Protect Species Podcast
This podcast is a production of the Global Center for Species Survival, which is a partnership between the Indianapolis Zoo and the International Union for Conservation of Nature Species Survival Commission (IUCN SSC). We record all episodes at the Indianapolis Zoo in the Bedel Financial Media Studio, made possible by a generous gift from Elaine and Eric Bedel.
Protect Species Podcast
The Weird and Wonderful World of Wildlife Photography with Joel Sartore
Renowned wildlife photographer Joel Sartore takes us on an extraordinary journey from his early days in newspaper photography to his groundbreaking work with National Geographic and the ambitious Photo Ark project. Learn how Joel uses innovative techniques, such as black and white backgrounds, to give equal prominence to all creatures, whether they are tiny insects or massive lions. Delve into the unique challenges and collaborative effort required to photograph Earth's biodiversity, and discover how pictures play a vital role in raising public awareness about the extinction crisis.
Brace yourself for exhilarating adventure stories from Joel’s wildlife photography escapades. From close encounters with grizzly bears and spitting cobras to the humorous ordeal of Joel's boots melting on hot lava or the time he was pelted with monkey poo! Each tale offers a vivid glimpse into the unpredictable and often perilous world of wildlife photography. Joel also shares his personal battle with a tropical disease and the fascinating discovery of traditional healing methods in the Amazon, adding an element of intrigue and danger to his conservation efforts. Join us for an episode packed with stories, insights, and a powerful message about the importance of protecting our natural world.
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Joel's work can be seen on the Photo Ark website.
Additional links:
Photo Ark Project
Joel Sartore Instagram
Joel Sartore named 2023 Jane Alexander Global Wildlife Ambassador
"The Spider Monkey Incident"
Okay. Lights, camera, animals. A picture says more than a thousand words. They say so. Today we're talking about wildlife photography, and our guest is arguably one of the best. Joel Satori's collaboration with National Geographic led to the creation of the photo arc, and he's here to tell us all about it. I'm Moni Boom.
Justin Birkhoff:And I'm Justin Berkoff. Welcome to the Protect Species Podcast, where we celebrate biodiversity in converse with conservationists. Joel, thanks for joining us. You're welcome. Glad that you're taking time out of your busy schedule. So we're going to start really with some brief introductions. You know, tell us a little bit about who you are, how you have you know, how your career has progressed and what you're working on these days.
Joel Sartore:Sure, um, I uh. Basically I'm from Nebraska. I uh worked in newspapers for a while and then I got on with national geographic as a magazine photographer about 30 some years ago, and then about 17 stories I don't know 17, 20 stories into it, I decided to do, uh, a thing we call the photo arc, which is why I'm sitting here today. I think this is a 30 year long project in which we're trying to photograph every captive species in the world, every species in human care around the world, at zoos, aquariums, wildlife rehabbers and private collections as well. So to date we've got more than 15,000 species. We're not sure how many the world actually has in human care.
Monni Böhm:I was about to ask you this.
Joel Sartore:Maybe it's 30,000. Maybe it's 25. I don't know, but that's it. We photograph animals on black and white backgrounds uh, to use studio lighting and really show true colors and to isolate animals, and without any size comparison. There's nothing in there but the animal on these black and white backgrounds.
Joel Sartore:On these sets we have okay, the animals are all the same size. So the mouse has as much of a voice as an elephant, a tiger and a tiger beetle same size. So the mouse has as much of a voice as an elephant, a tiger and a tiger beetle same size. So we can really tell the stories of these smaller animals that people don't pay attention to. We've got plenty of coverage on tigers and gorillas, giraffes, but most people have never heard of a Palawan stink badger, for example, or an Arroyo toad or I don't know, the pink pigeon. There's all these different animals nobody will ever get to meet because they live in trees high up or they live in muddy water and soil or leaf litter. I mean we just don't know what's out there. So it's really a big introduction to biodiversity. That's the whole point.
Joel Sartore:Love the mention of a stink badger Always a good one yes, and how does, how does your process work for anything that's in water, because I feel that might be a little bit more tricky than for terrestrial it's not tricky if you have a series of aquariums that are optically correct and you put backgrounds in them and then you load the animals into them and the shoots just take a few minutes and then we take them back out. Yeah, um, the question I get a lot is well, how would you do a lion, how would you do something big? How would you do a bear? Well, we did lions here at the indianapolis zoo yesterday morning. I not gotten african lion on black yet. Okay, I'd forgotten I did them on white years ago.
Justin Birkhoff:I mean you're taking lots of pictures, right, I know, I know it makes sense, I know so.
Joel Sartore:There's a pair of female African lions here that look good and they prepped a space. They painted an off-exhibit space black. We shifted them in and got pictures yesterday, that's phenomenal.
Justin Birkhoff:So you use the term we a lot. Yeah, I mean myself.
Joel Sartore:Just you, just me? Well, no, there, just you, just me. Well no, there's a lot of people that work on it. Um, on foreign shoots, I take my oldest son, cole, with me. He's about 30 years old, he goes with me on all the foreign shoots and, uh, then I've got this staff at home that that will color, correct and keyword and use photoshop on some, some pictures, if an animal's pooped in the middle of the shoot yeah, we don't want to move the animal.
Joel Sartore:we take that out in Photoshop, but the animals are all on black and white backgrounds. It's just, we don't really want that.
Monni Böhm:I would love to see that as the outtake. So you still?
