Photographing Animal Migrations, the Heartbeat of Yellowstone | Nat Geo Live

Joe: My goal with this project was to make five or ten really beautiful pictures. Essentially, giving a voice to these animals, a visual voice. And it was this picture right here that I think gets at the essence of this migration. She is on the move.

(audience applause)

Arthur: Yellowstone was created 144 years ago. And it was created, originally to protect these incredible geological wonders. The geysers, the canyons, the waterfalls, the hotsprings. But, since then we've come to value Yellowstone just as much for its incredible ecology. These large mammals, in particular that roam wildly across the landscape. They're now virtually synonymous with the word, "Yellowstone." But, at the same time, a look back at these ancient sites in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem suggests another important untold story. And that's what we're here to talk to you about tonight.

Joe: This right here is a drawing of an elk made thousands of years ago by Native Americans at a site called Legend Rock south of the town of Cody, Wyoming. There's over 300 petroglyphs at this site. And most of which are the hoofed animals: the pronghorn, the elk, the deer, the moose, the sheep. And some of the tribes didn't call it "Yellowstone", after the rocks. They actually called it "Elk River" after these hoofed animals. They knew something that has taken us a long time to figure out. And it's these animals that Arthur and I have been focusing on for about a decade.

For me, this journey started on the great plains in South Dakota where I grew up. And it was those geese right there that really piqued my interest in migration. Fast forward to my early 20s, there's a pronghorn migration that had just been mapped. There were over 400 pronghorn that were moving about 100 miles from the Upper Green River Basin into Grand Teton National Park. So of course, I was interested. I got on my computer and Googled it. You know, pronghorn migration. I wanted to see what it looked like. Well, it hadn't been photographed.

So, I thought, "Wow, this is-- this might be my chance to be a photographer. Or at least to act like a photographer." And I applied for a grant so I could follow this migration. Make the first photographs of it. And I was awarded $3,000 bucks and I was set. So...

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So, for two years I lived in the back of my pick up. And my goal was to show the beauty of this migration. Show people what it looked like. What it was like to be a migrating animal. I started to get some of the first photographs of pronghorn migration, showing them in places where they can't see far, where they can't run fast. This picture right here, is from mid-January and they were stopped by deep snow.

And it was around this time that I realized that "Wow, if I'm there, the pronghorn aren't. And I need to start using camera traps." And it was a way for me to document it without disturbing them. This migration corridor, there's evidence they've been doing this for 6,000 years. And I had to figure out exactly the trails that they were using. You know, down to a couple feet.

So, that was backpacking hundreds of miles trying to figure out where I was gonna put my camera traps. So, I spent most of my time putting cameras at river crossings and deep snow. That type of thing. This is a pronghorn buck that didn't make it. For me, migration equals wildness. And I think this photograph gets at that.

My goal with this project was to make five or ten really beautiful pictures. Essentially, giving a voice to these animals, a visual voice. And over the course of those two years I felt like I got that done. And it was this picture right here that really opened that up for me. The shadow on the rock, the passing storm. That entire two years was worth this single moment in time. She is on the move.

And so, during that two years, I was realizing that we're having an impact and this needs to be documented. So, the housing developments, the fences that are associated with them. They'd burn up energy, every time they have to cross something like a fence. And some of them don't make it.

This fence has been retrofitted, since that picture was made. This is a famous place called Trapper's Point in 2008. And this is the most dangerous place along this pronghorn migration corridor. There's over a hundred collisions every year. It's a dangerous place for both, people and for wildlife.

But in 2012, the Wyoming Department of Transportation completed the first pronghorn wildlife overpass. This group of pronghorn right here is the first group to cross it in 2012. You can see 120 pronghorn...

(audience applause)

And then you can see, one Mule Deer right there that thinks it's a pronghorn.

(laughs)

(audience laughter)

And I'd like to think that I had some small part in getting that done. And that's really when I started to believe in the power of conservation photography. And luckily, out of the blue, I get a call from Hall Sawyer who is a researcher. Who is the first guy to study the pronghorn migration corridor in the late 90s.

And he called me up and said "Joe, I just made a discovery on these Mule Deer. I collared a small group of Mule Deer. He thought they were resident deer and to his surprise they actually moved a 150 miles to the north." Essentially linking Southern Wyoming to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. This is an incredible discovery.

He said, "Why don't you come back and photograph it?" So I said, "Well, sure. The..."

(audience laughter)

And the thing I realized with these deer is that the pronghorn was just the tip of the iceberg. There was so much more potential in this world of migration. Of course, it's longer than the pronghorn corridor. So of course, they're crossing highways, over 100 fences. And some of them don't make it.

So, during that whole time I kept hearing about this guy doing elk migration work and studying elk and wolf interaction up in Cody. I heard that even the game wardens in the Cody office were calling him the "Elk hippie."

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And out of the blue, he called me and he said "Hey Joe, do you want to do a project on elk migration?" And it brought us to right here.

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Arthur: So, I'm sure most of you know this. But, it doesn't take much in Wyoming to get called a hippie.

