?
• 1:00:29
  Talk to us about that.
• 1:00:30
  And
• 1:00:33
  you, you, you live there, you talk about the Lamar Valley, that's sort of the best
• 1:00:36
  wolf spotting spot in the world now really because they're, they're out there on the
• 1:00:40
  open ground from the few places you can actually drive in your car and literally
• 1:00:44
  see them by the side of the road.
• 1:00:46
  Incredible.
• 1:00:47
  Yeah.
• 1:00:47
  Talk to us about wolves.
• 1:00:51
  George Bumann: Wolves are contentious.
• 1:00:54
  We have several bills that have been put forward in our state legislature to, in
• 1:00:59
  whatever ways they can annihilate them.
• 1:01:02
  Again, you know, it, it won't happen to the success of, of previous
• 1:01:07
  times of the 19th century because poison is not allowed at this point.
• 1:01:13
  But I think like we as children who have siblings squabble most, with those
• 1:01:20
  who are closest to us or most like us, there's the most we have to lose.
• 1:01:26
  And I think as a social mammal who is both territorial and outspoken, you
• 1:01:32
  know, unafraid to be seen and speak.
• 1:01:34
  Its mind howl at you right in your face.
• 1:01:37
  You know, when you step too close to the den un unawares there is at once
• 1:01:46
  as indigenous cultures, my nesper friends say that the wolves are how
• 1:01:51
  we learn to be pit good parents.
• 1:01:57
  You can see that similarity as, as an analog and inspiration, or
• 1:02:01
  you can see that as competition.
• 1:02:04
  And therein lies a lot of the, the beauty in the, the, the travails of, of the world
• 1:02:09
  of wolves, especially in the context of Yellowstone, where it's not like Northern
• 1:02:13
  Canada or Alaska or Russia, where you have vast untracked spaces for them to live.
• 1:02:18
  They're living, you know, as they leave Yellowstone in context with human society.
• 1:02:26
  But when you see them as individuals and get over some of the mythologies
• 1:02:32
  that we attach to them, good, bad, or indifferent, and see them for who
• 1:02:36
  and what they are, they become, in my mind, some of the best teachers.
• 1:02:43
  They're like us in so many ways.
• 1:02:45
  And that's the thing I, you know, my art actually is a great, I use
• 1:02:48
  my art as an excuse to dig deeper into the lives of my subjects.
• 1:02:53
  What I really try to portray is not a wolf, or not a bear or not a elk.
• 1:02:58
  It's, it's.
• 1:03:00
  What is this being who resides in this form thinking, you know, some
• 1:03:07
  of these pieces take years to, to get to my satisfaction because I'm trying
• 1:03:11
  to model something that has no shape.
• 1:03:14
  I'm trying to model what I receive from them as perhaps anthropomorphized
• 1:03:18
  as it is in some cases.
• 1:03:21
  What's going through their mind?
• 1:03:23
  How do they experience this same exact moment as, as compared to me?
• 1:03:29
  And when you're having a hard day for whatever reason, coworker pissed you
• 1:03:34
  off, or you you got sick and vomited in the interview or just any, pick your,
• 1:03:42
  pick your, you know, terrible day and you go outside and you see this wolf
• 1:03:48
  who's just gotten kicked in the ribs and has three broken ribs and is still
• 1:03:52
  out there providing for its family.
• 1:03:56
  It's PAC Mate had its femur crushed, and yet from the air, the biologist
• 1:04:02
  flying along dart it and would never have known that it only had three legs
• 1:04:09
  because they just persevere that drive to survive, that drive to persist,
• 1:04:15
  to drive, to care for your young, to drive, to protect your mate.
• 1:04:19
  These eternal, deep universal things make you turn around and look at your own.
• 1:04:26
  Shitty day and think, alright, I don't have really that much to complain about.
• 1:04:32
  I've got dinner tonight, my sweetie right here.
• 1:04:37
  You know, I've got all my, my, my bodily appendages in Good.
• 1:04:42
  What's Netflix?
• 1:04:43
  Yeah, I've got Netflix.
• 1:04:46
  Totally.
• 1:04:46
  So they're a wonderful mirror to us in many ways because the behaviors of
• 1:04:51
  animals will tell us a lot about ourselves that perhaps we didn't even realize.
• 1:04:57
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:04:58
  They seem to meet wolves to be, to typify the best of family.
• 1:05:02
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:05:04
  That okay.
• 1:05:05
  You've got an alpha pair who will have the young, but the entire pack will
• 1:05:08
  look after the young most of the time.
• 1:05:12
  Yeah.
• 1:05:13
  They will fight these territorial battles sometimes to the death, but
• 1:05:17
  really they're doing it for family.
• 1:05:20
  Yeah.
• 1:05:20
  When I was a journalist there, I remember Idaho was also bringing wools back
• 1:05:28
  in and it got blocked by the state.
• 1:05:31
  Who withdrew the funding got withdrawn.
• 1:05:33
  And the ne as you talked about the Nez pe the Nez PE Indians
• 1:05:36
  stepped up and said, we'll fund it.
• 1:05:39
  Because for us the wolf is a symbol of family.
• 1:05:44
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 1:05:45
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:05:46
  You are living out there and you are taking people.
• 1:05:49
  Right?
• 1:05:50
  So if somebody wanted to, we'll go into this at the end, how people can
• 1:05:52
  contact you, but people can actually go with you into Yellowstone, right?
• 1:05:57
  You guide people.
• 1:05:59
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 1:06:00
  I still, I don't do as much as I used to, but a few times a year I teach
• 1:06:02
  classes and, and things like that.
• 1:06:05
  So yes.
• 1:06:06
  Rupert Isaacson: When you are bringing people in, I presume sometimes people
• 1:06:10
  are coming as families, some people are come, you know, and you are
• 1:06:14
  showing them these family structures.
• 1:06:16
  What, what are the insights that people gain?
• 1:06:22
  What are the things they come away with that they didn't expect perhaps?
• 1:06:28
  George Bumann: I think one of the, again, good question.
• 1:06:31
  I think a lot of times the initial takeaways are, they're not doing
• 1:06:35
  what I thought they would do.
• 1:06:37
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:06:38
  George Bumann: They're walking right by a whole group of elk or, you know,
• 1:06:43
  they're just, they're just laying there.
• 1:06:46
  Wolf's spend a lot of time laying about.
• 1:06:49
  And until we really have a chance to, to view them more and view individuals
• 1:06:54
  and individuals from different packs.
• 1:06:56
  And do you see this spectrum of, of behaviors that sort of
• 1:07:00
  calibrates and recalibrates?
• 1:07:02
  What, those expectations are we just so removed that yes, we have
• 1:07:08
  dogs and it's easier for us to relate to wolves perhaps that way.
• 1:07:12
  And you'll hear that, oh my gosh, it look, my dog does that.
• 1:07:15
  It rolls on its back, or, or it spins in circles before it, it lays down and
• 1:07:18
  for no reason, well, you get to see here it, you know, in the wild it, the wolves
• 1:07:23
  doing it, you know, maybe to, to lay the grass down, out there in, in the valley.
• 1:07:28
  But to see those, some of those tender moments too, I wish I could say I was
• 1:07:32
  there for this one, but Rick McIntyre maybe told you this story of Wolf 21.
• 1:07:37
  He's like the all time am heavyweight champion of, of wolf fights.
• 1:07:43
  You know, he, he at one point ran headlong by himself into
• 1:07:48
  the, the center of an enemy pack.
• 1:07:51
  And his pack subsequently rallied around him and they drove off this,
• 1:07:55
  this enemy to the Druid peak pack.
• 1:07:57
  And yet this wolf that is so fierce and so strident in his defense of his
• 1:08:02
  family, can turn around and play with his puppies, with abandon, you know,
• 1:08:08
  let those puppies attack him and knock him to the ground and bite him and
• 1:08:11
  put their paws over his back, which is something you do not do to a alpha wolf.
• 1:08:16
  You know, you, you don't dominate or, or symbol that, with these behaviors that
• 1:08:22
  this father freely lets his kids do, bite him on the ankles, you know, just
• 1:08:28
  he falls to the ground and feigns, you know, defeat so that these children of his
• 1:08:34
  can experience something of, of what he can teach them just by being who he is.
• 1:08:39
  So I,
• 1:08:42
  it's seeing these, these moments and these, these little windows
• 1:08:46
  into just how similar, very much on parallel tracks in life.
• 1:08:54
  You know, good dad plays with his kids.
• 1:08:56
  A good mom reads them at at bedtime and they, they really inspire.
• 1:09:01
  And I think people come away from that changed how, how can I be a better dad?
• 1:09:09
  I do it too.
• 1:09:09
  You know, it's like, man, it didn't run off and get another bone at the carcass.
• 1:09:15
  It actually stayed there and it, it greeted that puppy
• 1:09:19
  and played with that puppy.
• 1:09:20
  And, and even if for five minutes, can I do that with our dog to improve his
• 1:09:26
  life and just, just stop after I come in the door and I've got all these things
• 1:09:32
  in this to-do list in my head yet?
• 1:09:35
  No, just, just give, give five minutes, give 10 minutes.
• 1:09:39
  It's, it's nothing really, but it means the world.
• 1:09:42
  Yeah.
• 1:09:44
  Rupert Isaacson: You, I watched a Ted talk that you did in which you, and we
• 1:09:48
  have not talked about your sculpture yet.
• 1:09:50
  So listeners, George is an extremely stonly good sculptor.
• 1:09:55
  Won a bazillion awards and a bazillion shows and look him up.
• 1:09:59
  We'll give you web things at the end.
• 1:10:01
  If you wanna pay a million dollars for sculptures, you should.
• 1:10:05
  'cause they're great.
• 1:10:06
  But you were sculpting
• 1:10:10
  out of clay on stage a wolf, but I remember you saying,
• 1:10:16
  or did I, did I see it right?
• 1:10:18
  Is it a wolf?
• 1:10:18
  And you turned it into a coyote and then you turn it back into a wolf,
• 1:10:22
  then you turn it into a Labrador, then you say, no, it's definitely a wolf.
• 1:10:27
  And it's, is it a she wolf?
• 1:10:28
  And then you cocked the leg.
• 1:10:31
  It was great.
• 1:10:31
  Of the wire structure and then you was No, it's actually is a she wolf.
• 1:10:36
  And then you, and you told a story, which I found very inspiring
• 1:10:41
  about motherhood.
• 1:10:43
  George Bumann: Hmm.
• 1:10:44
  Rupert Isaacson: Can you tell us that story please?
