Animal Life in the Forest Canopy - Meet the Expert | National Geographic

And welcome back to the channel! We are live yet again for our fifth Meet the Expert. Oh boy, what a journey we have been on! We've been down deep into the ocean, we've met with experts who study bears, we've been out in Hungary to see venomous snakes, we have been across the world chatting to fantastic, inspirational scientists and experts and conservationists from all over the world, our National Geographic fellows about their incredible research. And today is no different. I'm sad to say that today is the last of our Meet the Expert series, but we thought we'd go out with an absolute bang with our fantastic guest today, Kevin McLean, whom I'll introduce to you very shortly.

But before I do, I've talked about this before. I've talked about the mysteries of rainforests and how they're a full sensory experience. And if you're watching and you've been in the middle of a rainforest, you know that your eyes are often drawn high up into the canopy of those trees. It's a world that we know very little about. It's full of mystery; it's full of sounds. You may see a tree fall, you may see a blur moving from tree to tree, you may hear noises like howler monkeys. There's a lot that we don't know about that world up in the canopy, and that's where we are going today.

Now if you're new around here, hello! I'm Lizzy Daly; I'm a biologist and wildlife TV host here to bring you yet another fantastic live Q&A. And if you are new around here, if you know the drill, then I want to hear from you! Get your questions in to us live today into our fantastic guest Kevin McLean, who's going to answer all your fantastic tropical rainforest questions about the mysteries high up in the canopy. We want to hear from you—we want to hear what your favorite tree-dwelling species may be! So do get in touch throughout today's live.

Now, our guest today: so exciting! As a biologist, I get super excited about the idea that there's still so much on this planet that we don't know. There's still so much mystery out there, and it's Kevin's job to essentially bust that myth. Yeah, he's an ecologist; he essentially spends his life studying wildlife high up in the canopies of trees from across the world. He's been to Panama, he's been to the Ecuadorian Amazon, he's been to Borneo, and he has seen and tracked so many different species by using motion sensor cameras to capture new behaviors and new animals that we just don't know enough about. He really has tracked it all, from three-toed sloths to anteaters to flying squirrels. This is a man who knows so much about this strange and wonderful environment, and he's here with us live.

Hello, Kevin!

"Hey, how's it going?"

I tell you what, it's just got a lot better for me! I am amazed by your job. You know, as a scientist, you have this idea of what it's going to be like, and you literally live up to that expectation in your job. It's incredible!

"Yeah, yeah, it's pretty exciting. Thank you so much for having me! It's been really exciting to see what some of the other scientists have been up to as well, for sure."

And your job, I think it's fair to say, is very specialist but actually quite general. I'm going to go into a little bit about what you actually do with your cameras a bit later on. But I want to start with perhaps the most obvious place: living or breathing and researching in this environment that we really know little about. Why high up in the canopy of rainforest? What was it about these environments that inspired you?

"Man, gosh, that's a question that I definitely continued to ask myself as things got more and more inconvenient. But yeah, you know, I think like there in a lot of the research that is done, especially in remote places, we can be influenced by what we kind of have access to, what is more like easiest to get to. So places that are like difficult for us as people to access tend to have less information, less research, and it doesn't mean that they're less important or anything like that; it's just, you know, that's not where the effort is concentrated. So I sort of saw that there. At the time I was starting a lot of this research, there was a lot of new methods in terms of using these camera traps and how to count populations based on all those photos, but it was all on the ground. And I was really interested, you know, in rainforests in particular; the majority of mammal species spend at least part of their life up in the trees, whether they're foraging up there or sleeping up there. Some of them live their entire lives. A lot of those species are really important to the forest as a whole. So I just knew that there was a little bit of a gap in terms of what our knowledge was and wanted to sort of jump in there."

Yeah, and jump in there you really did! I mean, I rattled off a few of the places that you've worked: Panama and Borneo. What has been your favorite experience in the middle of a rainforest? Do you have a favorite? Is that unfair to ask?

"Oh man, gosh, that's a really tough question because, you know, like at sort of a really base level, just being up in the canopy is a very different experience, a very different view, literally, of a forest. We're so used to looking just looking up at everything and having everything looked down, and then you get, you know, like 50 meters up into a tree and all of a sudden the birds are flying below you and you're looking eye to eye at another animal you know at the next tree next to you. I think that the animals get as confused as anyone else that I'm up there, but it's definitely, you know, I—it's just a very, very special experience. It's not easy to get up there, but I think I always have this sort of reminder at the beginning of a new field project where the first time I get up into another tree, I like get up there and like, oh yeah, this is cool! This is why I'm doing this. It's really amazing. It's a part of the forest that one we don't spend a lot of time in, but also that, you know, there's just not a lot of people that get to have this view, and it's a really, really special experience just to be there."

