How Animals and Humans Clash and Coexist in Yellowstone | Nat Geo Live

• For 20 years, my camera's led me to some pretty extraordinary places. I could have never imagined that I would be standing on the streets of a place like Pyongyang, North Korea, and 20 years later, I came back to the United States with my cameras, and it's been every bit as mind-blowing. (applause) NatGeo spent a year covering Yellowstone. They had a single topic issue this summer. There were many decorated National Geographic photographers out there, but the rest of them were inside the park showing the landscapes, the wildlife, the biology, the tourists, the glory of our public land.

My job was to stand outside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park because NatGeo knew it was just as important to tell the story of the people who live on the other side of the line and what it means to live adjacent to a national park. On my first day, I drove through Yellowstone National Park; this is what I saw. Welcome back to America, ground zero. So, I lived my life outside of the boundaries of the park. Little towns like Livingston, I photographed them in the same way that I photographed my life in North Korea and anywhere else. In the bars where I ate dinner, on main streets.

I started my own new Instagram series; I called this one Work Commute. Work Commute wasn't only to make all of the editors jealous that they were sitting in an office all day and this is where I was working. It was also that idea that we could take people out into the field. That a National Geographic story lasts for an entire year, so why not bring people along with you? I had another series #dogsinpickuptrucks. (laughter) But what National Geographic really wanted me to do in Yellowstone was tackle issues, and mainly they wanted me to look at the conflict and confluence between people and wildlife.

The first thing that I covered were bison. Bison have had a very dark history in our country. We once had 50, maybe 60 million of them roaming North America. We killed them down to just a handful, but it was also the moment when human beings looked after animals and the conservation movement was born, and they brought them back from extinction. Now, the core DNA... American Bison that we have today live inside Pelican Valley in Yellowstone National Park, but they only have room for four, maybe 5,000 of them, and every year they come out and cross the line and wander into our yards and into our highways.

The bison was named our national mammal this year, and yet in the west, in many places, it's still registered as livestock. Can you imagine the bald eagle as livestock, kept in a chicken coop? They're not that loved, actually, by a lot of people in the west because of... the proximity that they live to the parks. Who couldn't love this guy? He was being—this is a Yellowstone bison; he was being tagged and tested for a disease called Brucellosis. Many people don't love bison because they fear this disease and that it will transfer this disease to their cattle once they cross outside of Yellowstone, and this bison tested positive.

And this is how they dealt with it. Very quickly, execution style. So, they're looking for solutions: how to manage bison, how to deal with them, how to protect them, but also live with them. And one of the solutions is Native American hunting rights. As the bison cross over into our land outside of public land, they give a certain number of hunting licenses to the native peoples. I had the privilege of going with these men and watching them as they hunted this bison and ceremoniously removing its heart in a field.

And they've started a new program too where they, instead of killing them, they round them up, put them in these trucks, and ship them off to the Native American Reservations because native peoples have a direct connection to the bison. When this truck arrived in Fort Belknap in the north of Montana, they let out school; all the kids came, all the elders came, and people celebrated as they let them go and let them loose on their land again. I photographed elk. It's probably the animal that's maybe the pulse of Yellowstone. It's what the bears and the wolves eat. It's also what brings in millions of tourists every year. These beautiful animals that you can see them practically no other place.

But again, outside of the line, people see them in a very different way. There's almost a cult of hunting, and it's big business too. So, I tried to go right on the line that separates the park from the rest of the state. This line right behind the hunter, that's the actual boundary of Yellowstone National Park, and the hunters come here, put themselves right on the line, and wait for elk to come up over the hill. The elk know where that line is; it's amazing. When they cross, it's like they just saunter in home free. But when they don't, like this one on the right, the hunter shot him; he stood up, he struggled, trying to get to the line, and he shot him again; he slid right to the line, and the hunter said, "It's a good thing he didn't make it to the other side cause we wouldn't have been able to retrieve him legally."

This is not a hunter; this is a biologist darting a wolf for research purposes. Wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in the mid-1990s because they didn't believe that the ecosystem could be healthy without an alpha predator like the wolf, and they're loved inside the park. Tourists name them, they watch them with remote cameras from laptops in their homes; they have tattoos on their arms of wolves, and when they see them through a spotting scope, they break down in tears. It's quite amazing, but again outside of the park, it's a different story.

Ranchers fear them because they come onto their property, they eat their livestock, and actually, they just see them in many ways as demons, the big bad wolf. And these are not people who are used to doing things any other way than settling them in their own way. They told me, "We're used to living with wolves now, and we know that they're here to stay, but we don't like the federal government telling us what to do." But they're learning to live with wolves and bears, and they're learning to ranch and to live their lives differently.