• 1:10:47
  George Bumann: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:49
  And it's, it's a good one because it's, it was one where I was out
• 1:10:52
  with a family and it was midsummer.
• 1:10:56
  So the first week of June July in Lamar Valley.
• 1:11:00
  And this family dearly wanted to see wolves.
• 1:11:03
  And so I'd taken them to a place that overlooked.
• 1:11:07
  The route through which the, the local wolf pack took to get to their den.
• 1:11:14
  So you'd see Cummings and goings potentially all day long, but at that
• 1:11:19
  time of the year, it's time for the puppies to really gain their exposure to
• 1:11:26
  the wider world, you know, here to four.
• 1:11:28
  By early July they've lived in the den and food have been brought to
• 1:11:33
  them and toys have been brought to them and the families visited them
• 1:11:35
  there and taken care of them there.
• 1:11:38
  But there comes a point where you have to get out into the world and see what it's
• 1:11:43
  really like and who you have to contend with in the situations you run into.
• 1:11:49
  So, explain that to the family.
• 1:11:50
  This is the place where, you know, we could see the Druid wolves coming
• 1:11:53
  and going from the den, you know, hear that often the places they cross
• 1:11:57
  the river and in the distance, you know, some of the trails they used.
• 1:12:00
  So keep your eyes open.
• 1:12:01
  And we were there for a little while and at one point the daughter says, there's a
• 1:12:08
  wolf over there and we're on this bluff.
• 1:12:11
  That sort of drops down to first the road, then a small creek that flows into
• 1:12:15
  the Lamar River and then the Lamar River.
• 1:12:18
  And along the, the edge of this same bluff was a wolf.
• 1:12:23
  She was right.
• 1:12:23
  She, she was entirely right.
• 1:12:25
  It was maybe a quarter mile from us, half a mile.
• 1:12:28
  I can't remember.
• 1:12:29
  'cause we were looking through spotting scopes, but it wasn't just any wolf.
• 1:12:34
  This was the Alpha female, the famous Wolf, 42, the Cinderella Wolf depicted
• 1:12:40
  on multiple television programs quickly.
• 1:12:44
  Why was it a Cinderella wolf?
• 1:12:46
  She was dubbed the Cinderella wolf because when the wolf were returned in 1995,
• 1:12:52
  as you experienced, they were brought as much as they could in family groups.
• 1:12:58
  And when she was brought down with her family, one of the other quote
• 1:13:03
  unquote family members, as it turns out, we now know genetically
• 1:13:06
  was not a pure sibling to her.
• 1:13:10
  And as shown by Bob Landis' footage in some of the National Geographic films
• 1:13:15
  early on that came out, she and her other sisters and even her mother were brutally
• 1:13:22
  terrorized by this wicked stepsister.
• 1:13:26
  She drove her mother outta the pack, drove a couple of her sisters outta
• 1:13:29
  the pack, drove Wolf 42 outta the pack, and ultimately they got sick of it.
• 1:13:35
  This was the, this
• 1:13:36
  Rupert Isaacson: was the she wolf.
• 1:13:36
  I remember hearing about this.
• 1:13:37
  You actually went around killing the cubs of some of the other ones.
• 1:13:40
  Is that right?
• 1:13:40
  Correct,
• 1:13:41
  George Bumann: yes.
• 1:13:41
  40 Wolf, 40 was her number would went to the year before and killed 40 twos pups.
• 1:13:50
  And apparently she highly unusual behavior among wolves too.
• 1:13:53
  Very unusual.
• 1:13:55
  Very unusual to kill.
• 1:13:57
  Pups or any individual within your own pack, that is very
• 1:14:01
  get so in any species unusual.
• 1:14:03
  Yes.
• 1:14:04
  Right.
• 1:14:04
  We, we don't have the corner on that, but it's far more rare, I would
• 1:14:09
  say, even than in our population.
• 1:14:11
  So 42 was not gonna take it as it seems is from what we understand.
• 1:14:16
  She and perhaps one of her adult daughters and maybe a couple others, put their
• 1:14:22
  paws down, said Not this time sweetie.
• 1:14:25
  And they beat her up badly and she ultimately died of her injuries.
• 1:14:30
  So this is kind of the pretext to her that morning, but also
• 1:14:35
  her rise and her ascendance to be the alpha female of that pack.
• 1:14:40
  She was a, a strong leader, but she, if I can use a human
• 1:14:44
  term, was, was compassionate.
• 1:14:47
  Mm.
• 1:14:47
  You know, even, even as an alpha, they don't always lead from the front, you
• 1:14:52
  know, and she would lead from the back.
• 1:14:54
  Sometimes she would lead from the middle of the pack when they were traveling.
• 1:14:58
  And at the time we saw her this morning with this family, she was eight years old.
• 1:15:04
  Now, keep in mind, this is almost three times the normal lifespan of a, a regular
• 1:15:10
  wolf in the population at that time.
• 1:15:12
  So within her was this accumulated wisdom of life
• 1:15:20
  and that plays into the events that unfolded in a really.
• 1:15:23
  Beautiful way that I thankfully realized then, but even more so now as a parent.
• 1:15:32
  And as we watched 42 stood on that bluff and she at one point looked behind her,
• 1:15:38
  which if you know anything about animal behavior, was often a, a, a sign quite
• 1:15:43
  universal, one that someone else is there.
• 1:15:46
  She looked back into the forest and outta that forest came five little
• 1:15:50
  puppies just clamoring tiny little characters, you know, just 7, 8, 9 weeks
• 1:15:59
  old, however old they were very young.
• 1:16:03
  And they joined at her heels as if to say, okay, now what mom?
• 1:16:10
  And she gave the signal, whatever that signal was, and they descended the
• 1:16:15
  bluff down toward the road and the park rangers stopped traffic so that the,
• 1:16:20
  the family could cross the, the road.
• 1:16:23
  And it was hysterical because it was late enough in mourning that the sun had
• 1:16:28
  been hitting the asphalt and it was warm.
• 1:16:31
  And I noticed as these puppies were dancing across the pavement of the road,
• 1:16:35
  that they were kind of like picking up their paws in this funny ways.
• 1:16:38
  If they had something stuck to them, when, in fact, I think it was just
• 1:16:41
  the heat of the, the road in the, the morning sun was a new sensation to them.
• 1:16:47
  Right.
• 1:16:47
  And they get across the road, it's like, woo, they made it,
• 1:16:50
  there are three big obstacles.
• 1:16:51
  The road, the creek, and then the river.
• 1:16:55
  And phew.
• 1:16:56
  Okay.
• 1:16:56
  So they, they go across and they hit Soda Butte Creek.
• 1:17:01
  And mom is now joined by two of her adult daughters.
• 1:17:04
  So auntie one and auntie two join, and the adults go to the Ford, the crossing
• 1:17:09
  place of the creek that they usually use.
• 1:17:12
  And the three adults cross the creek.
• 1:17:16
  And the pups aren't sure about this whole thing.
• 1:17:18
  They're, you know, they're very apprehensive about
• 1:17:21
  stepping into the water.
• 1:17:22
  They're kind of exhibiting this indecision.
• 1:17:24
  But at 1.1
• 1:17:25
  of 'em just leaps in and then they all jump in, you know, but the flow
• 1:17:28
  quickly takes them, you know, and, and most of them get out, but one
• 1:17:31
  gets washed down like a hundred yards.
• 1:17:33
  And we're, you know, us watching we're like, oh my gosh,
• 1:17:36
  did, did that puppy make it?
• 1:17:38
  Did it just, did we literally just watch this puppy drowned.
• 1:17:41
  And, you know, pretty soon out comes this pup onto the far side of the bank
• 1:17:46
  and it just, in that beautiful morning light, it shakes off and there's just
• 1:17:50
  this prismatic spl you just spray of, of fractured light that, that sort
• 1:17:58
  of heralded, this youngster making it, getting back with its siblings.
• 1:18:03
  Whew.
• 1:18:04
  Boy, that was a big deal.
• 1:18:05
  Hope we don't have to do that again.
• 1:18:08
  So they made it through the second big obstacle.
• 1:18:11
  Then they came to the third, which was even bigger.
• 1:18:14
  Yet it was the Lamar River.
• 1:18:16
  And even in mid-summer throughout most of the history, that is still at
• 1:18:22
  high water or at least higher water than normal as far as the year goes.
• 1:18:28
  So per crossing the creek, the adults take them to the Ford of the river.
• 1:18:34
  And as they're standing there, the adults, you know, sort of survey,
• 1:18:38
  got all the pups it seems like, and they stride out across the flow.
• 1:18:42
  They make it to the other side and they look back and all at once, this one black
• 1:18:46
  pup just says, to hell with this, this is a fool's errand if I've ever seen one.
• 1:18:53
  And it starts walking up its side of the river upstream and all the other pups
• 1:18:57
  join it, and you can, you know, totally anthropomorphizing, but there's something
• 1:19:01
  within the wolves that you, you know, you can feel that, okay, this isn't working.
• 1:19:06
  But to me it was like G kids, you know, like we've all had that, you
• 1:19:10
  know, it's like you're trying to shuttle them from point A to B and
• 1:19:13
  they get stuck with friends or you know, the dandelion next to the path
• 1:19:17
  and come on, I have an agenda for you.
• 1:19:20
  And it just wasn't working.
• 1:19:21
  So back across the river, the adults went, they gather up the puppies,
• 1:19:25
  they bring 'em back to the Ford, they cross again, they turn, look
• 1:19:29
  back, and off the pups go again.
• 1:19:33
  And this went on and on until they start, they start moving up around
• 1:19:38
  a, a bend of the river to the point where we can't see them anymore.
• 1:19:44
  So we don't know.
• 1:19:45
  What's going on in the 10 minutes goes by, 15, half hour, 45 minutes goes by,
• 1:19:52
  and at some point, all of a sudden we see one wolf head, a second wolf head
• 1:19:57
  above the sage brush, and then they start moving into where we can see them better.
• 1:20:01
  And behind them are all five pups.
• 1:20:05
  They made it.
• 1:20:05
  And so then they trundled on across the valley to their traditional
• 1:20:09
  rendezvous site, which is kind of a, a, a traditional gathering place, but
• 1:20:13
  also a babysitting site for the pups to start learning what it's like to live in
• 1:20:18
  the Lamar Valley, the open, wild world.
• 1:20:21
  But one of the most beautiful things to me that ties into that comment
• 1:20:24
  you made about how this is such a statement on motherhood is every time
• 1:20:30
  she went back to get those pups, she would pick up something in her mouth.