Joel Sartore:have the original somewhere, Because I really really would love to see those photos. That's pretty sick, but okay, all right. Yeah, no, there's a team of people. We have shoot producers in foreign lands that really work hard to try to line up enough things to shoot. But in terms of who's pushing the shutter?
Justin Birkhoff:button. It's me Okay, and with that, how much travel are you doing on average a year, or do you not want to think about it?
Joel Sartore:Yeah, no, about half the year, I think, and there's at least a day spent researching for every day in the field.
Justin Birkhoff:So that's full-'s, that's full-time that's all, that's every day of the sounds like full-time, plus it's every day of the year.
Monni Böhm:It is, yeah, okay, pretty much very exciting yeah so, apart from the lions and they were challenging mainly because you forgot um which one was your most challenging photo shoot- um, chimps are rough chimps.
Joel Sartore:I find it rough because they're very smart and they're fast and they're strong and they're um, they can be malicious or they can be joyful, playful. They're kind of like people, right, and so we're not really necessarily working with very many trained animals or anything like that. These are animals that I that I come across, that I think that we could, we could do, or the zoo thinks it would be okay but they're not.
Justin Birkhoff:They're not trained for this they are absolutely no.
Joel Sartore:Nothing's really trained for this now, so so I've tried chimps a few times and, um, we did a video of the of one of the times.
Justin Birkhoff:It's called the chimp incident I've I've seen that it's yeah sobering yeah, it's.
Joel Sartore:uh, I don't know, maybe it's eight seconds, seven seconds before they destroy the set. Yeah, so it's just not. I mean as you mentioned.
Justin Birkhoff:You know, for the lions here they an offsite or off off show area was painted.
Joel Sartore:That's right.
Justin Birkhoff:To be your, your good work around.
Joel Sartore:That's the way to do it. Yeah With, with this chimp problem, it was paper that we duct taped to a off exhibit space and that's really dumb. It was early on in the photo. I mean, it's a learning experience, right, that's right, and the chimps had a great time just destroying everything. So everybody wins. Yeah, and it makes a good story.
Justin Birkhoff:We're talking about it to this day? Yeah, and so you mentioned a bit is the idea that, without anything else in the background, so this very stylized shooting, you know goal or method that you're able to really focus in on these species. And what is it that you want to communicate through this shooting style, as opposed to having animals in more natural environments?
Joel Sartore:Well, I did actually more than I indicated at the start of this interview. I did over, I think, thinking back about 30, some stories for national geographic magazine over about 17 years, and only two moved the needle of conservation. Okay, one helped the northern koala get preserved or get basically get them protection, and the other helped stop a dam from being built in a through a tropical rainforest in bolivia. That would have drowned a thousand square miles.
Justin Birkhoff:So those two, but that's not a very good, I mean those are very significant, but it's not yeah yeah, it's not moving the needle the the way you wanted to, or if you've got over 30 stories.
Joel Sartore:You want to have more land. You know some significance. So, um, with the photo arc, it's. It's just. Uh, I forgot your question. Now, sorry, I'm looking at.
Justin Birkhoff:I have to be quiet on this one. Yes, terrible. What are you trying to communicate using this style?
Joel Sartore:Yes. So what I'm trying to do is get the public to wake up and care about the fact that we're going to lose so many species to extinction. It's going to threaten our own survival. Yeah, I forgot about that part. So the thing is that nature is kind of on the run now, but we seem to want to just hate on each other and argue about politics. We want to. We want to completely obsess about sports, the price of gas, just these, all these things, and I get that, you know, take selfies of ourselves while the world burns.
Joel Sartore:So the at this point in time, we're at a pretty critical juncture, and people have said this over and over again. Do we care? Do we care about anything? I don't know. I hope so, and that's really the intention of the project is to show people what's at stake by showing them biodiversity. Trying to anthropomorphize animals. All we can get people to realize that baby monkeys are a lot like baby people, aren't they cute? Why would we want to cause them to go extinct, whatever it is, and just hammer that home over and over again? We are a decades-long ad campaign on behalf of nature. That's what we are. So we're just trying to introduce people to what biodiversity looks like, hoping that some of these animals will resonate and cause people to want to come into the tent of conservation and care and finally care so, but we really should talk about why they should care.
Justin Birkhoff:There we go.
Joel Sartore:Why they should care, or even a majority of the insects. Those are what allow us to eat fruits and vegetables, because they pollinate fruits and vegetables.
Joel Sartore:There's one right. If we lose the rainforest around the equator, like in Brazil and Gabon and Congo, it's not just about losing jaguars and parrots, it's about losing the ability to get predictable rains in the areas where we know how to grow crops in good soils. Yeah, so those, those rainforests not only cool the planet, filter the air, provide us with oxygen you know good things like that but they drive the rainfall cycle on the planet. So if we cut down the majority of those rainforests we don't know how many we can, how much we can cut before it collapses, yeah, but you're going to have a lack of rainfall or too much rainfall and it'll cause millions and millions of people to starve to death. So the photo arc is. It looks at big issues, but in a subtle way. Okay, look at that cute baby tiger. Let's learn about that. Well, let's go beyond that now. Let's say here's what the tiger needs to survive, right? I I mean. Well, I've been here in Indianapolis, went across the street to the Idle George Museum.