They used to just send these sheep up into national forest land and let them graze for the season all alone, but now they go with them; they sleep every night out there with the sheep, and I did this too. I followed them all the way to the top of the Gravelly Mountains. The animal that's on most people's minds right now is grizzly bears. Grizzlies have been protected as an endangered species for something like 40 years, and maybe as a sign of their recovery, the numbers are greater; they're coming further down into lower lands; they're becoming a bit more habituated.

Now we find them in the front lawns eating apples out of our apple trees. This is Dusty; he's a bear trapper for the state of Montana. He's sort of like a dog catcher or like a beat cop. He goes around, he educates people how to protect their garbage, and how to protect bears by not allowing them to become habituated. But he also gets his 911 calls, "Hey, there's a bear on my roof again," and they go and they dart them, and they bring them back to the garage, and they sometimes euthanize them if the bear becomes too difficult to deal with. But usually, like this bear, they tag their ear, they brush their teeth, they give them inoculations, and then they drive them from Wyoming to the Montana border and they let them go on the other side.

And the bear catchers in Montana told me the same thing. They bring them into Wyoming, open the door, let 'em go into Wyoming. This man's name is Nick Patrick. He knows better than anyone what it means to live on that line, to live with the wild, to live with bears. He's a rancher from Wyoming. One day, he was walking in his yard with his dogs; his dogs start barking, and they ran off into the willow trees. He thought maybe they were chasing a raccoon, so he walked in behind them; he didn't have his bear spray, and he found himself suddenly caught between a huge sow grizzly bear and her two cubs.

Before he could do anything, the grizzly was on him. He said with one swipe, it took off his entire face. He fell to the ground; it mauled him; he played dead, and she let him go. As she was walking away, he reached into his pocket to see if he had something to protect himself; she turned and saw him. She was on him again; she mauled him, dragged him by his leg. She let him live. He walked back from the willow trees into his barn, and he found a shop rag, and he covered his face so that he could go and tell his wife and his children that he'd been injured. He didn't want them to see what had happened to him.

And he walked in the house and told them to, "Take me to the hospital." When we first started this project, we wanted to photograph Nick because Nick tells that story of living with wild better than anyone else. But he said he didn't want to be photographed then because he hadn't had the reconstructive surgery that you see in this picture. He hadn't been given this new prosthetic silicone nose, and he said, "I don't want to be photographed like this yet," and it wasn't because Nick is vain; it's because Nick said, "I don't want my face to tell the wrong story and scare people away."

Because Nick believes that we have to live with the wild, and Nick says that, "That mother was doing what any mother would do, protect her children." And Nick said, "I want my face to tell a different story; I want it to tell a story of how we should protect the land and we should protect the wildlife and that we have to learn to live among them." So, National Geographic spent this entire year, 2016, photographing national parks. This was the centennial of the creation of the park service. Every issue had a story about a national park, and I tried to go to as many as I could too now that I was back in America.

I took my children; we went to the Badlands; we went to the Everglades, and I hung around with these invasive python hunters, and I went to Yosemite. I got to go with President Obama to Yosemite National Park. He was there on Father's Day to tour the park with his family, but also to announce even more land and seas that he and our government decided to protect. With that announcement, he solidified his legacy as the best president that we've ever had for conservation, protecting more land and seas than any other before him.

I got the chance to walk through the forest with him—just me and a couple of cameramen—and at the end, he shook our hands, and I thanked him, and he said, "Hey, aren't you the guy who took all those pictures in North Korea?" (laughter) I said, "Yes," and I said, "What did you think?" And he said, "It's good; I think it was important we got to see something we don't normally see." And he started to walk away, and he turned around and he said, "Hey, just be careful over there; I don't want to have to come over there and rescue you and bring you back home." (laughter)

But I made it home, exactly 20 years from the time that I left. It was actually 4th of July, the first day that I came back. I went to my sister's house; she had a 4th of July party. Now that I'm home, I guess I kind of often feel like a stranger in a strange land after being away for so long, and so I notice and I photograph the things that maybe outsiders would notice. All the patriotism and the flags and the sugary diet that we have, and maybe I'm a little critical, but I also know that my sister made these, and so I also feel love, and I also feel like I'm happy to be home again.

This is my front yard, where I moved back to. This is the frozen lake outside of the house I'm living in. Those are my footsteps going out onto the lake and back to my yard. I had to go quite far out into the world for a long time to feel like I could answer that voice in my head and that I could find my purpose and that I could bring that purpose back intact and that I could notice all the little bits of beauty right here in my own country and in my own backyard.

And so maybe for most of you, you didn't have to quite go so far. You knew that from the beginning, but for me, I had to go a long way before I could come back home. So, I want to end by just thanking National Geographic because they brought me back home, and they're still sending me out there into the wild, so thank you very much. (applause)