• 1:20:38
  Sometimes it, it was a rock, like literally would pick up a rock with her
• 1:20:42
  teeth or a stick, and she would take that around to each one of the puppies
• 1:20:48
  as if to say, I've got something for you.
• 1:20:52
  You, you want it?
• 1:20:54
  This is really good.
• 1:20:55
  Do you want it?
• 1:20:56
  You know, I, I've done this with my own son, with gummy worms to get
• 1:20:59
  him to the top of the mountains.
• 1:21:01
  Right.
• 1:21:02
  He's just like learning from the wolf.
• 1:21:04
  I would never use such a bribe.
• 1:21:05
  Okay.
• 1:21:05
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:21:06
  You gotta gotta lure you along somehow with something that, that takes
• 1:21:10
  your mind off of this, this hurdle.
• 1:21:13
  And, and she did it, this wisdom within this mother of seeing so many
• 1:21:20
  difficulties and successes, bringing that all to bear around this vital task
• 1:21:27
  of cultivating the next generation of hunters, of soldiers, of caregivers.
• 1:21:34
  And she did it in spades.
• 1:21:36
  It was just, it still is so touching to me that story.
• 1:21:40
  And as it turned out, she was killed by another wolf pack later in the year.
• 1:21:46
  So this would be her last litter of puppies that she would ever have.
• 1:21:52
  And listening to Wolf 21, her mate, how and how and how for her that February was.
• 1:22:05
  I can still hear it.
• 1:22:09
  And I think to me, the sculptures, the viewing, the book, the, all these things
• 1:22:16
  are just excuses to try to peel back,
• 1:22:22
  what did that mean for me?
• 1:22:25
  What did that mean Then what does it mean to me now?
• 1:22:27
  What, what does that teach us?
• 1:22:31
  And that's nature to me.
• 1:22:33
  It's infinite.
• 1:22:35
  It is,
• 1:22:38
  it is freedom.
• 1:22:41
  It is joy.
• 1:22:42
  It is obligation.
• 1:22:43
  It's tragedy.
• 1:22:45
  It's, it's, it's everything you can possibly imagine rolled into one.
• 1:22:52
  And it gives us, it just gives us inspiration,
• 1:22:56
  perspective, options, and yeah.
• 1:23:00
  I start running outta words.
• 1:23:01
  It just, the vastness.
• 1:23:03
  That's why I went to
• 1:23:04
  Rupert Isaacson: words.
• 1:23:04
  Don't cut it.
• 1:23:04
  Yeah.
• 1:23:05
  It it, it's so interesting that we are all animals vocalize or many of them do.
• 1:23:12
  We have this larynx so you know.
• 1:23:14
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:23:14
  They call us homo sapien sapiens.
• 1:23:17
  But that's just means the thinking ape.
• 1:23:19
  That's everything with a brain thinks there's nothing special
• 1:23:22
  to humans about thinking.
• 1:23:23
  But we do speak.
• 1:23:25
  George Bumann: Mm-hmm.
• 1:23:26
  Rupert Isaacson: So were the ultra vocalists and yet words fail us.
• 1:23:32
  If you made it this far into the podcast, then I'm guessing you're somebody
• 1:23:36
  that, like me, loves to read books about not just how people have achieved
• 1:23:41
  self actualization, but particularly about the relationship with nature.
• 1:23:48
  Spirituality, life, the universe, and everything.
• 1:23:52
  And I'd like to draw your attention to my books.
• 1:23:55
  If you would like to read the story of how we even arrived here, perhaps
• 1:23:59
  you'd like to check out the two New York Times bestsellers, The Horseboy
• 1:24:04
  and The Long Ride Home, and come on an adventure with us and see what engendered,
• 1:24:09
  what started Live Free Ride Free.
• 1:24:12
  And before we go back to the podcast, also check out The Healing
• 1:24:15
  Land, which tells the story of.
• 1:24:19
  My years spent in the Kalahari with the Sun, Bushmen, hunter gatherer people
• 1:24:24
  there, and all that they taught me, and mentored me in, and all that I learned.
• 1:24:28
  Come on that adventure with me.
• 1:24:30
  George Bumann: That's why I returned to art, honestly, Rupert, that I felt
• 1:24:34
  so much from this place when I let, when I gave into it and quit asking
• 1:24:40
  myself, is this my career trajectory?
• 1:24:42
  Am I supposed to do this?
• 1:24:43
  Is this gonna help my resume?
• 1:24:45
  Is this all that bullshit?
• 1:24:47
  I just let go.
• 1:24:51
  You experience things that you will never expect.
• 1:24:54
  You know, there is a time when I would be working on a black bear sculpture,
• 1:24:57
  let's say, and I would be just, you know, driving, you know, striving to find that
• 1:25:03
  black bear so I could finish the sculpture as I often do outside in the field.
• 1:25:07
  And I'd never find the bear.
• 1:25:10
  But when I let go, I'd bring the sculpture in case I saw the bear, I would see
• 1:25:14
  the moose with her fawn or her calf.
• 1:25:18
  I would see the badger feeding.
• 1:25:20
  Its young.
• 1:25:21
  I'd find all these other things that I could not have possibly planned that
• 1:25:25
  were so infinitely better than what I thought I should be doing and finding.
• 1:25:30
  And that's not just for wildlife sightings.
• 1:25:32
  This is, this is for my day.
• 1:25:34
  Like, oh my gosh, what am I gonna do?
• 1:25:36
  I'm so sick and tired of office work and staring at this screen.
• 1:25:41
  My wife and I say, 10 minutes.
• 1:25:43
  10 minutes.
• 1:25:44
  It's always worth it.
• 1:25:46
  Okay, I can do 10 minutes.
• 1:25:47
  And of course, you end up spending an hour 'cause the ants lead you over to
• 1:25:51
  this trail that they've made that goes under the, the log over there and then
• 1:25:54
  the, then this, a bull snake takes off from there and you can see where it's
• 1:25:58
  trying to check out where the, the magpie nest is or the the robin Nest.
• 1:26:03
  And it just takes you out of that world that you've built around yourself
• 1:26:08
  and just helps you chill out, man.
• 1:26:12
  Like, look around, enjoy, relax, breathe.
• 1:26:17
  And we're the better for it.
• 1:26:19
  But it just seems so hard sometimes.
• 1:26:22
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, I think you talk about sound soundscapes
• 1:26:31
  and that sound really brought you in to this wild place, and that
• 1:26:36
  by learning sounds and what sounds might mean we can learn so much more
• 1:26:43
  about what's around us and back to the way we, our species make sound
• 1:26:51
  George Bumann: mm-hmm.
• 1:26:52
  Rupert Isaacson: Is we make it through story.
• 1:26:54
  I, I've been, and I've been lucky enough to live with koan, bushman, hunter
• 1:27:00
  gatherers in, in the Kalahari boat.
• 1:27:01
  That's actually how I know Greg and through that work and so on and, and
• 1:27:05
  story's everything, story's the hunt.
• 1:27:08
  It's the gathering, but it's healing.
• 1:27:10
  Particularly what story is, is healing.
• 1:27:13
  And we're funky monkeys.
• 1:27:16
  We're sort of half bonobo, half love and peace and love making and
• 1:27:22
  flowers and Jefferson airplane.
• 1:27:25
  And we are half chimpanzee, gangster up, gonna rip fucking head off.
• 1:27:32
  And how do we bring these two sides of ourselves together?
• 1:27:35
  And of course, in a wild human context.
• 1:27:39
  We have the shaman, we have the healer at the center of the culture.
• 1:27:43
  And what is that?
• 1:27:44
  But story, you know, you bring your you bring your dilemma doesn't have to be
• 1:27:48
  an ailment to the healer and the healer.
• 1:27:52
  That's a story.
• 1:27:53
  And then the healer goes into the spirit world, goes into an
• 1:27:57
  altered set of consciousness and goes and talks to our ancestors.
• 1:28:01
  Or he talks about climbing a rope.
• 1:28:03
  That's very interesting.
• 1:28:04
  Earlier, poked up my ears because all the good healers I met in the Kalahari
• 1:28:09
  talked about climbing the rope to God's village when they're in trance
• 1:28:13
  and seeing this great interconnected web that they climb and then they get
• 1:28:17
  a series of instructions and then they bring that back and create a new story.
• 1:28:23
  And then you go out into that new story.
• 1:28:25
  Now there you are in that wild area.
• 1:28:27
  But one of the things which I think we all feel to some degree in the US unless we're
• 1:28:36
  living in a place like New Mexico where there's a really, really strong indigenous
• 1:28:41
  culture where the people who are always on the land are still on the land,
• 1:28:46
  there's often a sense of are, but the people are missing.
• 1:28:51
  And this idea of pristine wilderness, we know is a complete illusion.
• 1:28:57
  There were always people there that people got cleared out to make.
• 1:29:02
  To make it a national park.
• 1:29:03
  It's the same, same story in Africa, by the way.
• 1:29:06
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:29:07
  And of course when we go into the city where we say there is no wild,
• 1:29:10
  as you pointed out earlier, we're surrounded by the wild in the city.
• 1:29:14
  We are of the place, but yet when we go into a place like Yellowstone,
• 1:29:19
  because the original people, the Nez PEs as you, as you pointed
• 1:29:24
  out, they're not there anymore.
• 1:29:26
  And there's a pretty thorough going genocide.
• 1:29:29
  Yeah.
• 1:29:29
  You know, we gotta call it what it is.
• 1:29:31
  And I'm a product of the colonial experience myself, my family
• 1:29:34
  are South Africans and Yeah.
• 1:29:36
  Yeah.
• 1:29:36
  I mean, we all participated, our ancestors all participated in this.
• 1:29:46
  And we are tame people now and we go into the wild for healing.
• 1:29:54
  But that story, that wild story is still there for us.
• 1:30:00
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:30:01
  Do you, this is more speculative now, but as you go forward into the next
• 1:30:07
  phase, you've written this really good book, you do this amazing art.
• 1:30:11
  You take people into the wilderness, you help them to interpret what they
• 1:30:17
  see you, you help people to heal themselves in the stressful city
• 1:30:22
  by noticing the wild around them.
• 1:30:26
  Where are we going?
• 1:30:29
  As a species with this, we're going more into ai.
• 1:30:37
  We're go, you know, you go to a place like Yellowstone, but the
• 1:30:40
  original people, they're not there.
• 1:30:44
  One could say that's a very pessimistic thing.