Joel Sartore:And then we went next door to the State of Indiana's History Museum and there's all these amazing artifacts and paintings and so forth and there's guards. We stand guard over that, but we won't stand guard over some of these amazing birds and mammals and reptiles and fish and amphibians and invertebrates. We really should be, because not only are they honed through time and they're intricate as can be and fascinating, but I think they have a basic right to exist as they go. So will we. But I feel like a guy standing at a bridge that's out waving his arms and one car after the next is driving past me and I can hear him in the background crashing. But we don't give up. Do all we can and try not to just create the world's largest obituary.
Joel Sartore:You know, the thing is there's still time to save all this stuff, or most of it, but people have to wake up and realize it's about saving habitat and actually doing something. There's a great line here in the Biodiversity Center. Did I say that right? Is it called the Biodiversity Center?
Justin Birkhoff:The Global Center for Species Survival.
Joel Sartore:Thank you. The Global Center for Species Survival has this line on the wall and I took a picture of it because I thought this is fantastic, by a man named Robert Swan. It says the greatest danger to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.
Monni Böhm:Yeah, so, that's a theme.
Justin Birkhoff:We hear a lot with some of our guests.
Monni Böhm:That's generally applicable to pretty much anything you want to get done in life. It's the they.
Justin Birkhoff:They will do something about it, they will save it. Who's they? Yeah, exactly where is you and me?
Joel Sartore:that that's us right here, right now, exactly right. So so the thing is, people have this great capacity to want to help. Human beings are very giving when they're aroused, you know, when they see the problems they, but they don't know what to do. It's so big, right. What do you do? Well, let's talk specific things, specific things. What can you do?
Joel Sartore:There's so many things, right, like look at insulating your home, yeah. Driving a smaller car, driving it less. What kind of food do you buy? How much meat do you eat? Do you pour poison all over your lawn to keep your, to keep green grass, when you should have native plants for insects?
Joel Sartore:There's, there's just a million things to do, and it's such a good life to actually use your time for good. For example, if you can become a specialist on whatever you love. Maybe it's, maybe it's getting dogs and cats adopted, maybe it's you love birds and you want to keep your county from mowing all the roadside ditches when ground nesting birds are trying to pull off young you know, like, just wait till late June, yeah, mow. Then, like, if you can become an expert and use your time and stick with it and use your time to convince people that these are good things that don't cost a thing. In fact, some of them can enrich you, like insulating your home. That enriches your bank account, saves you money, saves the planet. These are all things that are things I think about all the time, and we tie these photo art pictures back into that. You bit off more than you could know.
Justin Birkhoff:It was a great answer right, no, and I think it. It really illustrates, like, what the value of an image can be. Is that it's not just an image of, you know, a lion, since you shot the ones that we have here is like it's, it's an image of a lion. And then that connection point to all the other things that go along with it. And right, you know it's. How do we create an impact campaign about that? How do we create the? You know, the marketing, as you said, is like, you know, we're an advertisement for for biodiversity, right, and it. It's not necessarily framed that way, but at its core, that's the mission behind it.
Joel Sartore:Right, but I mean, like everybody else does it, we have to think more like corporations and their marketing, right yeah, when Taco Bell comes out with a new Chalupa, you know it right, you know it.
Justin Birkhoff:You know more about it than you possibly need to do. Oh, you sure do you see it on little, but you see it?
Joel Sartore:when you're filling up your car with gas, you have a TV in front of you and it's telling you all about it, or a new truck from Ford or Chevy or a new movie coming out. Right, I mean, I love Raiders of the Lost Ark. I love that movie. It's one of the things that inspired me to work for Geographic. But when the latest Raiders movie came out, you heard about it for months and for six straight months you knew that movie was coming out.
Joel Sartore:So we have to do that on behalf of nature now. We really do need to let people know that, as we keep behaving in similar fashion and tearing the world up, these consequences will descend upon us, and it's going to be kind of too late if everything gets really bad and then we go to our politicians demanding to know why they can't fix it. They're not going to fix anything. It's really up to people to be smart enough to see this stuff coming. You notice how there's lots of smoke in the air all the time from the fires in Canada? Yeah, you notice that. Yeah, it's how it's really really hot now outside. Yeah, like for many more weeks than it used to be, I noticed that we don't really have any snow anymore in nebraska, which is a wild concept, not really, I mean. I mean, not really.
Justin Birkhoff:The idea that there's no snow is like, compared to you know its baseline right like the fact that people ignore these very blatant signs that things are changing because it's a.
Joel Sartore:It's a frog in the pot thing. Right, you put a frog in a pot, supposedly. I've never tried this, nor would I. Yeah, you turn and cold water. If you tried to put a frog a frog in a pot of hot water, you'd hop right out. But if you sit in cold water and turn the heat up real slow normal you might sit in there.
Joel Sartore:So we are such a resilient species that we can probably tolerate about anything that comes upon us, with the except of the exception of, like nuclear winter yeah, we won't go there. But but in terms of an increasing temperature in the summer, okay, we'll just work at night. Our construction crews are working, yeah, um, we have this adapt and overcome sort of mentality as opposed to.
Justin Birkhoff:Maybe we should change what we're doing right, so it's.
Joel Sartore:I mean I'm fairly adaptable to them.