Yeah! We actually got the most glorious picture on the screen.

"Yeah, it's a really—it’s a tough smile to love, I guess, but yeah. So this is a dusky leaf monkey. This is in Penang in Malaysia. And this is—they're smart animals. It's a monkey, a type of langur. This guy's just checking out the camera. The cameras themselves are not totally inconspicuous; they look like this. So, you know, it's like a hunk of plastic that wasn't there the day before and probably smells like me a little bit and so they come up and check it out. We just happened to catch this one kind of mugging for the camera a little bit. Very curious animals! More of those pictures later on because you have done a lot with camera traps, and obviously setting up this environment is a really important part of what you do."

But you mentioned a few things happening: no birds flying underneath you. If someone is watching and hasn't been into a rainforest, how can you convey what it's like to be in this environment and to really be up high in this mysterious part of the environment? How would you best describe it?

"Oh man, that's a good question. I mean I think part of it is like it takes so much work to get up there just from like, you know, getting your equipment up there and then hauling yourself up there. By the time you get up into the canopy, inevitably, you're just sort of catching your breath. It's kind of like that moment if you've ever, like, you know, hiked up a mountain or something like that. For at some point, like just before you get to the top, you're just so exhausted that all you're thinking about is just being tired, and then you finally get a chance to stop and you look around, and that's sort of what it feels like. That's sort of the best comparison I can make. For a long time you're just focusing on your well-being and then you stop and look around."

Right! And I love how you just kind of whisked off, "Oh yeah, you just go up a tree!" Everyone that's watching—I mean let's, for example, I was in Borneo last year; the tallest yellow meranti tree is the tallest at 330 feet—is it like 100 meters? Yeah, just enormous! Tell me the process of going into the rainforest and lugging up all that gear that can be what, 80 pounds in weight?

"Yeah, yeah, definitely! It's no—it's not exactly an easy process, that's for sure! And I think as I started doing this, I realized why there hadn't been so many people doing canopy research. So this is all the equipment. This isn't necessarily what I would bring up in one trip, but this is what I would bring into the field, like for an expedition of some kind. So, yeah, it starts off—I go out into the forest without any climbing gear at all, and I'm just looking for trees that will be sort of good for whatever project we're working on. Sometimes we're looking for fruiting trees, sometimes we're looking for trees that we know animals nest in. Other times we're just looking for trees we know they move through but they're not feeding in; it depends on what it is. You identify all those trees, and then you're looking at sort of the general health of that tree. You have to look for any rotting at the base or any branches that aren't looking so good, and you're making sure that the vegetation is really full on those trees because you're literally putting your life on all those branches. So I spend a lot of time just looking, looking at the general health of the tree, looking to see if there's wasp or bee nests or something that I might run into. All of that happens before I even bring a rope out."

And then from there, yeah, the way we get into the trees: I have a really long, tall slingshot. It's maybe like seven or eight feet tall, and there's like a little bean bag.

"Yeah, this is a friend of mine that was using it. There's a little sort of bean bag thing in the slingshot that's attached to a string that goes into that little box. And so we shoot that little bean bag, that weight bag, over a branch that gets the string over the branch, and then we can tie the rope to that string, and then we can pull the rope over. We'll either attach the rope at the top of the branch or we'll attach it back down on the ground depending on how tall the tree is, and then I can just climb up!"

How many shots—how many shots has it...?

"Oh gosh, I will always—at least a half day for shooting a line into the tree because I just never know. There have been times, very few where I get it in like, you know, two or three shots or something, but I've also spent three days trying to get into one tree that I knew I had to get into. So yeah, I mean also, you know, I like, I didn't—I don't know, I like I didn't use giant slingshots as a child, so I had to learn how to do this! I didn't have a lot of history of practice or anything. So when I first started doing it, I was bad at it, and so you just have to get better and better and keep practicing."

And yeah! All jokes aside, I mean you are in a dense environment as it is, and of course, you’ve got all those variables to deal with: animals in that environment and conditions, etc. So, it's a difficult job before you even begin, right?

"Really? Yeah, yeah! I mean, you know, most of the places that I've worked recently, we've had trails to sort of get to certain parts of the research site. But then at some point you'll see a tree sticking up above the rest, so then you have to get yourself to that tree, so you end up going off trail, you know, falling down hills and sliding in the mud and whatnot. And yeah, yeah, you just—it's very dense vegetation, so some of the challenge when you get to that tree is finding just a little hole in that vegetation that you can shoot the line through, and the lines just get stuck on everything. It's not an easy process. But I think, you know, I think untangling string at this point is now like a therapeutic exercise for me, if anything! So yeah, you just spend a lot of time arguing with string, essentially!"