• 1:30:48
  Then you talk about nature gives you options and I take that as optimism.
• 1:30:54
  And there have actually been a lot of recent and I've, I've been involved in
• 1:30:59
  some of them as a human rights activist.
• 1:31:02
  Big wins by indigenous people in the last 30 years as almost
• 1:31:06
  like a slowly rumbling moment.
• 1:31:09
  Momentum that from the old days of just wipe 'em out to build McDonald's.
• 1:31:15
  You know, to now know indigenous people are beginning to get the
• 1:31:20
  land back and change things.
• 1:31:22
  And what else is wiped out, say from yellow and the wolves
• 1:31:26
  eradicated at their back.
• 1:31:28
  Back.
• 1:31:29
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 1:31:29
  Rupert Isaacson: Are we as a
• 1:31:30
  George Bumann: species, rewilding
• 1:31:35
  some of us are not enough.
• 1:31:39
  Really that's why I spent three and a half years on this book.
• 1:31:44
  I just certainly could have done far better things with three and a half years.
• 1:31:48
  But I saw how transformative the experience of wildness.
• 1:31:56
  Was for people, you know, tens of thousands of folks I've had the
• 1:32:01
  pleasure of sharing Yellowstone with.
• 1:32:06
  And you see the reaction and you feel it because you felt it yourself that they
• 1:32:15
  are not gonna be able to articulate this, but by God, they sure as hell felt it.
• 1:32:25
  And I, it gives me great solace to see those indigenous cultures bringing
• 1:32:30
  back some ownership and say, over the land, because God's sake, sure as
• 1:32:37
  hell in the US the dollar rules the United States of America incorporated.
• 1:32:45
  But in those indigenous cultures that remain, there still is
• 1:32:49
  that baked in understanding.
• 1:32:52
  You know, we're very smart, we made ai, we do all these kinds of
• 1:32:56
  things, but we're not really wise.
• 1:33:00
  Should we do that?
• 1:33:03
  What aren't we doing that we should?
• 1:33:08
  And within those cultures is that consult of the land?
• 1:33:13
  Is this good for the seventh generation of everybody?
• 1:33:17
  Not just people, but is this good for the land?
• 1:33:20
  Is this good for the water?
• 1:33:21
  Is this good for the air?
• 1:33:24
  And will these kinds of touchpoints with nature and wildness in our own
• 1:33:32
  wild within be enough to counter that?
• 1:33:34
  I don't know.
• 1:33:36
  I'm pretty pessimistic myself, but what I really do believe in is that
• 1:33:46
  it is through the story that we will leave a legacy of what is good and true
• 1:33:57
  for those generations that manage to persist after whatever happens, happens.
• 1:34:06
  I don't feel like I honestly contribute that much, but if I can for someone
• 1:34:14
  pass on something that gives them joy, that helps them through tough times,
• 1:34:21
  it makes them bust out laughing when they're at their worst and think to look
• 1:34:26
  to that squirrel who's got half a tail and think, I still got my tail at least,
• 1:34:36
  then that will be a contribution.
• 1:34:38
  My grandfather was a master storyteller.
• 1:34:41
  And he would never have said that, but I watched it and I knew it from a young age.
• 1:34:46
  I would, I would ride my bicycle to the museum that he helped start.
• 1:34:50
  And it covered local history in that part of New York from 10,000 years to
• 1:34:55
  basically the pre well to world to war.
• 1:34:57
  What town was that and what's the museum?
• 1:34:59
  It's called the Fort Brewerton Historical Society.
• 1:35:02
  And it was built on the grounds of a a, a very early European owned basically
• 1:35:09
  home and trading place, but it was on the site of a French and Indian
• 1:35:12
  war embattlement and, and campsite not campsite, but a fortifications.
• 1:35:17
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:35:17
  Still one of the most well preserved in, in all of that region, but he, you know,
• 1:35:24
  it covered everything from the paleo Indian culture 10,000 years ago, all the
• 1:35:28
  way up through the, you know, woodland periods and the explorer periods, and
• 1:35:31
  Father Le Moine and Samuel Champlain and Civil War and Revolutionary War.
• 1:35:38
  All these connections to that place that I grew up hearing these stories
• 1:35:41
  when we were on the boat fishing.
• 1:35:43
  You know, I could picture in my mind, sir William Johnson in the beau coming
• 1:35:46
  across a Iida Lake to lay siege to the French forces in their Huron
• 1:35:52
  companions to the north and west.
• 1:35:55
  I, I lived with those stories and see them in my mind as real
• 1:36:00
  as I see the bobber drop when a.
• 1:36:04
  A perch bites.
• 1:36:07
  And I would watch him tell these stories to other people.
• 1:36:11
  And even in the span of 10 to 20 minutes, he would, the people would change.
• 1:36:17
  You would see their energetic signature, if you will, elevated,
• 1:36:24
  altered, arguably improved.
• 1:36:28
  And the, the time that brought it to me most, that almost still
• 1:36:31
  brings me to tears, was he'd always wanted to go to Alaska
• 1:36:38
  and he never made it.
• 1:36:41
  So for his 75th birthday, our family pooled all their resources
• 1:36:45
  and bought he, myself and my uncle, his son, a ticket to go to Alaska.
• 1:36:51
  And it was a cruise, so it was like totally not my way to do it.
• 1:36:55
  Probably not his either.
• 1:36:56
  I'm pretty damn sure of it.
• 1:36:58
  But we went anyway.
• 1:37:00
  It was a wonderful opportunity to be all together, the three of us.
• 1:37:04
  And as you often do, you sit at the same table every night with the same people.
• 1:37:08
  And just my grandfather being my, his himself would tell stories every day.
• 1:37:13
  And at that table was a co, a couple from Cardiff Wales and there was a
• 1:37:17
  couple from Mexico City and their adult daughter, MBE was her name.
• 1:37:22
  And he would just tell stories.
• 1:37:23
  And the, the couple from Mexico City did not speak any English.
• 1:37:27
  The daughter would have to fragmentary, translate the stories
• 1:37:31
  to them from my grandfather.
• 1:37:35
  And the tour came to a close and NBE pulled me aside right
• 1:37:41
  before we said our last goodbyes.
• 1:37:43
  And she said, I wanted you to know your grandfather's stories were
• 1:37:48
  the highlight of my father's trip.
• 1:37:55
  And they didn't even share a language.
• 1:38:00
  And yet this mystique, this power, this, you could almost say shamanistic ability
• 1:38:08
  to transcend time and space for the betterment of now was in full effect.
• 1:38:17
  I never forgot that.
• 1:38:21
  And I think more than anything, the story gives me hope that those, those good and
• 1:38:29
  true things about our world, principally underpinned by the natural world, will
• 1:38:35
  persist as we have to tell the story.
• 1:38:40
  Mm.
• 1:38:41
  We have to tell it again and again.
• 1:38:43
  And even to people who don't get it and don't want to hear
• 1:38:45
  it, we have to tell it again.
• 1:38:48
  We have to learn to tell it in different ways that are appealing
• 1:38:51
  and do get a foot in the door because we have to tell the story.
• 1:38:58
  That's really all we have.
• 1:39:00
  Money's nothing.
• 1:39:02
  If you invest your most precious resource, your time in something, I
• 1:39:08
  feel you are obligated to tell that story, to share with the village
• 1:39:13
  what you have learned so that they too can stand upon your shoulders
• 1:39:18
  as much as you've stood on theirs.
• 1:39:23
  It,
• 1:39:24
  Rupert Isaacson: it's, I've just been thinking, you know, there you are.
• 1:39:27
  In, when, when you were growing up in upstate New York, by the way,
• 1:39:31
  Fort Burton or Burton, did you say?
• 1:39:34
  Brewerton, BR Eton, we're gonna look that Fort Brewerton.
• 1:39:38
  I was busily trying to look up Burton or Brewerton while you
• 1:39:42
  were talking to see what, what Brewerton French and Indian Wars.
• 1:39:46
  Yes.
• 1:39:47
  The English and the French battling it out for who would get control of the fur
• 1:39:52
  trade before America was minerals and
• 1:39:56
  George Bumann: Yes,
• 1:39:57
  Rupert Isaacson: even agricultural wealth.
• 1:39:59
  And using the Indians to do their fight and call them
• 1:40:02
  George Bumann: Indians all the way through.
• 1:40:04
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:40:05
  Rupert Isaacson: Then these stories taking place against a wild, natural
• 1:40:10
  backdrop, whether it was then in the 18th century or whether it was your
• 1:40:15
  grandfather founding the historical society and helping to create that museum,
• 1:40:21
  or against that backdrop of Alaska.
• 1:40:25
  We've been telling stories since we have been on the planet.
• 1:40:32
  It occurs to me as you were saying, that the, the same animals, the same
• 1:40:35
  ravens, the same wolves, the same foxes have been observing us, as you say,
• 1:40:43
  and listening to us tell our stories.
• 1:40:47
  George Bumann: Mm-hmm.
• 1:40:47
  Rupert Isaacson: Do you ever get a sense
• 1:40:52
  that
• 1:40:54
  they know we are, they are in our stories and
• 1:41:02
  are we in theirs?
• 1:41:06
  Yes.
• 1:41:08
  George Bumann: To both.
• 1:41:09
  Rupert Isaacson: Talk to me about that.
• 1:41:11
  What's been your experience?
• 1:41:19
  George Bumann: Sometimes the story is told to ourselves,
• 1:41:25
  and I think I.
• 1:41:28
  Sort of alluded to that, that change in the e energetics of, of an individual
• 1:41:33
  in contact with story, it shifts us into a place or a plane or, I don't know.
• 1:41:42
  I don't have words for it.
• 1:41:43
  I know it when I feel it, that makes us open.
• 1:41:50
  So I talk to animals, not thinking they will understand me in the words
• 1:41:56
  I use, but they will get my meaning.
• 1:42:00
  And indigenous cultures around the globe say this, you know, you, you talk to
• 1:42:04
  the animals and they will talk back.
• 1:42:06
  And I don't make the animal noises when I'm in the field.
• 1:42:08
  I wanna make very clear about that.
• 1:42:10
  It's illegal in Yellowstone.
• 1:42:12
  But even outside of that, my own ethical boundaries, I do not imitate them.
• 1:42:18
  I used to do it for hunting, and I would again, if I hunted,
• 1:42:21
  Rupert Isaacson: is that how you learned it?
• 1:42:22
  Because they're so good?
• 1:42:25
  George Bumann: Yes.
• 1:42:25
  That's where I started.