Joel Sartore:I mean summers yeah so we'll start building our homes underground and if it's too noisy we'll just put on earphones. We're very adaptable. But we'll get to a point where if we lose too much biodiversity, it's really not going to benefit us very much, it's going to be a big problem. And so the photo arc, in a fun and entertaining way, tries to get people to realize biodiversity is amazing. Look at this. I had no idea we had this, and most of what I photographed can be saved. It absolutely can. We just have to give these animals a little bit of a break, encourage the habitats not be destroyed or to revegetate or whatever it takes. So I'm hopeful believe it or not, you wouldn't know it from listening to me, but I'm a hopeful guy and I don't get depressed about any of this. I just think we've got to get to work.
Monni Böhm:And I'm glad to be on your podcast because I can just it's cathartic for me, you know just be able to talk about this Good, do you ever think that for your photo arc, you would also at some point move beyond animals, maybe to the plants that make up the habitat you're trying to kill me? I'm just thinking maybe there's somebody else who wants to follow. I mean, maybe not you, because that's a lot of work.
Joel Sartore:I have thought about a plant arc and and uh, yeah, I think that's that's, that's something that's doable by somebody, but it's not me. I'm gonna have my hands full just getting through the I mean you gotta know your own limitations.
Justin Birkhoff:That's right. And so, as you know, as we're talking about the photo arc and what it's, what it means and what you're trying to do with it, it's obviously brought some really interesting memories and stories to your life, and you know we go through this Two spitting cobras found in camera gear.
Monni Böhm:What is this all about?
Joel Sartore:That's right. Well, things crawl around on me. You know, yeah, you know, when I worked in the field there were lots of problems, you know, being chased by things that I tried to get too close to. What's the most scary chase? The most scary chase Chugging Female grizzly bear. Yeah, that'll do it With cubs.
Monni Böhm:Oh, yeah, yeah, Anything female with a dog.
Joel Sartore:And I tell you what you don't even know you have legs. You just stand there with your mouth open and you watch this bear go from a brown dot to just right up in your face in a heartbeat. It looked like she was floating or flying at me. I just stood there. I had no idea. I mean, obviously it worked. Yeah, here I am. Yeah, yeah, I was also back up against a river, so I don't know.
Justin Birkhoff:There wasn't much, yeah, but.
Joel Sartore:I didn't know to wade out in the river or do anything. I just stood there and I just stayed still and lowered my eyes so I wouldn't be confrontational, and she backed up and trotted off, but it means I did something wrong. That's what that means. In terms of photo arc close calls, really there's not been any, because we try to minimize that at zoos. We're working with the processes. We'll ask a zoo for their inventory and then we'll go through it. We'll say we need these 20 and the zoo will say well, we can do these dozen, the rest are too skittish or they're not here anymore, whatever. And then we just set about plotting and planning how to do it.
Justin Birkhoff:And so it's months and months of of you know research for every day of shooting.
Joel Sartore:But with spitting cobras, you know I just if the spitting cobra comes off the background and goes into my camera bag, then I back up. One got into my lights actually, because they climb pretty well. I just back up and the people with the long snake hooks, they, they get it done. They fix all the problems. No, problem.
Monni Böhm:Let the professionals do their job, that's right so what did the professionals do about the one pair of boots melted by lava?
Joel Sartore:that was just an accident. Just buy you new boots. Yeah, I saved them. I thought I was walking in gum, but it wasn't, but it wasn't hot out, and then I realized it was my boots melting off. So I got off the lava and then I didn't have any more problems, but but your feet get really high.
Monni Böhm:I now have a wonderful mental image as well of you kind of technically walking like on gum.
Joel Sartore:But it was crusted over. I thought it was all done being hot, but it wasn't done being hot, it turns out. At least you weren't barefoot. It could have been worse. It could have been a lot worse, yeah.
Monni Böhm:This podcast is a production of the global center for species survival at the indianapolis zoo. We record all episodes in the beetle financial media studio, made possible by a generous gift from eric and elaine beetle I did.
Joel Sartore:You want to hear the gross?
Joel Sartore:story yes, let's hear a gross story, give us one. I got a. Um, I had a sore on my lower right leg that wouldn't heal up and it kept getting bigger and bigger. It looked like it was going to heal and then it would expand out wider. And, um, it was from being in bolivia. It's from an insect bite, because when you come out of the jungle you're covered in bites. So I had this bite that wouldn't heal and I thought it was a brown recluse bite, and so did my doctor. Uh, but it wasn't. And, and some friends of mine actually gave me some I don't know some sort of a. It was a, it was a cow udder balm for milking parlors. Yeah, I've seen these on udders. Use this balm, use this lotion. Well, nothing worked. And so what happened was I got? I was injected by a female phlebotomist sandfly with mucocutaneous leishmaniasis, and that means it's a microscopic parasite that is necrotic. Do you know about this? You're nodding. Have you ever heard about this?
Monni Böhm:I've heard some of the words before. I'm nodding also just because it's exciting all right and it's a reflex.
Joel Sartore:It eats away uh. It eats away at your tissue and wants to go in through your lymphatic system into your head, where it blows big holes out your sinuses and can rot away your nose and your palate. So you don't want that to happen. That sounds terrible. So you get a uh. So what they do is they put a pick line your arm, if you hold out your arms for me. I'll show you Right here.
Justin Birkhoff:It goes up the vein of your arm and goes into the top chamber of your heart.
Joel Sartore:So it can deliver this chemical they give you every day for an hour. It's served cold, it makes you really cold and they dump it in the top chamber of your heart because it's corrosive to veins and it'll burn holes through your veins if they give it to you anywhere else. So they dump it in the top chamber of your heart and then it proceeds to screw up your liver and your pancreas.
