*All photos are courtesy of the Mangelsen Images of Nature Gallery.
Wendy Corr:
Well, hey there, folks. Welcome to the Roundup. We are a Cowboy State Daily podcast, and we focus on interesting people in the cowboy state, and whether you know it or not, whether you know the name or not, you have seen the work of this phenomenally interesting person in the cowboy state that we're going to interview today, that we're going to have a conversation with today, and I'm so excited to get on to this conversation with Tom Mangelsen.
But first, I want to make sure that you all know about another fascinating podcast that if you're a business person in Wyoming that you need to check out. It is the Wyoming Business Alliance, “Business From the Basement”. This is a fantastic resource for anybody who does business in Wyoming that wants to have just a little bit more insight, maybe a little bit more networking. Check out the “Business From the Basement” podcast from the Wyoming Business Alliance. But don't go there yet, because you're not going to want to miss this.
This conversation that we're going to have today is with possibly the most famous wildlife photographer in the world. I mean, this is, bar none, the most famous photo. They call it the most famous wildlife photo ever taken, the grizzly bear with the salmon - it's called, I think it's called Catch of the Day. Is that correct, Tom?
Yes, catch of the day taken by this gentleman right here, Tom Mangelsen. Tom now lives in Jackson Hole, but Tom has devoted his life to capturing and really, really understanding these amazing creatures that we have, not only here in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, but around the world, all seven continents.
And Tom has brought those images to those of us who can't get to those places and to experience the magic of these wild animals. So Tom Mangelsen, welcome to the roundup. Oh my goodness, I'm so excited to have you on here today.
Tom Mangelsen:
Thank you. It's my pleasure, Wendy.
Wendy Corr:
Well, we are just so there's so many questions, so many questions that I have for you and and so I want to start out, though, with most everybody has an origin story. You know, everybody's got an origin story. Your origin, Grand Island, Nebraska. You started off in the Great Plains there, but something drew you to a camera.
Tell us about your growing up in Nebraska and how that then took you into this amazing career that you've had.
Tom Mangelsen:
Yes, I was born and raised in Grand Island. My grandparents, both sets of grandparents, lived there, my parents, my dad's three brothers, and I spent my first dozen years there. Then went to Ogallala, which is in western Nebraska, and sandhill country, which is kind of ranch country, and also a unique place in Nebraska.
So both Grand Island Ogallala were right on the Platte River, which is where I spent a lot of time with my father, duck hunting and goose hunting and rabbit hunting and pheasant hunting and quail hunting. And he took me, my dad took me out in the decoy boat when I was pretty much like a baby, 1, 2, 3 years old, my first memories are, you know, from those days, being pulled out in the boat early morning, before sunrise, and setting up decoys, and spending my summers with my brothers and my dad fixing up the tow heads, as we call, little islands where we had our blinds, and learning how to call ducks and geese.
And that was my dad's passion, was both hunting and fishing. We'd spent a lot of time cat fishing in the river in the summer times. But all those experiences, I think, mostly learning how to make lines and paint decoys and set decoys and calling, and that was just thrilling for me. I spent every moment I could out of school being out in the duck blind from my dad.
And he sometimes actually bribed the priest that we wouldn't have to go to Mass on Sunday. He would give us a dispensation, and we would take him maybe three or four mallards at the end of the day and he would keep letting his boys out of school.
Or we’d go to 5:45 mass and very early in the morning and have our waders on and our hunting gear on, so we could get out out the doors, and his communion was over, and that was legitimately then we went to mass, so no more mortal sins and things like that.
Wendy Corr:
But that had to have taught you the patience that you then required later on in in being a photographer and really waiting for those great shots.
Tom Mangelsen:
Exactly. So we, yeah, we spent, you know, from sunrise till sunset, and I learned I didn't know any better. Basically, I just thought, that's what we had to do if you're going to shoot a duck or goose. You had to wait and wait and wait. And some days we would wait, you know, three or four days before we even saw anything close.
So patience is probably the best lesson that I learned from those early days that now transfers into photography. So you have to be very patient in wildlife photography if you want to get extraordinary shots.
Wendy Corr:
And you have gotten those extraordinary shots. What's the longest that you've ever had to wait to get that perfect shot of some of these amazing animals that you've been out there and really lived in the wild with?
Tom Mangelsen:
Probably be 1999 - I’d never seen a mountain lion before, even though I spent five or six years in the mountains in Colorado, and 25 years here at that time and in Nebraska in the West, where there were some mountain lions.
But on February 14 in 99 my assistant librarian at the office had her husband, who was a naturalist ranger at the National Elk Refuge, said he saw a lion with three young cubs going to a den on the refuge on what's called Miller Butte. It's a fairly high Butte, and he had seen a cougar there three years before was getting so he probably the same one.