So do you have any particular stories that really stand out for you? You know, a particular journey to find a certain tree or a tree that you've spent a lot of time in carrying out your research?

"Yeah, that's another good question, actually! You know what? The photo that you just showed of me up in that tree—I've climbed many, many, many trees at this point. I don't always remember all of them, but that one I definitely do because that was one of them where I spent half of the afternoon of one day, one entire day, and then the morning of another day trying to get that shot. It's really hard to tell from where this picture is taken, but it was a sort of large distance from the trunk of the tree, which makes shooting it a little bit harder. And then there was a small window that we had to get the weight bag through on that branch so that it wouldn't hit another branch above it and everything. It just took tons and tons and tons of shots. At some point you just get tired and frustrated, and you know, some choice words are used, and you just have to take a break and eat a sandwich or something and then come back to it. But yeah, it really tests your patience in a lot of ways for sure."

I can only imagine! What I like about these stories is it's the real side of sometimes being scientists, and it actually takes integrity and perseverance, and all of that comes before even setting up a camera trap, which is fabulous. I want to talk about that shortly, but before we do, once you're up in a tree, you're in that environment; there’s lots going on around you. What's the process then? How long are you in that tree for? Is there anything that happens to you? Like, where do you go to the bathroom? Tell me the basics!

"Oh goodness! Yeah, really just getting into the personal details of it! Yeah, no, I mean I try to not have to go to the bathroom in the tree at all! Actually, I don't think I've ever had to do that. But I just, you know, it really depends on what the tree is. So, yeah, in this photo you can see, like off to the right, there's a camera that is down that branch, and you can see my rope, the white rope, going off there. In this tree in particular, I not only had to go straight up, but I had to move laterally into the tree. So I had to shoot the line over that first branch, and then I had to toss that other weight bag over to the branch that the white rope is around now. So that process can take forever as well. It's sort of—it's weird. It's almost like playing some sort of weird carnival game where you're tossing the weight bag to get over the branch, and then you're just pulling on the string a bunch of times to get it to swing back to you in the right direction. So I don't know, like in a weird way those are some of the skills I developed the most while I was in grad school, which was not something I was really expecting."

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to wager any bets at this point!

"But I will say I'm pretty humble about most of my skills and knowledge, but I will say I'm pretty good at swinging a weight bag in a tree. So yeah, so you'd probably be the best person to take to a carnival, actually, as you just... [Laughter]"

Yeah! And then, again, you just talk so casually about some of these skills, but they're so necessary. Picking those correct lateral branches is integral to getting the right footage that you need! Right? So tell me more: how many camera traps would you set up in a tree, and what is it that you're trying to capture?

"Yeah, I mean, again it sort of depends on the project! I especially when I was first starting, you know it takes so much time to get up into that tree; I wanted all of that effort to be for something! So I would set up a whole bunch of cam—I would set up three or four cameras in a single tree, which then adds even more time because you have to—after you get into the center of the crown, you can kind of look around and see where a camera could go and where animals might be walking from one branch to the next. You can really see where certain branches connect to each other and where animals might be moving. You can spot those places, but it does take a long time. So I would put initially a bunch of cameras into a single tree, just because I was really nervous about not getting anything and like, you know, just sort of having nightmares about an animal moving through my tree and not actually going by my camera."

"But yeah, I think over time you sort of figure out the best places to put things—the places that are most realistic to actually get yourself and a camera to. Sometimes, you know, it's more important to have cameras in a bunch of different trees—have more cameras spread out throughout the forest rather than a concentration of cameras in a few trees."

And you mentioned earlier that sometimes you put them in fruiting trees or near nests. Would you ever put one, say, near an orangutan nest in Borneo?

"Oh goodness, I would not want to go near an orangutan's nest! But I do, you know, I am never purposely going anywhere that I know I'm going to encounter an animal in the tree. During the most of the species in the canopy are actually nocturnal; they're active at night. So there have definitely been plenty of trees I've been in where there were animals sleeping somewhere in the trunk or in a nest above me or something, but I'm trying to do my best to not disturb what is already there. I've not done a lot in terms of just like specifically monitoring one nest, but we are really—we're often looking more at sort of the population of species or the community of species that's coming through a certain point in the forest. So, yeah, I really sort of do my best not to disturb what's up there and leave it in the same condition that it was in."

And obviously, anyone that's been in the rainforest, I mean, you'd rarely see it happen anyway: someone being high canopy. But you guys, professionals, you know what you're doing, so it's so important to get in and out without any disturbance.

I have a question that's come in: "Is the tallest tree out of to... wow, suburb of Borneo Island was the question about that yellow meranti?"