• 1:42:26
  It was I learned to hunt deer and turkeys and ducks and geese.
• 1:42:30
  I figured out how to call beavers of all things in order to hunt them, but
• 1:42:35
  it didn't get me closer to them in the way that we're talking about here.
• 1:42:41
  So I keep my mouth closed.
• 1:42:43
  If I imitate the raven in the field, I do it under my breath
• 1:42:47
  because even if I'm not making the sound, we all learn differently.
• 1:42:51
  We learn not just with our mind.
• 1:42:53
  We learn.
• 1:42:54
  With our soma, the, the summation of our body.
• 1:42:57
  Our, our, our entirety is a learning tool.
• 1:43:00
  It's an antenna, a receiver, and a projector.
• 1:43:03
  A transmitter.
• 1:43:05
  And so when I'm out there I've heard indigenous folks that I know here say
• 1:43:09
  that they, the animals respond to them when they speak their native language.
• 1:43:16
  But I've sort of done some of my own ad hoc experiments with just
• 1:43:22
  speaking English, my native tongue.
• 1:43:26
  And I think I encourage others to do that because you don't make eye contact.
• 1:43:33
  Like with a lot of indigenous cultures, it's important that you don't look
• 1:43:36
  your fellow interlocutor in the eye.
• 1:43:40
  That's rude.
• 1:43:41
  It's a provocation.
• 1:43:44
  But you speak into the space that you share and they hear you.
• 1:43:52
  They get your intentions, they get your motives.
• 1:43:55
  They understand whether they are safe or not.
• 1:43:58
  Great example is we just, my son and I walked our dog, he's, he just had knee
• 1:44:04
  surgery, so we aren't going very far, but we went down the driveway, which is
• 1:44:07
  two tenths of a mile long, but we went to the end and on the way back in those
• 1:44:11
  few minutes, an entire herd of elk.
• 1:44:13
  Walked across the driveway and were occupying and feeding
• 1:44:16
  the place that we had to walk through to get back to the house.
• 1:44:18
  They were all almost all around the house.
• 1:44:20
  So what do you do?
• 1:44:22
  You know, like most people would hoo hoo get the, get outta here like we do with
• 1:44:26
  the seagulls on the beach, or you know, the pigeons are defiling the sidewalk,
• 1:44:30
  get outta here, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:44:31
  Well, you're, you're being tallied, you are being observed, you're being received.
• 1:44:39
  You are, your behavior is being remembered.
• 1:44:42
  Pigeons, colom, Bolivia, the rock dove.
• 1:44:45
  It can remember hundreds if not thousands of people's faces and
• 1:44:49
  know who's naughty and who's nice.
• 1:44:53
  And through the behavior of one another, and watching that so
• 1:44:55
  closely, others get the message having never had an encounter with you.
• 1:45:00
  So our approach is what a, another mutual friend of John and I or ex Craig and I,
• 1:45:07
  John Young calls the honoring routine.
• 1:45:10
  So when you run into an animal or herd, or he's this great example of running
• 1:45:15
  into a group of geese and they need to get to the other side of where these geese
• 1:45:20
  are just like we had to cross through.
• 1:45:21
  Where the elk were is you walk until you see them take notice and
• 1:45:29
  you don't look, but you stay for a moment and you respect their space.
• 1:45:36
  You might even back up.
• 1:45:38
  You might fiddle with some sticks or take your attention off of them, but that
• 1:45:44
  initial contact lets them know you have a directive, but I'm only gonna ex exercise
• 1:45:51
  this directive if you give me permission.
• 1:45:55
  We don't ask as human beings, for the most part.
• 1:45:58
  We just take, and we don't worry about the collateral damage.
• 1:46:02
  If you really want the relationship, you have to be willing to give.
• 1:46:08
  And that might just be simple as giving space, giving a minute of your time.
• 1:46:13
  But what that does is George and I, young George and Hobbes, our black
• 1:46:18
  Labrador stopped and we turned around.
• 1:46:21
  So we were facing away from them and they went back to feeding.
• 1:46:26
  Could see it out of the corner of my eye.
• 1:46:29
  And after a moment or two letting them do that relaxed, I turned
• 1:46:33
  around again and I walked.
• 1:46:34
  And this time they let me go a little further and I repeated, I
• 1:46:38
  turned around, I turned my gaze away.
• 1:46:40
  I talked to them.
• 1:46:41
  Sorry, it's cold out.
• 1:46:43
  We needed to get back to the house.
• 1:46:44
  We don't have as good a fur as you do.
• 1:46:46
  We're, we're gonna be patient though.
• 1:46:48
  We'll be right here.
• 1:46:49
  If you, if you want us to wait a little bit longer, wander
• 1:46:52
  backwards, noodle with a few things.
• 1:46:55
  We did this a couple times and just like with John's example of the geese,
• 1:47:00
  they, they, the, the sea parted.
• 1:47:03
  The geese parted the elk, parted the one that was in the driveway
• 1:47:06
  that really didn't wanna move.
• 1:47:08
  We gave her a little more time, but she too just took enough steps off to
• 1:47:13
  the, the western side of the driveway.
• 1:47:16
  There was enough room for us to go through,
• 1:47:19
  and you don't, I've done this with bison.
• 1:47:21
  He had a school group and it's this huge herd of bison we couldn't get through.
• 1:47:25
  I was like, listen, kids, this is how we're gonna do it.
• 1:47:29
  No pictures, no eye contact with the animals.
• 1:47:35
  Follow these rules to the T and they let you write through and thank them.
• 1:47:44
  It's, it's a, it's a conversation that's communicated without, without sound in
• 1:47:48
  that case, but it is very clearly received and acted upon and that that reciprocity
• 1:47:57
  of, you know, all told that elk incident, it cost us maybe five minutes, like
• 1:48:04
  all of us can spare five minutes.
• 1:48:07
  Because the beauty of what comes outta that now is that group of elk
• 1:48:11
  remembers us and the next time we don't have to play that much of a game.
• 1:48:18
  They let us right through.
• 1:48:19
  We've had deer and fawns, deer, mothers with fawns that would let me walk
• 1:48:25
  with our two black labs before Hobbes.
• 1:48:27
  I would, as a gesture of, of my responsibility to the.
• 1:48:32
  Relationship.
• 1:48:33
  I put my hand on their shoulders.
• 1:48:35
  They weren't on leash, but they were healed.
• 1:48:38
  I put my hand on their shoulders to demonstrate that we're all in
• 1:48:42
  this and we're all gonna behave.
• 1:48:45
  And there are times we could walk within 10 feet of her and the fawns.
• 1:48:49
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:48:50
  That's, that's, you know, you see people, people think that's magic.
• 1:48:56
  It's not magic.
• 1:48:57
  It's honoring the relationship across a species boundary.
• 1:49:01
  And that's where the real beauty really is, is when you see them respond in kind.
• 1:49:07
  It just my heart beams.
• 1:49:09
  Hmm.
• 1:49:12
  And I can't help but think that they appreciate it too.
• 1:49:17
  Oh, without a
• 1:49:18
  Rupert Isaacson: doubt.
• 1:49:18
  You know, whether animals are domestic or, or wild.
• 1:49:21
  You know, my, my horses, I have a heard of seven horses and so today I
• 1:49:29
  was going to work with one horse and my horses have a professional life.
• 1:49:36
  You know, they, they work with autistic children and they also work with
• 1:49:41
  teaching people how to do dressage.
• 1:49:42
  And they're good, you know, professional attitude.
• 1:49:48
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 1:49:48
  Rupert Isaacson: But I try to honor
• 1:49:54
  their choice.
• 1:49:54
  I.
• 1:49:55
  So I went out to catch Boo slus and he just looked at me and went, nah.
• 1:50:04
  Trotted off to the far end of the pasture, lay down with his back to me and very sort
• 1:50:12
  of emphatically put himself on the, I was like, all right, not today, no problem.
• 1:50:16
  But 10 years ago I would have insisted, I would have said,
• 1:50:28
  but through the process with my oldest son who's autistic and the
• 1:50:34
  relationship that he formed with a horse called Betsy, I realized I had
• 1:50:39
  to completely rethink everything that I knew and that agency was everything.
• 1:50:45
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:50:46
  Because I was going to now rely, absolutely rely on this
• 1:50:50
  horse and all subsequent horses to when the stakes are high.
• 1:50:56
  I have my son in front of me in the saddle, or someone else's
• 1:50:59
  autistic child in the saddle.
• 1:51:00
  I had to know that in that moment the horse was really with me.
• 1:51:06
  So where before I would've, I would, was brought up with the,
• 1:51:11
  you have to make him do it.
• 1:51:12
  You have to be the dominant one.
• 1:51:14
  You have to do it.
• 1:51:14
  That was the old school.
• 1:51:16
  I realized that that had to be completely abandoned.
• 1:51:21
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 1:51:22
  Rupert Isaacson: And the moment I started giving Choice and
• 1:51:25
  agency, the give back was bananas.
• 1:51:31
  What my horses will do for me now when they know I need it, but if they know I
• 1:51:35
  don't really need it, they'll be like, well, maybe I'll, maybe I So true.
• 1:51:40
  You know, you, you, and you're so right with, with, with the, you
• 1:51:43
  know, because say with the, the elk herd there, well, it's one thing to
• 1:51:49
  demand they move, which could also be a fear-based reaction, you know?
• 1:51:54
  And you say, as you say, they're clocking you, and that, oh, he's
• 1:51:57
  a bit nervous of us, isn't he?
• 1:51:59
  Which is different to honoring us.
• 1:52:00
  Think to, okay.
• 1:52:01
  We, there's a lot of us.
• 1:52:02
  We're very, very big.
• 1:52:03
  And yes, if I feel he's too close to my calf, I might take a dip at him.
• 1:52:08
  If you behave differently the next time they're in your driveway, I would posit
• 1:52:13
  there might be a chance one might take a dip at you because you are not a friend.
• 1:52:19
  But what you're saying is, I, I am your friend.
• 1:52:21
  I mean, no harm.
• 1:52:23
  Um mm-hmm.
• 1:52:25
  And this honoring thing in Mongolia, you know, wrote across a chunk of
• 1:52:30
  Mongolia with my autistic son when he was five, going from shaman to shaman.
• 1:52:34
  It was an extraordinary thing.
• 1:52:36
  And, hmm.
• 1:52:37
  The Mongolian word for the WildHorse, what we call the prosky horse,
• 1:52:41
  which was never tamed, is kin.
• 1:52:44
  Which is honored one.