Monni Böhm:It messes up your amylase and lipase levels.
Joel Sartore:It throws off your heart sometimes and then you get that for a month and this is better than it eating through your brain, so it is better than it going into your sinuses and eating the front of your face, right? So that? Yeah, I don't know about brain, how it affects the brain, but I know that you don't want it to get really bad. And that disrupts the creature's life cycle, that one month long treatment of a thing called antimony. By the way, it's an arsenic derivative.
Justin Birkhoff:Oh, that sounds super pleasant so you get kind of knocked down.
Joel Sartore:You kind of lay around and don't do a whole bunch for that month, and then the wound starts to heal. At the end of that 30 days it just starts to heal and then you're really kind of healed up two or three months later.
Justin Birkhoff:So you have a good relationship with their local tropical health experience. Yeah, the infectious disease doc in Lincoln. He thinks I'm a pretty exciting guy. He does. He's like oh, he's back. I wonder what's this? So he's always back.
Joel Sartore:So when I got done with all that, of course I went back down the Amazon, because it's a very biodiverse place, and I went to a village where it was just a family and they all had the same big scars on their lower legs that I did. The sand fly lives in sand. It doesn't fly very high up and so a lot of times people get bitten around the lower legs and they all have the same scar. And I said to them you know you don't have the money to rent a boat to town to take your fruit to the market. How did you afford the $10,000 antimony treatment? Yeah, that's the only treatment. They said well, we have a healing bush here and we peel some of the bark and we boil it and there's an oil comes off.
Justin Birkhoff:We put a couple drops of the oil and the hole starts to heal the next day so if you think about what it is that we're throwing away with each acre of rain, yeah, no, it's absolutely. That's an amazing. It's like very tangible, very tangible.
Joel Sartore:Yeah, I had a vial that oil in my medicine cabinet for years, but I told my infectious disease doctor about that. He's like yeah, which doctor stuff?
Justin Birkhoff:well, no, it's not, no, not really that's where we get a lot of our medications derived from a lot of it's plant-based plants in the tropics, where everything's a big competition eat or be eaten they've developed all these, all these amazing molecular structures to to ward off being eaten, and some of those can benefit us medically.
Joel Sartore:So forget about the whole part where I said we need the tropical rainforest to keep us getting rain.
Justin Birkhoff:I mean we can be selfish about it, right, like that's fine.
Joel Sartore:Medicines, right, medicines. Yeah, that's a good juicy story, isn't it?
Monni Böhm:No, that's a good one. That was an excellent story. You want another one. You're talking about the plant photo arc was going to kill me. We got time to kill. Yeah, we got time to kill.
Justin Birkhoff:We can do one more. Yeah, let's do another story, let's do it. What's?
Joel Sartore:the point of this. I was in a bat cave in Uganda, okay.
Monni Böhm:It's already a great start.
Joel Sartore:Where my guide had said it's okay to go in here and they had built a metal little grandstand for people to watch. It was a big colony of Egyptian fruit bats, like hundreds of thousands of them, and so it was outside the cave. I was walking back through the road and all the bats decided to exit at dusk to go out and feed. And I looked up and I got a big hot guano or a big poop in my eye.
Justin Birkhoff:I appreciate the temperature for both of these stories, it burned. That didn't sound good then.
Joel Sartore:Then I called the cdc in kampala because I knew that cdc had sampled that, that bats, the bats in that cave for viruses, most of that. There's a viral load in most bat caves. That's not harmful usually. And so the guy in kampala it was, it was nighttime. I remember being real hungry, it was kind of cool out and we were done with this long hot day and I said yeah, I got a bat poop in my eye, but I've heard from my guide that you guys sampled that cave and there's nothing nefarious in there. And he said where were you again? And I said I was in Python Cave. And he's like, yeah, we sampled that twice a year. There's Marburg in there. That's the only known reservoir for Marburg. Well, marburg is just like Ebola, but it kills you a little faster and the fever is so bad you don't remember it.
Joel Sartore:So he said I said at what rate of infection? And he said I'll call you back. I said call me right back because I'm really curious. And so I remember I was really hungry. All of a sudden I felt sick to my stomach and I was sweating, and it was a cool night and I was starving when I started the call. How odd and he called me back three or four minutes later and he said five point something percent and I spelled it out F-I-V-E, no other decimal points, five point something percent. He said. Yeah, he said, and the eye is a very sterile field but we don't know what the transmission rate would be because nothing's been really done with this disease. Yeah, and so you need to go home now, because you got 36 hours before you become contagious, if you get it, and you will go to your infectious disease doctor, which I did, and you will um see him. So I flew home, kind of emergency, flew home and I and my assignment was over, obviously, and I met with him and he was so excited, so happy.
Monni Böhm:I have a picture of the infectious disease doctor now every single time he gets from you, it's like yes, he's like joel, where are you going next?
Justin Birkhoff:what can I know?
Joel Sartore:it's been. It's been a while since then. Leishmaniasis I think this is actually the doctor's partner and they're very nice guys and they're great at what they do. They're great at at it. And so he said well, we're going to give you the rabies series right now.