"That is—that's a good question! You know, this is something that has continued to change, actually, also pretty recently. There are a few different research groups that have been identifying the tallest tropical trees in the world. The tallest trees in the world are in California, the giant redwoods, but the tallest tropical trees are these dipterocarp trees, which is what the person is asking about. And while I was in Borneo one year, they had just made an announcement, like a year prior, that they had found the tallest tropical tree in the world. They sent a team out to go and measure it, and then while I was there, someone else found another taller tropical tree! So then they had to send out their team, and so it—I actually haven't kept up on the news of it exactly, but in Denum Valley, wow, like there's a bun—there's a few different pockets of old growth forest that have huge, huge trees."

Absolutely! And for anyone watching that's interested in that, yeah, that story in itself is particularly interesting, and they go out in helicopters and do survey air surveys of those trees. And it's really down to identifying a tall tree, right, and then measuring it?

"Yeah! They can find them with—they use what's called lidar: like the laser version of radar. And so they can find potential candidate trees with that, and then they'll send a team on the ground to actually like get a tape measure and actually measure the whole thing in person—so that's a giant tape measure!"

So your camera traps are up now in these trees positioned perfectly. Tell us about some of the things you've seen. You must have captured some incredible things!

"Yeah, I mean, I think the really interesting thing is that, especially when I started, I think there's more groups and more researchers doing canopy camera trap work now, which is really great, but when I started, I just like anything I got was really exciting. Anything we got was something different—something new! Not necessarily a species we didn't know about or, you know, something new like a new species altogether, but it was, you know, you're capturing behavior; you're capturing, you know, interactions sometimes with species that we just don't see very often. And, yeah, I mean, this is like a huge, huge iguana that was living in one of the trees that I set up cameras in. It's funny because the cameras have an infrared motion sensor; usually it's something that is warm that is moving, and that's why they're meant for mammals, but this iguana actually it was sunning itself on a branch, so it got its body temperature was much warmer, and then it moved into the shade where the camera was so it had enough of a temperature differential between the environment that it set up the camera. So fantastic!"

Yeah! So, I mean, you do see a real variety of species. Is there a particular encounter or thing that you've— I should say thing—you've captured on a camera that's kind of really caught your attention or caught your eye or amazed you?

"Yeah! I think one of... well actually, when I was in Borneo, I was really excited because Southeast Asia in general is sort of the hot spot for squirrel and flying squirrel biodiversity, and I really like squirrels; I love flying squirrels! And I, you know, I had sort of like kind of just to some extent had decidedly gone to this part of the world just because I wanted to see so many of these squirrels! So this is a red giant squirrel. It kind of—it's, you know, again, there’s no size reference here, but they can get up to basically around the size of a house cat, essentially! This is the largest squirrel in the world. They have that membrane that goes from their wrist to their ankle that helps them glide, so they live in these super, super tall trees. And that's how they get around; they're nocturnal, they come out at night, and they'll come out of their nest and glide to the next tree and climb up to the top of that. They eat mostly leaves, so they're just gliding around the forest looking for young leaves that they can eat. They are incredible gliders! I was so lucky—we were just saying before we were on—I was so lucky to see a gliding flying squirrel, and it is the most spectacular thing you will ever see. This was, of course, at nighttime traveling from these giant trees from one to another, and that screenshot—so here we go, there's some more."

"Oh yeah! So this is actually in the same tree. I got photos of that giant flying squirrel, that giant red giant flying squirrel, and this is a pygmy flying squirrel, which is actually the smallest squirrel species in the world. They weigh, I think about 20 to 22 grams, which is like about the weight of a double A battery, if you can sort of imagine that! But they're really, really tiny; I was really excited to get one of these! You can see him landing over on the left, and then he kind of checks out the camera and takes off. I really wish that I’d gotten better photos of them, but yeah, I was really excited to get those! And the other thing that I didn’t realize until I actually saw some of these squirrels in real life and also did a little bit more, just sort of digging in literature is, you know, I always thought of flying squirrels as they leap, they glide, and then they just sort of end up where in the direction. So there’s a lot of importance on the direction they jump, but they can actually—they have muscles in that membrane so they can squeeze them on one side, squeeze them on the other; they can use their tail as a rudder, so they can actually really direct their trajectory as they're gliding. So they can go around trees, and as they come to the tree they're gonna land, they slow themselves down. They make sort of like a little bit of a j pattern, and then they have like a little thump on the bottom!"

Wow! We can learn so much from flying squirrels, let me tell you! But they're fabulous! But just that— I mean those pictures that you've shown us, there are very different species in one tree. I mean you talk about communities of species. What does something like that mean?

