How queer identity shapes Nat Geo Explorers | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

Foreign Hi, I'm Dominique Hildebrand. I'm a photo editor here at National Geographic, and I'm a co-lead of our LGBTQ Employee Resource Group. To celebrate Pride, we're doing something special, and overheard we're handing the mic over to two National Geographic explorers who really love nature. I'm not going to say that I hug trees, but sometimes I just like to be embedded in nature.

So yeah, if you were going to hug trees, nobody here would chat you. National Geographic, I feel like there's a lot of tree huggers in the building. It's not you. Today, we're meeting Rudiger Ortiz Alvarez. My pronouns are he/him; most people call me Rudy. I'm a biologist and a doctor in ecology based in Spain. And Christine Wilkinson. I am a postdoc at UC Berkeley and at the California Academy of Sciences; my pronouns are she/they. I use social ecological frameworks to understand the interactions between people and wildlife and to share that science through story.

Rudy and Christine have totally different research interests. Rudy is a microbiologist who also records soundscapes in a fascinating rainforest in the Canary Islands, and Christine studies large carnivores, including spotted hyenas in Kenya and coyotes in California. They're each working toward a deeper understanding of how nature and humans interact.

Rudy and Christine are also both members of the National Geographic queer and allies Explorer group. We'll learn more about their research and how their identity makes them the scientists they are today. A lot of us who may have come from disadvantaged backgrounds or backgrounds where we weren't accepted by our families because of some part of our identity, queer or otherwise, basically built our relationships with nature because we were escaping that, and we ended up becoming these maybe protectors of the Earth because of our identity and because of our relationship with that.

This is overheard at National Geographic, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big weird beautiful world. Coming up, we'll celebrate Pride, learn how studying hyenas can lead you to drive around with 100 pounds of rotting meat on a sweltering day, and hear a unique whistling language that shows how humans and nature are constantly adapting to each other.

Rudy and Christine will take it away after the break. First, fuel your curiosity with a free one-month trial subscription to National Geographic Premium. You'll have unlimited access on any device, anywhere, ad-free, with their app that lets you download stories to read offline. Explore every page ever published with a century of digital archives at your fingertips. Check it all out for free at natgeo.com/exploremore. Thank you!

So Christine, I've seen your TikTok and your Instagram videos many times. You have this amazing series called Queers Natural. I love it! But could you tell me a little bit more about the series? What is the broad scope? What is it about?

Queers Natural started in Pride 2022, where I actually attempted to make a video every day of Pride 2022, an absurd endeavor to try and highlight homosexuality and sort of gender bending in the animal kingdom. Happy Pride Month, y'all! There are estimated to be over 1,000 species who engage in same-sex coupling or whose sex roles aren't exactly what you learned about in basic biology. For Pride Month, let's highlight these queer animals and talk about how being queer is actually natural.

How did you get the idea for this? How did you get the idea for Queers Natural?

Yeah, so I come from a deeply religious and homophobic family, and the folks in sort of those realms often say that being queer or gay or anything like that is an unnatural way of being. But the animal kingdom has shown us that there are at least a thousand, if not more, animal species that exhibit some form of queerness. So the idea behind Queers is Natural is to show that queer is natural, it's all around us, and just because we haven't studied it in Western science, mainly because Western science was created by cis white guys, it doesn't mean that it's not right there.

Yeah, it's interesting how embedded it is in society, right? Like, "Oh, but these things are not natural; we are not humans; we are not supposed to do these things." And it's like, "Okay, it's everywhere!" Literally, we just need to learn about it.

Right? When was the moment where you first learned that this behavior suggested that? When was that "aha" moment, like, "Whoa, this is a thing, and it can really, really be tied to my identity"?

It's a good question. I'm not sure if I had an "aha" moment, but it was, you know, I've done a lot of work with spotted hyenas, which are a very gender-bending sort of animal and kind of defy what we know about most social large mammals, which is that the females are a lot larger than the males, and they dominate the males, and they kind of make all the decisions.

And I think that along with the hyenas and many of the other animals that I've worked with, don't kind of fit into these neat, clean boxes, right?

Yeah, that's right. So I've been wanting to say something to my family that they cannot refute, and it turned into Queers Natural.

Your handle on social media is Scrappy Naturalist. What does it mean? I'm Spanish; I sometimes don't get the full thing, so can you tell me a little bit more about it?