• 1:52:46
  Revered one.
• 1:52:48
  George Bumann: Hmm.
• 1:52:48
  Rupert Isaacson: And this thing of honoring into species, you talked about
• 1:52:52
  our soma, our body being an antenna.
• 1:52:56
  And so therefore it, it, it sends out signals, it receives signals.
• 1:53:01
  It's, we are all part of the same electromagnetic field.
• 1:53:04
  Right.
• 1:53:05
  Horses, trees, whatever that is a, that is a reality.
• 1:53:10
  So you are absolutely sending out through your electromagnetic field an intention
• 1:53:18
  to animals that are so keenly aware because they bloody well have to be.
• 1:53:23
  'cause there might be a wolf in the thicket or a bear.
• 1:53:27
  They better have some things to rely on beyond what we call the five sensors.
• 1:53:34
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 1:53:35
  Without question,
• 1:53:36
  Rupert Isaacson: is it possible to live meaningfully without those extra senses?
• 1:53:46
  And is it possible to get those extra senses without interspecies relationship?
• 1:53:52
  And in your book, is that what you're trying to teach us?
• 1:54:02
  George Bumann: Hmm.
• 1:54:05
  I think those extra senses are revealed to us.
• 1:54:11
  They're in us all along.
• 1:54:13
  We come like the elk, like the wolf prepackaged for connection.
• 1:54:23
  We come prepackaged for a particular context, a place.
• 1:54:29
  If anything in the book, I, I really hope folks come to see.
• 1:54:35
  They don't live in an address, but they live of a place.
• 1:54:41
  And our guides are these more than humans who exceed us in so many capacities.
• 1:54:48
  Yes, they can hear in frequencies far beyond us.
• 1:54:51
  Yes, some can see an ultraviolet light.
• 1:54:53
  Yes.
• 1:54:53
  'cause some can hear in sub sound, some can smell in parts per billion
• 1:54:57
  of things we don't know exist.
• 1:55:01
  But we have superpowers too.
• 1:55:04
  And those superpowers are most keenly resurrected and put to
• 1:55:10
  use in these natural contexts.
• 1:55:16
  Does it help with people?
• 1:55:18
  Absolutely.
• 1:55:20
  You notice the discomfort in that woman in the presence of that particular man.
• 1:55:26
  You notice the child who flourishes in the company of his grandmother.
• 1:55:36
  There are unspoken things that, that sift all through our world.
• 1:55:41
  And the more than human world that reinforce all of this in ways that, you
• 1:55:49
  know, spoken language gets in the way.
• 1:55:51
  A a a raven call is, is stupid.
• 1:55:55
  And I don't mean to sound trite in saying those things, but the sounds,
• 1:56:00
  the listening, the using the senses where we, where we just begin.
• 1:56:04
  The relationships are the, the stepping stone through the first door.
• 1:56:11
  But there are no limited number of doors.
• 1:56:17
  And I think your experiences with the shamans, they, that is their world,
• 1:56:21
  is the world beyond the obvious.
• 1:56:25
  That's still underpins everything.
• 1:56:28
  And, and I don't hear like I have compromised hearing from guns.
• 1:56:32
  You know, people think even just to start, I need to have perfect hearing.
• 1:56:35
  I need to have perfect vision.
• 1:56:36
  And, and in the book I even talk about folks with autism and, you know,
• 1:56:41
  temple Grandin's work with animals.
• 1:56:43
  They, they re they relate in ways that neural normal people cannot, or
• 1:56:55
  do not, those who can't smell or see or hear or walk without their hip.
• 1:57:03
  Screaming at them are limited in those capacities, but we often
• 1:57:10
  fail to realize that it opens other doors that normal quote unquote
• 1:57:14
  people don't even recognize exist.
• 1:57:19
  You know, a friend of ours, he, he should have hip surgery years ago, and they would
• 1:57:24
  come to Yellowstone every year and they would sit in their vehicle, he and his
• 1:57:28
  wife, and she'd sometimes get out and walk a little bit, but he just didn't get the
• 1:57:34
  surgery, didn't get the surgery, didn't think it would work, didn't, wouldn't
• 1:57:37
  do what he wanted it to, but they would sit and that quote unquote handicap,
• 1:57:42
  you know, I think of our, our one friend Shane Doyle, who's a crow tribal elder.
• 1:57:46
  He says, in our culture, there's no handicap.
• 1:57:51
  Everyone is alternately able,
• 1:57:55
  you know, and the, the Haudenosaunee story of the, the muskrat saving the
• 1:57:59
  world, or, or being the one who brings the world into existence by grasping
• 1:58:03
  that little bit of mud from way deeper than anybody else could dive in the,
• 1:58:07
  in the limitless sea, to put on the turtle's back to begin everything.
• 1:58:13
  Those insights and lessons and successes are so often rooted in those
• 1:58:19
  unexpected places and people, and beings
• 1:58:24
  and, and those beings.
• 1:58:26
  Reside within us.
• 1:58:27
  I can't, I can't hear above 8,000 hertz here.
• 1:58:30
  I can get to about 14,000 here, but it's not what you can and can't do.
• 1:58:35
  It's what you do with what you can do.
• 1:58:39
  It's what you do with the sounds you can hear.
• 1:58:42
  I could eclipse other birders in finding warblers and even some that made these
• 1:58:46
  high pitched sounds because I listened better to the sounds I could hear.
• 1:58:54
  And that was a gift that nature gave me.
• 1:58:59
  Rupert Isaacson: As we move towards the, the, the close of this, and I hope this is
• 1:59:02
  just the first of several conversations, I would love to have you back on, to
• 1:59:07
  go more deeply into this, although I'm also not gonna let you out of here
• 1:59:11
  without hearing how you call a beaver.
• 1:59:14
  So many jokes.
• 1:59:16
  Oh, yes.
• 1:59:18
  But have you, I dunno if you've ever been to Detroit, but there's
• 1:59:20
  a, there's a famous exit of the freeway by there called Beaver 69.
• 1:59:26
  And when I was lucky enough to spend some time with the Cree up in northern
• 1:59:31
  Quebec when they were fighting off hydro Quebec who was gonna flood their
• 1:59:35
  land and they were actually successful.
• 1:59:37
  And I ate a lot of beaver and
• 1:59:44
  yes you did.
• 1:59:45
  And I presume that's probably why you were hunting them too.
• 1:59:48
  Let's just go back to your book because I want people to go out and buy your book.
• 1:59:53
  Take us into a last story from there that will help bring our listeners who,
• 2:00:01
  yeah, I, I wrote down this word while you were talking about the healing power
• 2:00:05
  of nature and so on and perspective.
• 2:00:07
  And the word that came to my mind is, or a WE and whether it was
• 2:00:16
  you with the elk, you with the wolf, you with the
• 2:00:23
  ravens bouncing like popcorn, whether it's me this afternoon saying to my
• 2:00:30
  horse, you know what, if you don't want to, no problem, and, and look at you,
• 2:00:37
  you, so that allows me to see him in that moment, not just as this horse I'm
• 2:00:41
  going to wear, but oh my God, you're the most amazing, beautiful animal.
• 2:00:43
  Look at you, look at you.
• 2:00:45
  You are awe, I mean, awe of you.
• 2:00:48
  You put me in perspective.
• 2:00:50
  I'm small compared to you and you're beautiful compared to me.
• 2:00:52
  And I think that's the power of your book.
• 2:00:57
  That, and we talked about mental health and you know, there, there's, there's data
• 2:01:02
  now showing that even if you're living in, you know, the most non-natural environment
• 2:01:07
  in your, all depressed, in your.
• 2:01:10
  If you watch a wildlife documentary, your body begins to respond very, very
• 2:01:14
  similarly to if you were in nature.
• 2:01:17
  The subconscious doesn't much care whether it's simulator and, and maybe
• 2:01:21
  VR will help us in this way, you know, at least we can get back to nature.
• 2:01:25
  Who knows?
• 2:01:26
  Who knows?
• 2:01:26
  Who knows?
• 2:01:27
  Maybe that's where AI will help us.
• 2:01:28
  But I feel that a book like yours gives one that sense of
• 2:01:36
  awe and that sense of it healing.
• 2:01:43
  So give us one more story.
• 2:01:46
  George Bumann: Hmm.
• 2:01:47
  Well, first thank you for that and thank you for having me on.
• 2:01:51
  It's been a real treat to be able to share what is, you know, our day to day doesn't
• 2:01:59
  seem that special sometimes, but each of us hold within our own hands, within
• 2:02:07
  our ears, within our eyes, our minds.
• 2:02:10
  These diamonds in the rough and those gems are, as you say, and I agree,
• 2:02:17
  they, they, they are the embodiment of the awe that you find when you
• 2:02:23
  just open up to what comes in.
• 2:02:29
  One day I'd had it with the office.
• 2:02:33
  You know, we run a fair bit of, I have a online course on animal
• 2:02:35
  language, and we run an online summit on Yellowstone topics, you know, so
• 2:02:41
  folks around the world can tune in you.
• 2:02:44
  Many of these things, because of our age, are very, you know, very office screen
• 2:02:50
  to do phone oriented and yeah, I'm living
• 2:02:54
  Rupert Isaacson: in Yellowstone, staring at a screen.
• 2:02:55
  George Bumann: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 2:02:58
  We, we are not made to, to operate on this wavelength, and yet this is how we
• 2:03:03
  connect and tell the story these days.
• 2:03:06
  And I'd had it, I was done.
• 2:03:07
  I just, and often my wife will see it before I do, or the dog does.
• 2:03:10
  Like, you need to go for a walk.
• 2:03:15
  Well, you did get out.
• 2:03:16
  Yeah, exactly.
• 2:03:17
  Go out now.
• 2:03:18
  I think it'd be wise for you to go now.
• 2:03:20
  And one day, I, I went out for a walk and I, I write about this one
• 2:03:23
  in the book because it, it to me leaves the breadcrumbs to what I
• 2:03:30
  feel is one of the highest order
• 2:03:36
  experiences of that awe.
• 2:03:40
  And instead of just going in and sitting or just going and walking,
• 2:03:43
  I did what was, what you could say was just an extended stand.
• 2:03:51
  That slightly moved.
• 2:03:54
  And what I mean by that is, I, I went into the lower yard.
• 2:03:56
  I do that sometimes after five points.
• 2:03:57
  Yeah.
• 2:03:57
  But yes, and that's kind of the way it felt.
• 2:04:02
  You know, I went into the lower yard and I was gonna walk, I was gonna go do
• 2:04:05
  something uhhuh, and what I realized is what I needed most was to be something.