"Yeah, I mean, I think what's really interesting is, because I'm setting up a camera that's in one static position, you know, like you think of, I don't know, sometimes you think of like the habitat of an animal as like its territory, and they're defending it all the time. But the reality is like there are lots of species that are kind of overlapping in their territories and lots of individuals sometimes as well. And that's sort of what we think—we're talking about a community of different species. It may be different individuals of the same species that are utilizing a similar environment. In this case, they're, you know, those big trees that they're in. Sometimes they're looking for leaves to be eating in the big tree itself, but actually it's the structure that is really important for these flying squirrels, because it's a huge tree that sticks up above the rest of the forest, so it provides like a really great jumping point to get to the next. If you're going to rely on gliding, then you have to go from a higher place to a lower place, right? So that's why these giant lollipops of trees sticking up above the forest works so well for them."

Absolutely fantastic! We have some more questions coming in. What's your favorite animal that you've seen in a tree, Kevin?

"What's—yeah, also really, really tough! I mean, the thing is, there are a lot of species that I've seen on the cameras that, like from the photos that I have never seen in real life, just because, you know, I'm out there during the day, and, you know, they're mostly going by at night. I have spent the night in a tree before, but I didn't see a whole lot other than like lightning off in the distance. So, but yeah, I think my favorite animal that I have actually seen out in the tree was actually probably not even— not even a mammal, even though that's sort of what I focus on. I really loved seeing some of the hornbill species in Borneo because you see them again; you're like up really high. They are not necessarily landing in the trees that are even up at your level, so you're kind of watching them from above. They're landing on a perch and then, you know, passing food to each other. And what's really crazy is, when they're flying close to you, you can hear the—like, their ligaments and tendons moving their wings. They're actually—they're not like an owl that flies silently; they're like really noisy in their flight! But yeah, I don't know! The other one in Panama also is the Rothschild's porcupine, is a really favorite of mine— I don't know why."

Yeah? I don't know why I am drawn to porcupines, but I think to see these guys and see them, getting photos of them was really fun and not something I was expecting. I think the first site that I got photos of them in Panama, I didn't even know that they were in the area. Everyone else did; I just didn't know. But still..."

Yeah! And I guess for you, you have a completely different perspective on some of these species, which are strictly arboreal, completely tree-dwelling. And of course, having those moments with animals you wouldn't normally like the hornbills you talked about must just be fascinating!

Absolutely fascinating! Really great! We’ve got a question that's come in here: "What does a forest canopy mean? Is it multiple trees forming a canopy shape?"

"I've talked about canopy quite a lot, but can you help explain that a bit?"

"Yeah, yeah, no, that's a very valid question. You know, I think sometimes when we're when I'm talking about my work or other things, you lock in these words that maybe just aren't meaningful to other people necessarily. But when we talk about the canopy of a forest, we're talking about the layer of where one crown of a tree—the leafy part of the tree—meets the next. So if you were to sort of take—look at a forest like in a cross-section, like looking at it from the side, you'd see sort of the forest floor at the bottom, you'd see the understory, which is sort of where all the trunks are, and maybe there's a little bit of vegetation. And then at the tops of all these trees where the leaves meet each other, that's what we call the canopy."

Fantastic! There you go! I have to ask you about sweat-drinking bees. Tell me about that!

"Oh my gosh! Yeah! There are a lot of species, especially in the forest that, like, they are limited—like they're nutrient-limited, so they're always looking for salt or other nutrients that they need in their diet to make their bodies function. So sweat is something, you know, I am always—I’m just a very sweaty person! And so whenever I— I've often been climbing like this, and these are bees. They're actually stingless bees, which is good—they can't actually bite, which is why I'm looking a little bit nervous there! But I was just like so sweaty, and this whole group of bees found me, and they're just—it's like—you can't even see all of them that are on there. They went all the way across my back as well. But they, yeah, they were just there drinking my sweat and trying to, you know, replenish their salts! I don't know if you ever go for a really long run; you have to hydrate, but you also have to take in, you know, salts and electrolytes to keep that moisture, and that's all that they're doing—trying to get all the salt off my back!"

You don't look best pleased about it!

"I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s little moments like that in this environment that perhaps you would never think of! Oh my gosh, yeah, I’m sure you’ve got so many different stories about that! Have you—don’t mean to kind of feel damning but have you had any kind of scary moments? Because I think a lot of people watching will be thinking, 'Oh, hundreds of feet up in the sky in a very unfamiliar environment!'"