Don't worry, I think that English speakers also might not know what I mean, so it's fine. So I grew up in Queens, New York, and when I was a little kid, I basically would be watching nature shows a lot: you know, Jeff Corwin and Steve Irwin and all those guys on TV who are all white dudes, right? And I was like, "How can I be like them? I don’t know how because I'm not that."

But I would run around Queens, and I'd try to follow cockroaches and cicadas and pigeons and squirrels and talk about them as if I had my own show.

That's amazing!

And come to the dinner table with, like, cicadas plastered to my shirt, which my mom hated. So even since then, I always wanted to make a TV show called The Scrappy Naturalist, where someone who maybe was unconventional was running around kind of talking about and exploring the animals that are right in our backyards that might be misunderstood or undervalued.

I love this! I hope you eventually do this show!

Like, that's the plan!

That's the plan. I hope so too.

So let's talk a little bit more about your fieldwork. You said you have this project involving hyenas in Kenya. So what attracted you to hyenas in the first place?

Yeah, so I had done a lot of work on human-wildlife conflicts, so the negative interactions between people and wildlife in East Africa starting in 2010. And I started to realize that a lot of the work that was being done on carnivore conflict where I worked in East Africa was on animals like lions and leopards, so like the big pretty kitties, you know?

But then anecdotally, people were saying spotted hyenas are actually doing a lot more damage for us, and then nobody was studying how they were interacting with people. So my thought was how can I more fully understand what this apex predator that no one seems to want to study, how it's actually adapting to and surviving in landscapes that are highly dominated by people, just because folks hadn't really done that before?

They look amazing; like they can do many things, and they are like survivor animals, right?

Yeah, they're amazing, and they're like female-led, girl power! And then we also do GPS tracking, so we'll capture the hyenas and put GPS collars on them.

Okay, so we have finished processing number 16 26. and we're about to let her recover, and she looks pretty healthy; she doesn't really have any parasites or anything, her teeth look good, and she has had cubs since we last saw her. We colored her when she was... I hadn't had any cubs before, so very exciting morning for us.

And we have in one block boss is described working with a pile of raw meat on a car called a meat mobile. Can't you tell me more about that?

When I was out in the field in Kenya last year, I was trying to take GPS collars off of the spotted hyenas because that's the ethical thing to do, and the collars were going to run out of battery. I was fortunate, or unfortunate, to be gifted, as a vegetarian by the way or a pescetarian, hundreds of pounds of rotting cow meat to be able to tie securely to trees and shrubs to call the hyenas in and get them to stick around a bit longer and find the one with the collar, dart it, get the collar off, but the problem is it's not like we have a place to store the meat.

Yeah, and it was like 120 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know what that is in Celsius.

No worries, it's high!

Every day, it was a big drought, and so my friend Simon graciously offered me his car, which is a lot bigger than mine to be able to store all of the meat in. So basically, the de-collaring operation was four or five days long, and just even by like the second hour of the first day, we had like flies forming on the meat, and it smelled exactly as you might imagine!

Oh my God!

And by the last day, we had all sorts of ecosystem back there, and you know life finds a way. The worst part was that because of the drought, there was like an enormous amount of dust everywhere, so we would close the windows a lot. But it was really great for capturing the hyenas, yeah!

You look basically most of your fieldwork in Kenya right but you're basing in California? Like, California doesn't have native hyenas, but it does have coyotes. So, critics are hyenas are both animals that had a bad reputation like we've been discussing. So is it tough to make other people care about these two animals, these less liked ones?

Absolutely! So something about misunderstood animals or vilified animals like coyotes and hyenas is that many of them, if not most, are misunderstood because they are generalists and they can adapt to the various things that we humans throw at them.

And in so doing, they kind of stick around and persist alongside us and then get into things that piss us off. And if you just like, you know, anything from rats to cockroaches to, you know, whatever, those are all things that have managed to make it work despite what people are doing, and that pisses us off.

And so it's really, really tough when not only maybe some things are happening, like, you know, spotted hyenas arguing livestock sometimes or coyotes are occasionally getting into your trash or eating your dog, right? Like, things are happening.

But also because people have grown up hearing all of these stories about these animals that are deeply embedded in their values and their perceptions about how those animals work on the landscape and how they should be treated.

And so getting it at the root of the issue really takes getting into people's kind of hearts and minds and values and listening to what they're experiencing and combining that with education.

What do you want the people to understand actually about these animals? What is their takeaway that you would say, "Hey, you need to know this," so animals that have a bad reputation might be, "Well, I understand them better now, so I don't know, may I may change my relationship with them?"