• 2:04:12
  Mm-hmm.
• 2:04:13
  And I just stood there and I just let the senses go.
• 2:04:20
  You know, there's a jet flying over, the breeze is coming in this way.
• 2:04:23
  Oh no.
• 2:04:23
  It, it actually is swirling back from that direction, the sunshine, it's
• 2:04:26
  hitting the back of my neck right here.
• 2:04:29
  The grasses are blowing in front of me, you know, just absorbing these patterns.
• 2:04:35
  And every once in a while, every few minutes, I would just take
• 2:04:39
  half a step, a full step, maybe.
• 2:04:43
  And by the time I don't know how long it was, an hour, hour and a half had passed,
• 2:04:50
  I'd gone maybe 20 feet, 30 feet tops.
• 2:04:56
  And whatever happened
• 2:05:01
  clearly shifted the dynamic of how I existed in that space.
• 2:05:10
  And I, I don't really know how to articulate it beyond that.
• 2:05:14
  But as I was standing there, this song, Sparrow.
• 2:05:17
  It drops in like almost over my shoulder and it lands in the ryegrass in front
• 2:05:23
  of me, and it's almost at my feet.
• 2:05:25
  And it's gnashing on this ryegrass seed.
• 2:05:27
  Like, you know, in the book I described as, it's kinda like that country diner,
• 2:05:32
  you know, and everybody's in their locals drinking coffee and they got the plastic,
• 2:05:36
  you know, coffee stir and they're just chewing on it, like a piece of grass or
• 2:05:39
  something in the corner of the mouth.
• 2:05:40
  And it's just, it's just living, it's doing its thing completely ignoring me.
• 2:05:48
  To me, that is one of the most
• 2:05:51
  beautiful, privileged positions to be in, in nature is to be forgotten.
• 2:05:57
  Ignored, overlooked.
• 2:05:59
  Allowed.
• 2:06:00
  Allowed.
• 2:06:02
  Exactly.
• 2:06:04
  And I felt different.
• 2:06:08
  It was, it was just like, it was not quite like I had too many pints, but it kind
• 2:06:13
  of smacked of an altered, just, just, it was like all the senses were on high
• 2:06:20
  functioning independently, but in unison.
• 2:06:26
  And I was, I just felt so relaxed.
• 2:06:29
  It was beautiful.
• 2:06:30
  It was just like having a, a killer massage or you know, a soak in the hot
• 2:06:37
  tub after long day and my phone went off.
• 2:06:42
  Of course the alarm clock went off and I was like, geez, god dammit.
• 2:06:46
  You know, like here, I just like, oh, you know, I've ascended to this, you know,
• 2:06:50
  altered state of, of consciousness and the phone rings, you know, the alarm says, get
• 2:06:54
  back to the office, dummy and I, I smacked the phone from outside my pocket and it
• 2:06:59
  shuts off and I begrudgingly turn around.
• 2:07:03
  I start slowly walking back up the steps past the greenhouse toward the house.
• 2:07:10
  And there's three, is it three or four?
• 2:07:16
  Three or four black build mag pies.
• 2:07:18
  They're a member of the Crow and Jay family.
• 2:07:20
  Just like the, the raven is, but they don't like being around people at all.
• 2:07:26
  You know, if you feed them, yeah.
• 2:07:28
  It's like the, the gal with the crows that, that you get to
• 2:07:30
  watch, they'll snuggle up to you.
• 2:07:31
  But in my mind I do, I we don't feed, the reason I don't feed is
• 2:07:36
  I don't want our wild neighbors to be engaged in prostitution.
• 2:07:43
  I don't want our relationship to be predicated on something they absolutely
• 2:07:47
  can't do without, for us to be together, it has to be built on trust first.
• 2:07:57
  And without that it's, I.
• 2:07:59
  To me, not worth it.
• 2:08:02
  That's a whole nother topic into itself.
• 2:08:03
  After that you
• 2:08:04
  Rupert Isaacson: can have the
• 2:08:04
  George Bumann: prostitution.
• 2:08:05
  Sorry, I couldn't.
• 2:08:07
  Yeah, exactly.
• 2:08:08
  I don't wanna, then we can, I don't, yeah.
• 2:08:10
  I don't want to pay them in the currency.
• 2:08:13
  They need to pay, you need to hang out with me.
• 2:08:15
  You know?
• 2:08:15
  'cause when you run out, if it's like training a dog or training a horse, if
• 2:08:18
  you're, if you're just training them a treats, they, they train to get the treat.
• 2:08:21
  They don't give a care about you.
• 2:08:23
  Right.
• 2:08:23
  You run outta snacks.
• 2:08:24
  You're, you're old news now.
• 2:08:27
  Mm-hmm.
• 2:08:27
  So we didn't feed these mag pies.
• 2:08:29
  Neighbors didn't feed them.
• 2:08:31
  They're always around.
• 2:08:32
  Every time we go for a walk, they're there.
• 2:08:34
  They,
• 2:08:37
  and they're usually gone.
• 2:08:38
  If you surprise them, the closest usually you ever get is
• 2:08:41
  30 yards, 40 yards, 50 yards.
• 2:08:43
  Usually if it's an open and they're gone, they take off.
• 2:08:46
  They are not hanging around with humans.
• 2:08:48
  Not any of you walking around on two legs outta here.
• 2:08:52
  Sorry buddy.
• 2:08:53
  Not trusting you.
• 2:08:56
  And oddly enough, that day as I walked past the garage, these three mag pies
• 2:09:02
  were right next to the sidewalk that I had to walk on to go into the house.
• 2:09:08
  They just stayed there.
• 2:09:11
  So, but I was, I dunno, I, I don't know why.
• 2:09:16
  I just felt like I could keep going.
• 2:09:18
  So I took another couple steps and they stayed there and I took a couple more.
• 2:09:27
  A few more until literally Rupert, I was standing over them.
• 2:09:35
  This is a position they never would concede to.
• 2:09:40
  I'm standing over them.
• 2:09:41
  I can hear these tiny little sounds that they're making,
• 2:09:45
  you know, this, this little,
• 2:09:52
  the sounds that you, you can't hear if you're more than five feet away.
• 2:09:57
  Like we've heard 'em outside the window and other times
• 2:09:59
  where we could be that close.
• 2:10:00
  Never when you're out and about,
• 2:10:04
  I can see what they're picking at in the grass.
• 2:10:07
  The food that they're selecting.
• 2:10:08
  They're moving away the, the grass blades and twigs and little pebbles, and, and
• 2:10:12
  they're all, you know, they were, if I fell over, I would've fallen on them.
• 2:10:18
  And yet they were pretending, acting, carrying on as if I didn't even exist.
• 2:10:25
  Very mysterious, very puzzling.
• 2:10:28
  And then at once, I had this thought of, wow, nobody's gonna believe this.
• 2:10:35
  And in that instant, I didn't move.
• 2:10:39
  I didn't make a sound, but every single one of them looked
• 2:10:43
  right up at me and took off.
• 2:10:48
  And after that point, I, I was like, what the hell was that?
• 2:10:51
  You know, I, they landed on the fence post, which, or the fence
• 2:10:54
  railings across the driveway, which was maybe 20 yards away.
• 2:10:58
  So I, I just started walking toward them.
• 2:11:01
  They weren't having it.
• 2:11:02
  They flew another 50 or 80 yards further, and I walked, you know,
• 2:11:06
  to the fence and they just, they were outta there completely.
• 2:11:11
  What was that?
• 2:11:13
  I i
• 2:11:16
  was that the state that the,
• 2:11:22
  the elemental human really exists in?
• 2:11:29
  Did they not even see me?
• 2:11:31
  Like I, you try to rationalize things like this, yet at the same time, it only
• 2:11:36
  takes a mere few seconds of an experience like that to really draw into question
• 2:11:44
  what you conceive of as, as reality.
• 2:11:51
  What, what else is possible here?
• 2:11:55
  What was that relationship?
• 2:11:58
  What, I don't know.
• 2:12:01
  I have ideas, I guesses, but I have to ask a shaman, because it was so transcendent,
• 2:12:11
  it was so imbued with a sense of awe that.
• 2:12:15
  I can't look at those mag pies even from a distance and see
• 2:12:19
  them the same way I did before.
• 2:12:25
  My notion of them has been transformed and a bunch, you know, from smaller,
• 2:12:33
  less profound experiences before that we every encounter changes the
• 2:12:39
  relationship a little bit better.
• 2:12:40
  I love, you know, John Craig and i's friend.
• 2:12:43
  John Young talks about his time with Thesal Bushman and that every time
• 2:12:48
  we encounter an animal, a specific individual, a thread grows between us.
• 2:12:53
  You probably know this story, right?
• 2:12:55
  And the next time you see them, that thread turns into a thin string and
• 2:12:59
  the next time it's a rope, and the next time it's a cord, and then a rope.
• 2:13:03
  And, and until you have these solid ropes of connection to
• 2:13:08
  everything around you and it,
• 2:13:12
  you are stopping before you walk out the front door to see who's
• 2:13:16
  there enough to exit slowly.
• 2:13:20
  Mm-hmm.
• 2:13:22
  So that you don't blow out the door and blast everybody out.
• 2:13:25
  Like every normal human you take on a different approach.
• 2:13:30
  Slowly open the door, leave it open as you look out, let the animals see you.
• 2:13:37
  Let them go back to what they were doing.
• 2:13:40
  Take one step to the threshold and wait.
• 2:13:45
  They go back to what they're doing, take another, and pretty
• 2:13:50
  soon you're in their company.
• 2:13:53
  Mm-hmm.
• 2:13:54
  And that's very powerful.
• 2:13:56
  Very, very powerful.
• 2:13:58
  And all of us can do it anywhere, anytime.
• 2:14:02
  It just takes a few moments of our retirement attention.
• 2:14:12
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, I feel your book
• 2:14:16
  helps us
• 2:14:19
  to enter that shamanic state a bit, and I think that's one of
• 2:14:26
  the great gifts of nature writing.
• 2:14:30
  It draws our attention back to the wild and it draws our subconscious back to the
• 2:14:36
  wild, and it draws our souls back to where we know we've lost since we became tame.
• 2:14:46
  And with each telling of a story like that, and each reminder that it's possible
• 2:14:53
  George Bumann: mm-hmm.
• 2:14:54
  Rupert Isaacson: To step back over that bridge.
• 2:14:57
  In fact, all it takes is intention
• 2:15:01
  and we're right there because we're the same species we ever were.