Joel Sartore:And then that's four shots in the thighs, but don't worry, that'll just boost your titer, your rabies protection. And then you're going to go home and be isolated in a spare bedroom and don't go within 25 or 30 feet of your family, just stay in there. And then you'll take your temperature two, three times a day. If you start to show a fever, you call us, drive yourself to the hospital and then we'll clear the halls and we'll put you into a negative air pressure room with a negative air pressure bed and we'll try to keep your fluids balanced. And there you go and I said well, what are the odds? It'll kill me if I get it. He said well, in Africa it would have been high, 90 percentile, here it's about 50, 50, whether you'll make it.
Joel Sartore:I mean, that's better.
Justin Birkhoff:Yeah, that's better.
Joel Sartore:So the second day in quarantine I got a call from David Quammen, who's the famous writer, and he'd just written this book called Spillover, about zoonotic diseases escaping. And he said would you who got Marburg from the same cave and she survived? And I said yeah. So we swapped emails and I said how bad was it.
Joel Sartore:And she said um well, I don't remember any of it. The fever was so bad, last rights were called on me a time or two and my family gathered at my bedside, but I don't remember that she said. And then I hope I'm remembering this right she said after the fever broke and I started to feel better. It was a year before I left my house and I went to the grocery store and I couldn't really be on my feet the whole time. I had to ride a scooter part of the time and she was in good shape and pretty, pretty young. Yeah, she's like a runner, so it's a bad one to get, but I didn't get it. Here I am excellent yeah, that's good.
Joel Sartore:That's pretty good one isn't it.
Justin Birkhoff:No, those are two good stories.
Monni Böhm:Clearly, you also do a lot of public speaking and it shows because you tell stories incredibly well. You already told us a few, and we like the gory ones. Yes, but what's the biggest crowd pleaser? Not everybody likes the gory ones, or is it one of those two?
Joel Sartore:Oh yeah, crowd pleaser. I got attacked by a group of black spider monkeys at a rehab center in peru, like two years ago, and, um, the lady told me that there was a, the monkey, the monkey species. I needed this is for photo art too. She says it's inside this little pin, inside this bigger pin. Oh, but the little pin is big enough you can stand up and the other monkeys won't be able to get you. You just go in. We're going to throw bananas and all the monkeys will run down there for those bananas I've played this game like all right, here's the plan.
Joel Sartore:You're like, I don't like that plan no well, I said this is, this is crazy, this isn't going to work. She says that the monkey in there is nice, but the others aren't, so we're going to throw the bananas. And so when we throw the bananas, you're going to go in, and you're going to go in this hallway uh, also made of wire where the monkey, the other monkeys can get you, but you're going to go straight back there to the nice monkey and just get in, okay, and then you'll have, I'll be right behind you and I'll have a bundle of black velvet and you have your handheld flash. This is going to work.
Joel Sartore:So they, jose, threw the bananas and as soon as the door locked behind us, those bad monkeys dropped those bananas and were faking us out and they came right back and she got out, or they didn't touch her, but the monkeys punished me severely with their long monkey arms and tails and they ripped at my hair and my clothes and ripped my backpack and my shirt because I was kind of down on the ground but they could still come all around this tunnel of cage wire and just proceed to just rip, and so, uh, I, uh, I thought it was really bad, but then I felt this hot, like tapioca pudding raining down, and so what happened is all those monkeys decided to poop on me at the exact same time and so my vision turned brown and I turned and I crawled out and I escaped the cage tunnel and I laid on my back, kind of gasping for air and kind of spitting a little bit, and I heard people laughing. It was all the tourists that had seen it and were standing over me taking pictures.
Justin Birkhoff:That's terrible, and you didn't even get the shot out of all of that. Oh, I got nothing.
Joel Sartore:I got nothing, but then that's a that's a yeah so my assistant who didn't film any of it she brought me over a little wet wipe that was the size of a postage stamp and I said I actually need a hose. And so then I I took my shirt off which wasn't pretty in the sun and they hosed me off and the tourists were all taking pictures of that. And then I got all cleaned up and I turned my camera upside down so that the poop wouldn't run in the shutter buttons and all the controls. So I wiped that off with the wet wipe and then I was ready to go. Like we had lots of other things to shoot. That was just like going to be a bonus animal, but we still had other animals to shoot. And so I um, I said okay, I'm ready to go, I put my shirt on and and, uh, so we're ready to go.
Joel Sartore:And the lady who owned the zoo was a little private zoo, like a rehab zoo. She said you know, you're the first one that hasn't run off, so that's amazing, so I admire that in you. I said you mean you've done this to other people. She said, well, it's just a badly designed cage, that's all. And it's just been the press anyway. So I will bring you the red wakari, my red wakari. A red wakari monkey is this, known as the old man of the forest. It's got this bright red face and orange hair and she had a pet red wakari monkey in her house and she brought that out and we put it in my little shooting tent and the pictures were so softly lit and so beautiful that the whole thing was worth it. All sins were forgiven. The end that's phenomenal.
Monni Böhm:That's a wonderful story. You're listening to Storytime with Joel Satori.
Joel Sartore:Well, you asked right.
Monni Böhm:Oh yeah, no, I could literally do this all day long yeah.
Justin Birkhoff:No, we could definitely just swap stories all day.
Joel Sartore:But we do have some questions.
Monni Böhm:We're not swapping so much we're just literally extracting. I don't have any stories to share that match, that at all.
Justin Birkhoff:So we've talked a lot about your photography, about the photo art you know and how you use your photography to support conservation. Yes, are there ways that an average person or an amateur photographer can also support conservation?