I think that there are a few things. So a lot of the stories that people are taught about these animals are related with myths, right? So things like people often think coyotes are purposely teasing their dog to lure their dog in to be attacked. That is not what's happening, right?

If you get some basic understandings of behavior of coyotes and hyenas, you can see like, "Oh actually, like they're protecting the den," or "Coyotes are playful and they are just trying to play, and don't let your dog do that,” but like, they're not trying to lure; they're not doing some trickster thing, right? But those are woven together with the myths around the animals.

The other thing I think is really important to help people understand is that these animals can be benefiting them. You know, for instance, coyotes are out in the cities eating rodents that we consider to be pests, which I have a huge problem with that word, "pest." It's another value-laden word!

But you know, some of these are disease vectors, right? Like rats are disease vectors, and coyotes eat them. So just kind of showing that a lot of the things about how they can adapt to us, like the ways that they kind of piss us off because they've adapted to us and stuck around, are actually rooted in really cool behavioral traits and adaptations that they have.

Hey Rudy!

Hi Christine!

Hi again! So let’s start! I love Twitter; I’m ashamed to say so. I want to start with something that I saw on your Twitter. I’m just going to show you a tweet from you, and can you just translate it for us after you read it in Spanish?

So this was just, I was a little bit tired that day, so what I wrote was, "The next day, I escaped the center of Madrid. I'm about to just get dirt in my skin, with dirt from the countryside. Maybe it's a little bit drastic, but it's Friday. I'm impulsive, and I need little forests!"

And to do that, I was sharing because this is not random. This was a tweet that was discussing the biodiversity in urban soils versus forest soils. So the microbes that we have in the skin and within ourselves, the microbiome, is better when we are in a natural environment like forests and stuff.

So that was like, "I need to get out of this city, and I need to go to the forest and just, you know, cover myself in there."

Cover myself in there!

Yes, exactly! That is awesome! That was a tweet!

Okay, so did you go and cover yourself in forests? Let's look at your follow-up tweet!

Yeah! The following two say, "I was not bluffing!" And it's basically me laying down on the floor in my hometown. My hometown is like one hour away from Madrid; it's near the mountains, and I always go there to relax, you know, and clear my mind.

And I love that you follow through!

I totally would have joined you, actually, by the way!

So welcome! Can you just explain a little bit about your connection to nature? It seems like, like what you just said, you do that kind of often.

Yeah, well, I mean, I was born in a town near the mountains in Madrid. As I said, only 10 minutes away from my house, I have this great forest and this great pine tree area that I always loved to go. When I was a kid, I used to go there with my mother and just see amphibians and frogs and, you know, looking at nature from a very small age.

Yeah, so it feels like you've had a connection to nature for quite a long time, and you have your own ways of connecting to nature. I'm curious why you've decided for your National Geographic work to focus on what nature sounds like for that connection. How did you first get interested in that?

Yeah, as I said, sometimes when I live in cities and stuff, I get like this necessity of going outdoors. So I was, by the end of my PhD, as I mentioned, I used to work in microbial ecology; it was okay; I liked it, but I wasn't retired by the end. I have to be honest.

And well, a friend of mine and I decided, "Okay, let's go for a trip!" And we were like, "Why not let's go to Borneo?" And there we did a canopy walk, which is like they have these metal structures in the rainforest so you just can go up and see the whole thing.

And we were there at dusk because we wanted to see flying squirrels. So apparently, they had maximum activities at dusk, like many other animals. And I was not expecting to hear what I heard next.

So suddenly, this orchestra exploded out of nowhere, and I was like, "What is happening around me right now? Like, all of this is not random!" My scientific side came up, right? Like, "This has patterns; this has things that I want to know how it works!"

That is absolutely beautiful! You didn't tell us whether you saw flying squirrels, though!

Um, I saw them; they were amazing!

That's awesome! And so for your work, that was not Geo funded. I saw that you're releasing a film based on that project in the Canary Islands. You're going to be famous! I'm super excited! Can you tell me about where you went in the Canary Islands and why you picked that place?

Sure thing! So, I was in Borneo when I had this like "aha" moment, let’s say, but there was another piece to the person that I wanted to develop, and that was like, "Okay, this orchestra sounds in nature is amazing; how do we fit into this orchestra?"

Right, so I start to think about it like our relationship with sound and particularly about our communication. We emit sound; we speak; we communicate with that. Does it fit somewhere in the natural soundscape?

So there is one place in the Canary Islands; this island is called La Gomera, and they have these two main components that I needed to study. First, an old rainforest is the oldest forest in Europe; it's called Laurisilva.