"Yeah, I mean the thing is in the grand scheme of things, I am actually like a pretty—like a risk-averse person, which is why I spend so much time evaluating the safety of a tree and testing things out. We do a bunch of tests on the rope before we climb, but at the end of the day, it is, you know, it's dangerous to go up there! Most of the trees I climb in, nobody else has climbed, so it's not like there's somebody else that's checked it out for you in advance! You just don’t really know! So yeah, I’ve definitely had times where I shot my line over, got my rope in, and then, you know, tested it. We do what's called a bounce test where I bounce on the rope first and then I get another person to bounce on the rope with me, and that combined weight—if it's holding both of us, then it should be okay for me. Sometimes you do all of that, and you get up into the tree and you hear— you hear a cracking, you hear something, and that is really—really sort of makes your blood go cold! But yeah! This was one of those times where I had done all the tests; I had examined this tree, and it wasn't even the branch that I was on—it was a branch that my rope had actually been leaning against that was not very healthy, and I hadn't noticed. I got maybe 10 or 12 feet up in the tree, and I heard a crack, and all of a sudden, I was only six feet up in the tree, and this branch was hanging just dangling right above me! So I had to—because it was dangling, it was kind of close to a trail, it was a little bit dangerous, so I ended up re-rigging my rope, climbing up the other side of the tree, and then breaking that branch the rest of the way and pushing it down on the forest floor so that it wouldn't fall on anyone else! But yeah, that's the branch that almost fell right on top of me."

Yeah! Scary, I’m sure! And I guess something that just comes with the job and why you need highly skilled people like yourselves—some of those skills—but they’re very important! Exactly! You know, actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I am now recalling that I climbed up the other side, and I was climbing up there, and I was about to move towards that branch. I put my hand on the trunk of the tree, and I happened to put my hand on top of a wasp nest! Oh, it was like out of a cartoon—like a stream of wasps coming out; they’re like swarming around my head, biting and stinging everything! So then I just closed my eyes and got out of the tree! Actually, like one of my climbing instructors that I worked with when I was first starting made us do all of our skills—like rigging, setting up our gear on the rope and climbing up and coming back down and everything—changing over our ropes. He made us do that all with our eyes closed; he made us tie our knots behind our back so that it was like really built into our muscle memory. And that was why, you know, I had—I couldn’t see; I had to close my eyes! My ears and my cheek were starting to swell already from the bites! And that's why you sort of prepare for the worst, because sometimes bad things can happen!"

Yeah, and also, to be clear, after that happened, I just sat on the tree on the trail and cried for a little while. It was rough!

"Oh no! I hope you got happy!"

It comes with the job! I'm sure there are big, big risks involved with what you do! Absolutely fascinating! Now, you’ve seen a lot. You've seen a lot with your camera traps; you've seen a lot yourself. You have to be fit, you have to be prepared, as I say, to have integrity. I've talked about you working with three-toed sloths before and sloths in general. What's this about you actually getting, goodness, caught up in a race with a sloth?

"Yeah! So the thing is, the thing you realize also is like, you know, we—I get all this equipment, I have the ropes, I have all this gear to sort of stabilize me and help me move in the tree, but at the end of the day, like I'm just, you know, I'm like not equipped physically to be up there, right? I don't—we don't have like the claws or the tails or anything like that to actually be up in that tree! And we think of sloths as being these like very, very slow animals, which I guess they sort of are, but at the end of the day, they're like much better, they're much better at being in a tree than I am! And so I was setting up a camera, and I was trying to get myself from like near the trunk to about five feet away to get to the right spot for the camera. And in the time I was trying to move like five feet in front of me, there was a sloth kind of like this one that had woken up in the tree next to me, it had moved into the tree that I was in, and then had moved on to the tree past me all in the time that I was trying to move like five feet in front of me! It was infuriating, but also just like, yeah, of course! He's good at this! That's why he can do that!"

I love just the comparison! Oh, I've been beaten by a sloth! It's fantastic! We've got another question here: "What's your least favorite animal you've seen in a tree?" I feel like you may have just touched on this from your negative experience, but is there one that particularly just continues to crop up?

"I don’t know, I don’t want to like animal shame any of the species that are up there, but I think the animals that I tend to have the most problems with are ants. And this is nothing against ants; they’re really amazing animals! Like there are so many different species, they're really amazing engineers up in the trees and down on the ground. And they also happen to be very good at defending the tree that they live in. Sometimes they actually have a symbiotic relationship with that tree, and since a lot of times I'm setting up trees in or setting up cameras in fruiting trees, like figs or something like that, a lot of times it means I'm running into ants that are trying to defend that tree. And so those are like, you know, like ants—sometimes they're like really, really big ones that just sort of swarm you. Other times it's little ones that will sort of get everywhere that you can imagine and just like pulling them out of my shirt and everywhere else. But there's like—and in the Amazon, they have these bullet ants which have—I've encountered them a couple of times—it's really, really painful to get bit by them! So yeah, I think I—again, I have nothing against ants, like in my day-to-day life, but I will say the most sort of adversarial relationship I've had with an animal has been ants, without a doubt!"