Joel Sartore:yes, through their own photography. Yes, everybody's a photographer. Now, everybody's got a smartphone. You hear this? That's my phone, that it is. Everybody's got one of these. They take good pictures, they do slow motion, they do time lapse, they do pictures in low light. They do raw files that you can then print big and put on your wall. So everybody's a photographer.
Joel Sartore:What can humanity do? Humanity can start by just paying attention and caring. You know, just, let's move beyond the obvious. Let's move beyond this thing where we're hating on each other and identifying somebody as other, or this tribalism. Let's move beyond that and think about okay, what do we got to do to right the ship? It can still be right. What do we got to do? Let's start just talking about things that everybody can do, um, that make sense and are actually fun, because if it's not fun, nobody's going to do it.
Joel Sartore:So you know, an easy one is to become a member of this zoo. It's a world-class zoo. It's one of the best zoos in the world. Just come here and you'll see. If you become a member of the Indianapolis Zoo. It means that you'll have a membership fee and then you'll probably buy something in the gift shop and you'll certainly want to eat at one of the delicious restaurants, right? So, and nobody at the zoos told me to say this, but this zoo works around the clock to save endangered species and habitats. That's what they do. Zoos are conservation centers. Nobody likes a bad zoo, but good zoos and aquariums are conservation centers and so if we support them, you're directly mainline injecting your money into conservation by becoming a member of the zoo. That's pretty, that's pretty obvious, that's pretty straightforward.
Joel Sartore:But these things we've talked about earlier, things that we can do, include shopping. Well, how are you spending your money? Every time you break out your purse or your wallet, you're saying to a real retailer I approve of this, do it again and again and again. I want more, I want more. Well, if that's something bad, if that's something really bad environmentally and it's up to individual people to study and research and learn what's good and bad. It's up to us. If we don't care enough, we just want to watch the ballgame, we just want the new taco, we just want to go to the movies. If we don't care enough, down, we all go down, we all go right, we we really will have a planet that looks like a mad max movie. It's not going to be. It'll be kind of too wet in some places and certainly very hot in a lot of places, too dry here or there, but it's really up to us.
Joel Sartore:My job as a communicator is is to just create this body of work and hope that something sticks right. There's this great. There's this great TS Eliot quote where he says um, ours paraphrase maybe ours is, but for the trying, then the rest is not our business. That's me. I'm trying what, what everybody else does with it. It's kind of up to them. Right, we're going to start a foundation to house the work and offer it up to the world. We'll see If people want to do something with it. That's great. I can't do anything more than I'm doing now.
Justin Birkhoff:I'm already working all the time You're already doing a lot, yeah.
Joel Sartore:But the things that we do, just like not for photo art like we plant native prairie in the front yard of our building and and at our house and we plant, you know, nectar bearing plants and and milkweed for monarchs, and we we put signs out so passers-by on the sidewalk cannot call us into the weed board because it looks shaggy in the fall, but they can see this is a prairie in progress. Here are the benefits. Here's why you should do it. Here's how you can do it. We have these four signs out that are big as a for sale sign in somebody's yard Big, colorful, with little bees and butterflies and flowers, and so people can learn when they're walking by. Here's what we can do. Right, there's so many things people can do. They can always go to joelsartoricom. Look at the FAQ or Frequently Asked Questions page. There's lots of stuff. In fact, it says what can I do?
Justin Birkhoff:There it is? Yeah, we can definitely link that. That's a wonderful resource. That'd be great.
Monni Böhm:We should probably also talk about why we're lucky enough to have Joel here with us today right.
Justin Birkhoff:That probably makes sense, doesn't it? Does it? So you're here at the Indianapolis Zoo. One was the benefit of being able to take some photos of our lions, but you're here as the 2023 Jane Alexander Global Wildlife Ambassador, evidently so as part of the Indianapolis Prize. So what does this recognition mean to you?
Joel Sartore:It's very nice. But you know, you can only brag to your parents really, and my parents both passed away. So there's, I don't want to brag, I can't. You know, you don't really truly your mom and dad, you can brag to them. Look at what I want, Right. But for me I have to kind of set that aside and think, well, maybe this will give lift to more species. It gives lifts to the zoo, that's great. Gives lifts to the prize, that's great too, but it's, it's kind of a I don't know. I'm, I'm very, very honored, but it's also I'm a little embarrassed. I don't want to brag about anything, that's fair. I'm just this guy that I'm type A obsessive a little bit, obviously, and I'm just trying to get this job done the fact that this is a world-class zoo, one of the finest zoos in the world, and they've decided that I'm worthy. I don't know why. I just am doing my thing. I'm just going to repeat myself I'm honored and all that, but it's like that's a good answer, that's about it.
Joel Sartore:That's about it. We appreciate that. I don't know what else to say.
Monni Böhm:That's quite all right.
Joel Sartore:If my parents were alive, maybe I'd be. You know, maybe I'd be more boisterous or something if they were sitting here on the podcast.
Monni Böhm:But they're not. I but they're, they're not. I'm seriously trying to think which other people I would brag to apart from my parents. And I can't, you can't really do it, you can't really. I mean, you can but you're, but then people, they don't take it the right way, you know people won't be like yay, that's awesome, and everybody else like you're really annoying.
Joel Sartore:That's right. That's right, exactly right, including my wife and kids. They don't want to hear it? Oh, I feel specifically kids usually yeah, they don't want to hear it they just don't teenagers or something no, no stop so I have a question.