And then Silbo Gomero, which is a whistle language that people used to communicate on the island. So, it's like this is the place where everything is connected, so that's why I decided, "Okay, I need to study this, and I want to make a broader case about how do we relate with nature through sound."

I would love to visit at some point already without you even telling me about it! But can you please paint a picture of La Gomera for me? What's it like?

The fascinating thing about La Gomera is that it's like at the same latitude of the Saharan Desert, and in the center of the island, we have this old rainforest.

Okay this that was not supposed to be there; it's there because there are a lot of mists and clouds that make humidity optimal for these forests to grow.

It's super, super steep; walking in the island is a challenge, and you have to be a very good hiker, I'd say. And you can imagine that it has a lot of contrast; it's like a mosaic; like in the center, it's very humid; you have the lower silva, but in the other outside, it's super dry.

Sometimes there are a lot of contrasting between seasons, so it's a very dynamic island. I like to consider it like a musical island.

I would like to show you how the center of the island sounds. So what you're hearing is a chorus of mainly blackbirds. This area is also close to some towns, so you are listening to some dogs as well, but the complexity of blackbirds in this case is quite astonishing.

That is so fascinating! I need to get a, like, an hour-long track of that from you.

I can share that with you; I've taken, I have many hours of this recorded!

I just want to go back to what you were saying about that whistling language. Can you tell me more about how it works?

Yeah, so Silbo is a whistling language or a communication system, there's some debate about that. So, people, back in La Gomera, as I said, it's a very steep island; it's not easy to just walk five kilometers because you could go to... you need to go a lot of ups and downs.

So for them, it made sense to just whistle, and the sound travels like five kilometers, so you can transmit a message to the whole island in 20 minutes. You send your whistling, and the whole island could know what you're trying to tell them.

And it's not like a code, so it's not like Morse; they are actually whistling in Spanish, right? Like, it's actual words.

So what you just heard were two sisters arranging a meeting at 4 PM. These are, you just heard Paola and Fátima Corea; these are two sisters who live in La Gomera, and we're amazing with us showing how Silbo works and how they use it.

So a big high five for them!

Do you like Silbo?

I would love to learn it! I know that I can't even whistle, like the kind of whistling we do in the West!

Can you tell me whether there have been times where you weren't sure if it was a person or like a blackbird imitating a person?

What does happen is that there are a lot of tourism to the island, and they all want to hear about Silbo, so there's a lot of shows, and okay, you take a whistler, you take it to the rainforest, and you do like this communicating thing, and they actually show that they can understand the messages.

And I bet that there are some words that are common in these shows because I recorded one blackbird who was actually saying one word in by whistling, like in Silbo.

When I first heard that file, I was like, "Am I really listening to, is this a blackbird or what?" What the hell am I listening to?

So it's pretty short, but it's like, that's Laurisilva!

So loudly, Silva is the type of forest, so it made sense that in demonstrations, they weren't saying bacon or something.

No, maybe! But I also think they can say Paco. I cannot prove that, but I'm pretty sure that I got a blackbird saying, "Hey, Paco!"

That is fantastic!

I feel like a lot of the work that I do or that I've done is very much about alleviating negative interactions between people and nature and shaping them into positive interactions, but this feels like a really lovely kind of marriage of people and nature. Can you tell me more about what you want people to take away from that?

Yeah, we live in cities; most of us, like 55% of the total population and 75% of the western population lives in cities.

Okay, so we are not exposed to these soundscapes anymore, and there was a time when we were connected to this. We made up a language to communicate through The Ravines of an island, right? Like, I think it's quite impressive, right?

But what we could achieve as an archaeological adaptation!

And I don't know; I just wanted people to understand that we need to reconnect with nature in some way, right?

And I thought that I could achieve that with sound that has an empathetic component that other forms of storytelling do not have. So that's why I wanted to do this project.

And if I could say something, Christina, for you maybe after we finish this conversation is just to go for a moment outside, pause, and just listen. Just see where you are at, what's happening around you, and just think about it.

So Christine, can I ask you about an essay that you wrote earlier this year? You described your identity as a black biracial queer scientist, and you wrote that embracing intersectionality has influenced your research. Can you say more about what you exactly mean?

Yeah, absolutely. Just as a background about that essay, you're laughing about it earlier is that when I applied for that award, I did not read the instructions fully, and I did not realize this was going to be published in a major journal.

Oh my God, that's incredible!