I understand that entirely! There's been some amazing pictures you've shown us! You mentioned that you haven't necessarily had, you know, hundreds of firsts, but you have had some pretty rare species, right? Can you tell us more about some of the more rare ones that you suspect?

"Yeah, what—so one of the species that I was really, really excited about—it's not—there's—it's called a bushy-tailed possum, and it's just, you know, like it's not like it's a—it's not necessarily like a critically endangered species or not on the endangered species list, like you would think. It's not—not even one that, you know, it shows up in all parts of the Amazon actually has a pretty big range, but it's just one that it's small; it's only out at night and just I hadn't really shown up on any other wildlife surveys that had been done in the area I was working in. So it was just like really, really special to like capture photos of this animal alive out in the forest. You know, I looked through other sort of scientific records of this species, and the other records were at times when they had been logging in a forest and they found one of these species, and then they'd, you know, killed it and sent it to a museum and have that specimen. But like there's just very few records of people seeing them alive out in the forest or just even in this case—like having photographic evidence of them. They're pretty—just very rare to see or document. And so it was really special to be able to capture, you know, I found or, in different cameras, I think we collected maybe 60 or 70 photos of them, and it's just, you know, like again, like I said, it's not like we're finding a new species; it's not like there's, you know, something we thought was extinct is coming back or anything like that, but it is really special to just know that you're adding an important record of a species that we don't really know much about because we almost never see it. And that's sort of like the only way we can learn anything more about animals is to find them!"

And it's super exciting and super valuable for that exact reason! What would you like the people watching to learn from your work and what you do?

"You know, I think one of the main sort of lessons of doing all of this is kind of what we touched on at the beginning: our understanding of a lot of ecosystems, a lot of species, is really biased by our own viewpoint. We are ground-dwelling animals ourselves, so we know a lot more about the forest floor, or that's part of why the deep sea is so mysterious to us as well because it's really hard for us to get down there! And so, but there's really interesting life, there’s a lot of really interesting processes that go on. The canopy itself is really, really important! I mean, it’s where most of the photosynthesis in the forest happens, and, you know, there's just like a lot of things going on. And sort of taking this approach of recognizing that places are maybe inconvenient to get to, but may have sort of some payoff in spending time learning about them—that's sort of been the biggest lesson. You know, for me at least, like some of the things that have been most impactful and most interesting and most meaningful for me came at places that were really, really hard to access! And yeah, it takes effort to find new things, and kind of I mean, reading about what you've done, it’s incredible! You've really been to so many amazing regions, but actually yourself as a National Geographic fellow in your project with camera traps—that started that curiosity, wasn't it? Like what can we learn from these environments?"

"Yeah, yeah, absolutely! You know, I think the whole idea of actually putting cameras up in the tree was from, you know, I was working on a survey project on the ground. We were setting up all these cameras and had spent a ton of time getting out to one site where we knew we had to set the camera up, and we got it running, and then an anteater climbed right over the camera we had just set up! And so, you know, like it's wonderful to see animals, but also really infuriating to know that, like, just the way we were going about this project that we were never gonna catch that animal. And so it got me thinking more and more about like what—this is a three-dimensional environment! We should be surveying it in three dimensions, you know?"

Absolutely! Oh, the coolest job ever! Right, we have a few more questions coming in! I can't believe this has gone so quickly! It’s been incredible! Have you ever fallen from a tree or got injured?

"Yeah, that's another good question. I very thankfully have not had a bad fall! You know, I think like I said I've had experiences where something has snapped or broken, and I've dropped a little bit, but I haven't fallen all the way to the ground! But I do, you know, in meeting other climbers and other canopy researchers, many of them have had really sort of harrowing experiences, and, you know, it's something—and these are all people that are great climbers, probably much better than I am, but you just never quite know. And it's something that's nerve-wracking! You do everything you can to be safe about it!"

But, yeah, I think that's—I’ve been very fortunate!

Absolutely! And I think close calls is enough, Kevin, if you ask me!

"Really interesting question! Do you ever use drones to get a look through the canopy? For me, this is interesting. I've spoken to somebody recently who does surveys of orangutan nests with drones. Have you ever used drones in the rainforest?"

"Yeah, yeah! So, I don't fly drones myself at all! But I have been working on a project before where we were flying a drone over to sort of do some surveys of other primate species. This is—yeah, this is a drone shot that another researcher who happened to have a drone took some photos and some video of me up in the trees. It is a tree, it's huge! But I, yeah, I don’t—there's a lot of potential for using drones up in the trees! It's not something that I have done necessarily, but, yeah, I think there's some really interesting work that's been done with them."