(audience laughter)

I had never seen a wolf or an elk. When I started this work I-- actually took me a long time to admit that. 'Cause, you know, showing up in Cody, Wyoming and saying "I'm here to help with your wolves and elk but I've never seen them" is... not a good thing.

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You tell them that after you get the job.

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And so, one of the things I learned is why these animals migrate. This is a very important thing. Why do they migrate, is to get fresh green grass. Grass is hard to digest, you want the fresh green stuff. And it stays green longer, up in the high mountains.

And so, this is the only chart you will see in this entire talk. But, it's a very important one. And what you're seeing on the bottom on the X-axis is the number of days those animals are off of the peak green. And so, as you go to the left, they get to be fatter. And there's a lot of fat involved here. We're going from ten percent all the way up to 20 percent body fat.

One of the first things to notice is if they're resident and blue if they don't migrate, they don't get as fat. If they're migratory, they get fat. And so, what does that fat mean? It means calves, it means productivity. This is what allows the wolf to recover in the Greater Yellowstone.

This is what sustains that creature. Allows us to sustain... Recovery of grizzly bears. Wildlife watching and tourism, these migratory ungulates by sustaining all of this are a huge part of that economy. There is an enormous economy for the communities outside the Greater Yellowstone.

When these animals are out there of hunting whether it be for meat or for trophies. And that feeds enormously in tens and tens of millions of dollars annually into these communities. So these migrations are really important.

And so, these barriers that Joe introduced you to like these fences. These are things that constrain the ability of these animals to gain that fat. And so that made me want to know about it. My equivalent of wanting to Google the pronghorn and not finding pictures, was wanting to see a map of it. And there wasn't one that used the new technologies.

And so, my part of this work was to set about doing that. And so, we want to show you the Cody herd and take you on that journey that we took to understand and document this migration. This is a population of about 6,000 elk. When there are enormous groups, out on the foothills and often on these private lands.

And these private lands are managed for many different uses as well as adjacent public lands. And so, there are some conflicts here for these wildlife. Whether it be, a risk of disease that they pose to livestock or developments like residential and energy developments that impact the habitats of these wintering animals.

Joe: So, as we move from the ranches up into the mountains twelve thousand feet peaks and these elk are going over the top of them. So, my job is to show what that looks like. And so, here's one of our first flights, actually. This is from a helicopter just showing how truly incredible these elk are, these mountain elk.

Arthur: This is at 11,500 feet and you can see the lead cow in this group of 12 is trying to figure out where they took a wrong turn.

(audience laughter)

Joe: So, right here in the middle, there's eight elk. That just gives you an idea of the scale of some of the mountains that these elk are going up. So, my job is to get a camera within two feet of those elk.

So here, we're gonna walk on that same path and try to figure out where these trails really are. As you can see in this video there's actually a cut in the rock that these elk have cut over the thousands of years, they've been on this trail.

Arthur: I work on these animals with these collars from a distance... a lot of the time, and one of the things I wanted to do just experience the same migration myself. And so, that's what we did.

Joe: So, showing these elk on these high mountain passes. The only problem is, there's a lot of bears on these high mountain passes as well. So, a lot of my work was repairing cameras that were pushed down and demolished by bear cubs, like these guys.

So, here's Arthur and I at that last spot. elk calf that's only a couple of weeks old and then she shows up.

(audience laughter)

(bear growling)

Joe: That's not a good thing. But, with months of work and years of work on this project I started to get some video footage that actually captured you know, the numbers that these elk are moving in. I mean, these are hundreds of elk moving over one pass together. This is almost 12,000 feet.

So, as we move from the mountain passes down to the river crossing. The south fork of the Shoshone river. It's a place I spent a lot of time at. This is a river that's raging with snowmelt. Super cold water.

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Arthur: So, the next part of this migration, the challenge is to get up into the high country where these elk spend the summer. And it's very distant and hard to get to and so you cannot do this without people who know this landscape intimately and have been in it since they were kids.

This is the place where the snow and the rain and the sun come together to make the grass that feeds this creature and feeds all this abundance. And so that's what we encounter and spend time with up in that high country, is these great big summering groups of elk.

What I set out to do in the course of this work was to create this map, a fuller picture of the elk migrations of the Greater Yellowstone. And I want to show you a completed product from that effort.

All these herds, making that movement from winter ranges in outlying areas of the system up into the heart of it. So what I see here is the veins and arteries of this landscape.

What you can imagine as you think of these animals moving in and out and in and back out, year after year is the pulse of this landscape.

So, for me as a photographer, how do you show that pulse or that heartbeat of a system in a photograph? I found this spot early in 2014. This like, ten foot by ten foot chunk of dirt I knew all the elk cross through.

And I worked it hard in 2014 and went back in 2015 and was gifted with an amazing picture. And that one picture took 375 miles on horseback two hundred and forty days that that camera was out there.

And I got one split second, this picture right here that I think gets at the essence of this migration. That calf is learning the migration for the first time. It's only a couple of weeks old and I feel like this picture is worth this entire project for me. Yeah. So.

(audience applause)