Personal essay! I have to say it's very vulnerable and and it's just out there. But that's okay! But yeah, I think in a few ways my intersectionality and identities have influenced the way that I approach my research and I approach my relationship with nature.

And I've really been able to span a lot of different levels of understanding of these really complex kaleidoscopic situations that make up human-wildlife interactions.

And I've had a lot of empathy for different groups of people that are dealing with these issues, or I feel like my identities as a Black and queer person can be reflected in a lot of the people that I work with, but also are connected to systemic injustices and inequities that lead to a lot of human-wildlife interactions being negative.

And so I think that my identities have led me to have a much more holistic view and empathetic view of what both people and wildlife are going through.

That's amazing!

Yeah, so I'm curious, what do you think about that, and whether your identities have influenced your work in any way?

Maybe I have a different experience because perhaps I've been more privileged let's say. I'm like a white, cis, homosexual guy in the Western world.

And what happened to me was that perhaps I was not hiding perhaps I'm during my career, but it was kind of invisible, right? I'm also passing so it's like, "Okay, I'm queer, but I don't know how to express this in my work."

I know there is also one thing that people state usually that is like, "Oh, but why do I have to put my queerness into my job, right? Like I'm just working; it doesn't have to do anything about it."

And I will say, "Yes, it does because it's you, and you are doing that work; you are doing that research, and it does influence it whether you know it or not. Maybe it doesn't have to be a specific queer issue that you know, but we are shaped the way we are, and the work we do is obviously shaped by that as well."

I absolutely agree. I feel like a lot of the pushback you're getting is again tied up to that Western science notion of objectivity, which is fake, and it doesn't exist.

We are subjective beings, and our backgrounds are very important.

Absolutely! I agree so much with this. So queer folks have made a lot of gains in parts of the world but not everywhere. So are there times when you have to be careful about how you present yourself?

But maybe you can talk something about Kenya, right? Like, what is it like?

It's been a really interesting experience and often psychologically harmful, I think, for me to work in countries where being queer is illegal.

But also, now that I've made at least one or two friends who I know are queer and are Kenyans, to see what they're going through as well because I, I mean, yes, like a lot of my career and my work is based there, and I'm deeply embedded in Kenya, but I, at the end of the day, can always walk away.

Right? And some people, you know, in our group and in who I work with cannot walk away from, you know, where they live, so I'm very grateful to be able to have that view of the two different ways of being and maybe start to see where I can tap into the change.

Yeah, so I'd love, as our final question, to ask, you know, there's probably somebody listening to this podcast who's interested in becoming a scientist or an explorer but might be struggling to bring in their full self and be their full self, either because of safety reasons or because they're just unsure. So what advice would you give those folks?

Well, first I would say that please do apply for the grant if you have an idea, please do it! Don't feel like you are not valid to do it, particularly I'd like to welcome trans people to apply for grants, I'd say. I think this has an underrepresented group within the explorer community, and we would love if we could welcome some of these folks around.

What do you say? What do you think?

Yes, please come join us!

Christine, what would you say to your younger version of yourself if you could give her advice?

Yeah, I think I would tell her that even though it might seem lonely to persist because there are communities of kaleidoscopic beings like yourself who care about nature or whatever their passion is that will support you and that are there for you and that we are here, right?

So we're seeing increasing representation of folks with queer and other identities, and that's wonderful, but you're just seeing the tip of the iceberg. There is a vast community ready to support you in what you do and support you as being a queer person and/or a person of color.

So try not to feel alone, and we hope that we can represent ourselves enough to be there for you and for you to know where to look.

If you like what you hear and you want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app, and consider a National Geographic subscription—that's the best way to support overheard. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe; there's a link in our show notes, and you can check out links to Christine's TikTok, where she posts her Queers Natural series, and Rudy's new film about the Canary Islands and its whistling language. Plus, see more natural stories about pride and the people pushing for equality.

This week's overheard episode is produced by Jacob Pincher. Brian Gutierrez is a senior producer. Our senior editor is Eli Chen. Our manager of audio is Carla Wills, who edited this episode. Our executive producer of audio is Devara Ardalan. Ted Woods sound-designed this episode, and Hansdale Sue composed our theme music.

This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners. The National Geographic Society is committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world and funds the work of National Geographic explorers Christine Wilkinson and Rudiger Ortiz Alvarez. Michael Tribble is the vice president of integrated storytelling; Nathan Lump is National Geographic’s editor-in-chief, and I'm your guest host, Dominique Hildebrand.

Thanks for listening and happy Pride!

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FB Pride! I really want confetti to be coming out while I say happy Pride!

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