• 2:15:06
  George Bumann: Absolutely.
• 2:15:07
  Rupert Isaacson: But it's good to be reminded, and as you
• 2:15:10
  say, if we are not reminded.
• 2:15:14
  Even those of us that know and value this,
• 2:15:19
  we, we slip so easily into poor mental health basically for
• 2:15:26
  those generations coming up.
• 2:15:28
  Now, if they're not reminded, if the cycle of storytelling is
• 2:15:34
  broken, how will they value that?
• 2:15:39
  Which we are supposed to not just protect, but upon which we
• 2:15:43
  rely for our very sustenance.
• 2:15:46
  George Bumann: Mm-hmm.
• 2:15:47
  Rupert Isaacson: So when you make, when you write a book like keeps
• 2:15:50
  dropping on animals, when you create the arc that you create, let alone
• 2:15:56
  when you take people into the wild,
• 2:16:02
  you remind us
• 2:16:07
  to care for ourselves.
• 2:16:10
  Because to care for the wild is to care for ourselves and to forget it and
• 2:16:17
  denigrate it and destroy it is to do the same thing to destroy ourselves.
• 2:16:24
  But we might not even know that because we're so growing up in
• 2:16:27
  families that are so, cultures that are so long divorced from the wild.
• 2:16:34
  So every contribution that you make,
• 2:16:40
  so listeners.
• 2:16:42
  He's dropping on animals and buy one for a friend, especially if you've got a friend
• 2:16:46
  that's not having much access right now.
• 2:16:51
  In return, George will now call a viva.
• 2:16:59
  George Bumann: I suppose I should fess up.
• 2:17:03
  So the beaver is also all a very social creature as well.
• 2:17:09
  So if you learn to sound like another beaver you stand a chance of having a
• 2:17:15
  very close encounter with the keto are.
• 2:17:19
  And most commonly and most attractive to them is the sound
• 2:17:23
  of chewing someone else dining.
• 2:17:25
  Ah.
• 2:17:26
  And so if you can imitate the sound of them doing this corn cob, like
• 2:17:30
  chewing of the bark off of a twig
• 2:17:39
  and they roll it,
• 2:17:50
  you can often call them up right up to you.
• 2:17:54
  Wow.
• 2:17:55
  Hide though.
• 2:17:56
  Hide.
• 2:17:56
  So they can't see that you're not another beaver.
• 2:17:59
  But you will, you'll be surprised.
• 2:18:04
  Roll the.
• 2:18:06
  Yep.
• 2:18:11
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, listen, George, it's been a real treat.
• 2:18:15
  I've been transported.
• 2:18:16
  Thank you.
• 2:18:19
  Thank you.
• 2:18:19
  Will you come on again?
• 2:18:20
  There's a lot of other questions I'd like to ask happily.
• 2:18:24
  George Bumann: Yeah.
• 2:18:25
  Rupert Isaacson: What I'm thinking we should do is we should, we should
• 2:18:27
  actually have a little three-way panel with you, me and Craig.
• 2:18:31
  Oh, that would be fun.
• 2:18:32
  Which means I just get to hang out basically with you and Craig.
• 2:18:35
  Very cool.
• 2:18:38
  Well, I'd love, you can call beavers together.
• 2:18:40
  George Bumann: There you go.
• 2:18:41
  We'll, we'll be a colony unto ourselves and maybe draw some others in.
• 2:18:45
  Yeah.
• 2:18:47
  Rupert Isaacson: So listeners, if, if, if you fancy the sound of that,
• 2:18:51
  we will see if we can do a Craig call.
• 2:18:56
  Have two,
• 2:18:57
  George Bumann: what would that be?
• 2:18:58
  What's the sound of a, a, an octopus suction cup
• 2:19:03
  popping off?
• 2:19:04
  Rupert Isaacson: Yes.
• 2:19:06
  Or, or, or, or the sound of sea lice crawling over a forearm.
• 2:19:10
  That thousand, the stuff that man puts himself through.
• 2:19:13
  George Bumann: Mm.
• 2:19:14
  The bark of a Cape Clawless Otter.
• 2:19:17
  Rupert Isaacson: That's right.
• 2:19:19
  The feeling of kelp wrapping itself around your lower calf when there's
• 2:19:24
  a great white closing in on you.
• 2:19:26
  That's a very wi with, with the water at sort of Sub-Zero temperatures.
• 2:19:30
  That's a very Craig type of situation.
• 2:19:32
  And yes, it is.
• 2:19:38
  George Bumann: Well, I would be up for it.
• 2:19:40
  It's not often and that we get to have these kind of conversations and, and
• 2:19:44
  certainly not frequently enough then that are in ways that others can benefit to.
• 2:19:50
  So count me in.
• 2:19:52
  Rupert Isaacson: So tell me before we, before we depart this
• 2:19:55
  time, how do people find you?
• 2:19:57
  George Bumann: Sure.
• 2:19:58
  They can find me at for the art.
• 2:20:00
  You can see my website at george bauman.com.
• 2:20:04
  Bauman rhymes with human, it's spelled B as in boy, U-M-A-N-N.
• 2:20:10
  And my wife and I have a lifestyle blog about our, our life here at the edge of
• 2:20:15
  Yellowstone called a yellowstone life.com.
• 2:20:20
  And at present, if you are already a, a Yellowstone aficionado or would like
• 2:20:24
  to be, we're working on the fourth annual Yellowstone Summit, which is
• 2:20:28
  an online event for anyone around the world to hear from the world's leading
• 2:20:31
  experts on all the neat things about this place@yellowstonesummit.com.
• 2:20:37
  When will that be?
• 2:20:39
  The event goes live on the 20th of February this month.
• 2:20:44
  Oh.
• 2:20:44
  Soon.
• 2:20:44
  And run through the 23rd very soon.
• 2:20:46
  So we're in the throes of finalizing speaker material programs.
• 2:20:51
  We have prerecorded and live sessions.
• 2:20:53
  We have everything from geology, ecology, animal behavior, photography, trip
• 2:20:58
  planning, geo you know, geothermal things.
• 2:21:03
  We actually have a, a classical musical, a classical music composer who's in, created
• 2:21:08
  some works based on his time guiding into the back country of Yellowstone
• 2:21:14
  this year to to feature this year.
• 2:21:15
  So a nice variety of topics, the arts literature, and to really
• 2:21:20
  give people a well rounded feel for, for the awe of, of this place.
• 2:21:25
  Rupert Isaacson: Sounds like an insane amount of work putting that together.
• 2:21:28
  It totally
• 2:21:29
  George Bumann: is.
• 2:21:30
  Sounds like it's ridiculous.
• 2:21:32
  My wife is really at the center of it and it's solid four or five months of the
• 2:21:36
  year to put this together and Oh, sure.
• 2:21:39
  She's a rock star when it comes to that.
• 2:21:41
  So
• 2:21:42
  Rupert Isaacson: that sounds like a wonderful thing to attend.
• 2:21:44
  An absolute nightmare to put together.
• 2:21:45
  Yeah,
• 2:21:46
  George Bumann: but it's so rewarding 'cause you know, from our two and a
• 2:21:50
  half decades of giving and organizing education programs, who here we know.
• 2:21:55
  So many of these people doing things that are off the charts amazing
• 2:21:59
  that you would never know about.
• 2:22:01
  Sometimes you might in the academic literature or park films or programs
• 2:22:05
  of that nature, but there's folks who are doing things that are so
• 2:22:10
  incredible that unless you lived here, you wouldn't know about them.
• 2:22:13
  So it's, it's actually a real honor for us to be able to put these folks up
• 2:22:17
  on a pedestal for others to appreciate in the ways that we love them.
• 2:22:21
  And again, what's the web address for
• 2:22:23
  Rupert Isaacson: people wanting
• 2:22:23
  George Bumann: to
• 2:22:23
  Rupert Isaacson: attend that?
• 2:22:24
  Summit?
• 2:22:25
  George Bumann: Yellowstone summit.com.
• 2:22:28
  And they can too.
• 2:22:29
  They can buy the pass and watch later.
• 2:22:31
  It's, you know, you can buy it after the fact, but you, there's a little
• 2:22:34
  price break if you get in early and yeah, yellowstone summit.com.
• 2:22:38
  It's a real, a real treat.
• 2:22:40
  And it's, it's the kind of event I wish I had around when we first
• 2:22:44
  moved here, frankly, you know?
• 2:22:46
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 2:22:46
  Creating the community, the social hub that
• 2:22:49
  George Bumann: you had to, yeah.
• 2:22:50
  It's really part of the point is to build that community of people who
• 2:22:53
  love this place around the globe tribe.
• 2:22:57
  Yep.
• 2:22:58
  Rupert Isaacson: Totally.
• 2:22:59
  And the book is Eavesdropping on Animals.
• 2:23:02
  George Bumann: Eavesdropping on Animals.
• 2:23:03
  You Can Get It in most places.
• 2:23:04
  Books are sold in Europe and Australia United States, Canada.
• 2:23:08
  You can go to my website.
• 2:23:09
  There's a link there that you can also link through to, and get a copy there
• 2:23:14
  or find out how to get one near you
• 2:23:17
  Rupert Isaacson: and we will have all the links.
• 2:23:19
  In the blurb following this.
• 2:23:21
  So it's all there if you have.
• 2:23:23
  Well, thanks If you're driving, I appreciate you helping spread the word.
• 2:23:27
  Oh, of course.
• 2:23:28
  That's valuable work.
• 2:23:29
  George, it's been an absolute delight.
• 2:23:31
  Thank you so much, my honor.
• 2:23:34
  George Bumann: My pleasure.
• 2:23:34
  I look
• 2:23:34
  Rupert Isaacson: forward to the next time.
• 2:23:37
  George Bumann: I as well.
• 2:23:38
  Rupert Isaacson: I hope you enjoyed today's conversation as much as I did.
• 2:23:43
  If you did, please help us to make more.
• 2:23:46
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• 2:23:51
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• 2:23:56
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• 2:23:57
  And if you'd like to find out about our certification courses with.
• 2:24:00
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• 2:24:04
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• 2:24:07
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• 2:24:11
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• 2:24:17
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• 2:24:19
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• 2:24:24
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• 2:24:26
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• 2:24:30
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• 2:24:32
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• 2:24:37
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• 2:24:39
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• 2:24:42
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• 2:24:43
  I can't wait for our next guest and also to meet you there.
• 2:24:47
  In the meantime, remember, live free.
• 2:24:52
  Ride free.