Justin Birkhoff:Yes, you've mentioned there's. You've taken 15 000 species roughly yeah, more than that now is there. Is there a species that you know exists in managed care, somewhere that you want to take a picture?
Joel Sartore:the white whale. The white whale, okay, right, um, there is, uh, not literally a whale, you know, um, it was the saiga antelope, which I got in kazakhstan last month. Oh, so that's phenomenal. Um, uh, there are animals that that may be out there that I'm not aware of yet, but we have a pretty good idea of where everything is, um, but you never know, there's there's, um, the andean cat of south america.
Joel Sartore:That'd be, a great one. It's not. There was one in a zoo in la paz in bolivia for a while and I did not get down there fast enough. I got an early, uh early sign from the zoo. That wasn't going to work out, and so I laid off. And I shouldn't have. I should have got found somebody local down there to sign from the zoo. That wasn't going to work out, and so I laid off. And I shouldn't have. I should have got found somebody local down there to go to the zoo and talk, sweet talk them.
Joel Sartore:So small cats the world. We need three or four more, that's it, okay. And so that was a big one. Uh, there will be another one coming to human care sometime, maybe at a rehab center. Yeah, and we'll, we'll get it. Um, there are other animals as well that are, that are super, super hard to find. That may or may not be bulwars, pheasant, blood pheasant, chinese manal, schlater's manal. Those are all pheasant types that are glorious, um, and we're kind of waiting to see whether they get a saola antelope you heard about the saola familiar with them.
Joel Sartore:There's been one juvenile that uh. The man that founded the saola foundation actually saw this juvenile before it passed away in lao.
Joel Sartore:I think and so if that happens I'll I'll go, but really we're, we're getting there. You know, I can kind of see light at the end of the tunnel. Most american zoos have hardly any species that I still need, so I go to southeast asia over and at the end of the tunnel. Most american zoos have hardly any species that I still need, so I go to southeast asia over and over again because of the diversity there, uh, south america, but we're getting there. It's kind of satisfying to see a zoo's inventory and not need any of the species on there and they have 600, 700 species.
Monni Böhm:That feel makes me feel good, makes me feel like I'm actually moving it along getting on top of it yeah, no yeah, and if you do ever get that solar shot, then you'll come back and tell us all about it I will.
Justin Birkhoff:There's no way that story's not amazing.
Joel Sartore:Maybe I'll have a good gross story for you too yeah, I try and look for something else as well.
Monni Böhm:That does something gross, some primate usually, I mean that's yeah, usually yeah, it's usually the primates Pretty reliable on gross stuff.
Joel Sartore:Yeah, it's bad, really bad, but they're good. You know, now that we have social media and we started this project I started the project before the internet was a big deal in terms of social yeah, and now that social media is doing so well, I find it to be a great time to be in conservation, because we can reach the whole world and not just to tell people about bad things but to celebrate good things companies, individuals doing great things, animals that are making recoveries. And we can literally read people's minds. We can see what they want and you know what they want are primates. They love primates. They love them because they're so similar to us yet so different, and the same emotions, the same feeling you get in looking them in the eye. So this is wonderful and we kind of tailor our social feed to that somewhat, you know, to really give people what they want. And then we slip in a snail. You know we slip in a grasshopper. Whatever we need to tell the story of, big or small, we love them all.
Monni Böhm:Amazing. On this note again, again. That sounds like a good wrap-up point yeah, um, that was awesome. Joel, thanks for sharing your phenomenal and sometimes very gross stories with us.
Joel Sartore:You're welcome. You asked for it.
Monni Böhm:I know I asked for the gross stories love them so the spider monkey incident, I think I don't know, it might be on my website.
Joel Sartore:We we illustrated it with a series of my goodness of drawings that my wife did just kind of like colored pencil drawings to illustrate the points and um. And then there's a couple pictures of me at the end proving photographs proving it happened yes, and because when we got done, when I crawled out and my assistant rocio I said, did you film any of that? She said no, but it was amazing no, but I should have and it didn't last it didn't last long, it was.
Joel Sartore:You know, I was in there a minute. You know the whole thing from start to finish. It was bedlam. It was really bad, it was really bad and they, yeah, they yell and scream.
Joel Sartore:There was one exaggeration in it, the right. It all happened, except for one exaggeration, when I I got to the door where the nice monkey was and it leapt on the door, that's true, and it was screaming at me like it wasn't nice at all. But the exaggeration is that when that we zoom in on the mouth of that monkey in this cartoon and and he has tattooed I hate joel on the tops of his teeth I mean that'd be very specific.
Justin Birkhoff:If it was real, how would that monkey know to do that? How?
Joel Sartore:would he even know my name?
Justin Birkhoff:yeah, and where would he get his own gums? I mean, that's a skill. No, they were on his teeth how would you tattoo enamel?
Joel Sartore:it doesn't make much sense really, but it gets a laugh. It's more fun that way?
Justin Birkhoff:Yes, well, if we can find that, we will also link that story, because the spider monkey answer. I mean, how can you not?
Joel Sartore:It's not very serious. It's not very. Yeah, it's not about serious science there. Not everything needs to be about serious science.
Monni Böhm:Not everything has to be serious.
Justin Birkhoff:In fact, we thrive on levity. I can tell what gave it away. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. We appreciate the time Obviously from your very, very busy schedule, my pleasure.
Joel Sartore:This has been very cathartic for me. Excellent, we'll do it again next week. See you guys.