Where was that clip taken?

"That was in Yasuni National Park in Ecuador! So that’s a big seba tree that was—you can see it sticking up above the rest of the forest! We actually—we got all the way up there and there were orchids up there that were just sort of like a field of orchids on one of these huge branches that all smelled like vanilla because the vanilla bean that we use comes from a type of orchid. These weren’t like the vanilla orchids, but they’re something related, so it was just so crazy to get all the way up there, and it like smells like cookies or ice cream at the top of this!"

"Incredible!"

Another question, great questions coming in everyone! Thank you for sending them in! Do you see a lot of effects of climate change in the rainforest? And it's kind of come at a good time because you mentioned the orchids in Ecuador and it’s my understanding that they’ve got a high amount of endemism, right? So the conditions they live in are limited to those conditions being correct. And we're seeing climate change change this. Have you seen that up in the canopies in Ecuador or any of the places you've studied?

"Yeah, I mean I think that exactly what you're saying about the orchids is, I mean, it's true of a lot of different species, especially in tropical forests, that where they are, are sort of in a—like living at sort of the limits of their tolerance in different ways and everything like that! So as their environment around them shifts and changes, their ability, like in an evolutionary time scale, they haven't had to adapt to things like that because in some of these places the conditions have been so constant for, you know, centuries and centuries. So it's things like that; you know, small changes have a big effect on some species! There are certainly some species that are able to move or able to adapt, but others that just really aren't equipped for it! Or if they are going to adapt, we don't really know how because we haven't seen it happen before! So there's just—there's a lot that we don't know! And then we—there's also some species that we know are really, really affected by changes in their environment."

So absolutely! Fantastic answer to a really fantastic question! And what responsibility do we hold as humans for the conservation of nature?

"What a question! It’ll be the last one we can fit in today, but yeah! I think, yeah, I mean there's so many good answers to this question! I think one of the things that comes to mind for me is that, like, you know, nature doesn't exist just for us to look at it! We actually—we get a lot of benefits from nature being around natural habitats and species and environments being around, you know, the—there are, you know, the filtration of the water that a lot of forests can provide and providing oxygen, and there's all sorts of things that—that service we call the ecosystem services that forests and other natural environments provide! So it's not that just that it's like we—we shouldn't just think of them as like ornaments for us to look at; they’re actually playing a really integral part of our lives! And if we lose those functions, then we have to figure out another way to do it that’s not just being done automatically in the environment."

Absolutely! Fantastic answer! And I'm always amazed, you know, you've worked in biodiversity hotspots! I’m always amazed by the density of wildlife that we have in these particular habitats. And often, you know, if you're sat—if I'm sat here in the UK, you know, you may feel slightly disconnected from an area like Ecuador, but we're all connected, right? And I'm sure you've seen that on a large scale with all your travels!

"Oh yeah, absolutely! And I think, you know, seeing sort of the connection between forests in, you know, other places that I've worked to the communities that surround them, you know, it makes it even more clear how—when I come back home, I live in California—we think about our water resources a lot here! You know, it really reminds you that we are really like, even here in California, we're also very connected to the natural environments around us! We depend on, you know, how much snowfall we get in the mountains every year to fill up our reservoirs! There's so much about how we live our lives no matter where you are in the world that really relies on having a healthy, healthy environment and surroundings."

I think that's a lovely message to finish on! What a fantastic—guys, absolutely flown by! I have loved—I could talk to you for hours and hours! Kevin, thank you ever so much for coming on live!

"Thank you so much! It's been a real joy hearing tales from trees hundreds of feet high! And I'm sure everyone will be following on with your next adventures when and if they can continue! Any last things you'd like to add before we sign off?"

"No, just, you know, I'm glad that you've been able to do this! It's been really fun to see what the other scientists have been working on! Some of them are familiar; some are people new to me! So it's been really, really amazing to just, you know, get a chance to feel like I’m connecting with other researchers around!"

Absolutely! And we certainly finished on a fantastic speaker! So, Kevin, thank you so much for joining us! And everyone, with their amazing questions today and throughout the whole of the series, a massive thank you for tuning in live! You know, getting the opportunity to connect with some fantastic people carrying out dedicating their lives to conservation work and work within the scientific field from across the world! It’s been an absolute pleasure to be part of the series, an absolute pleasure to talk to Kevin McLean, who is the new tree climber fan for me! I'm going to be following his work from here on out, up every single tube from forever from here on! Massive thank you all for watching! This has been a joy! Meet the Expert Series! I've been your host, Lizzie Daly, and hopefully, we'll see you around soon here on the channel! Bye!