And I told him, if he had ever seen one again, let me know. So she let me know. And the next morning, I was out there at daybreak, and I thought, I'll just get a picture of a mountain lion, hopefully, you know, I can call it good, and it'd be a record shot.
Most everybody would ask me, you have pictures of lions and leopards and cheetahs and elephants and whatever, polar bears, grizzly bears, but you don't have any pictures of cougars? And I said because they are all pretty much taken at game farms and they're captive animals that that they keep in small cages as basically photography or film slaves.
And I was never going to go to one of those places and use those animals to do that, which I, I think, is cruel and inhumane. And there's a number of game farms throughout North America, but especially a couple in Montana that are the most probably abusive in the sense that they raise these animals and they breed them.
And everybody wants pictures of baby whatever, foxes or raccoons or possums, they have everything. Even have snow leopards and lions and tigers. So I find that they take them out of the cages and they put them out, you know, a little maybe they have five acre fenced in property that they take them out in an area in Montana where it looks like it's natural, and it's it is natural, but people don't realize that these are captive animals. They spend 365 days a year in these cages. So anyway, I was really against that.
So this cougar showed up on February 14 in 99 and I thought, well, at least I'll try to go see one. And so that cougar stuck around for 42 days with her three kittens, and I spent all 42 days - I thought this was my once in a lifetime chance photographing a cougar that's not captive, not run up a tree with dogs and not hunted, but most pictures are either from -
Well, they're all either captive, like I mentioned, or they're run up the tree by dogs, and their only predator really are wolves and cougars have learned to run up a tree, maybe only 10 feet high. They know that. You know, wolves can't climb trees, and neither can hound dogs, which they're hunted with.
And after this 42 days, I realized how cruel and humane it would be to shoot.
There's a season right outside of Teton Park, where I live, and just outside the National Elk River where you can kill a cougar and you can't really tell the difference between a male and a female, at least easily. And most outfitters don't necessarily care, because it's maybe five or $10,000 in their pocket if they can lead somebody to kill a cougar.
So they run them with dogs up a tree, and then they just shoot them point blank. And half the time, almost 75% of the time, those females, if they shoot a female, will be pregnant or have dependent kittens.
So I got on that cause after these 42 days, and went to the game of fish and asked them what kind of protection they have for kittens that the mother gets shot and they don't have any other than that. It's sort of collateral damage, is what they told me, and I felt collateral damage.
That's sort of like we, you know, talk about Hamas or something, or, yeah, Ukraine and other people, kids get killed. It's kind of collateral damage, but I felt it's really cruel and not ethical. And so I started the Cougar Fund, which is now 25 years old, and mostly to educate children about the value of Cougars in the landscape and that kind of thing. Yeah, that took a few years to set that up, and we're still trying to stop the hunting, because it really is stupid and not humane.
And there's hunting across all across Wyoming, some 300 cats are shot every year. And then all the other states that have Cougars in the West, like 14 of them, now, I believe, including Nebraska, unfortunately, which is really sad to me.
But anyway, so I did that, but that was the longest time I spent. I was just trying to get a good picture, and I realized I’d maybe do a little book about cougars.
But they were 125 yards away. So that's a football and a quarter length away, field away. And I had a 800 millimeter lens with a 2x extender and dual tripods and lots of bean bags to steady everything, because it was all film in those days, it wasn't digital. And, like with low and distance was far, and so it's really hard to get.
The female would hardly ever come out of the cave. When it was light out, she would only come out at night and then go hunting, and sometimes you come back the next day, or maybe the following day. And I realized that if she doesn't come back, then these three kittens will starve to death in February temperatures in the den. So that was the real problem.
But anyway, I did get enough pictures to say that I got a nice picture of a cougar. Finally.
Wendy Corr:
42 days, you got the picture. My goodness! Now, you have gone and you are famous for going to great lengths to just get that exactly right shot. Tell us about your most famous photograph, which is Catch of the Day, which is the bear with the salmon. Tell us about that. I would love to hear the story behind that photo.
Tom Mangelsen:
I'll try to make it short, it’s a bit longer story. I was working on a film. I did films after I started when I went to Boulder, Colorado after Nebraska. But anyhow, I was working on a film about sandhill cranes, and I found myself in Alaska along the coast where they stop over before they cross over to Russia and the northern coast of Alaska, across the Bering Sea.
And I had about a week between shoots for these cranes. And I was on an airplane, Alaska Airlines going to Anchorage. And I read this article about Brooks Falls, which had these, it's a famous place where bears go to catch salmon in the spring and summer and fall.
And I saw these pictures where there were a dozen bears at the falls, and I saw one at the top of the falls, where a fish was jumping near him. And I thought to myself, I wonder if you could take a picture of a bear with a fish immediately in his face. Just a portrait, basically. And I never seen one before. And as to my knowledge that no one had actually captured that, or even maybe tried to, I don't know.
So I went, when I got to Anchorage airport, it's called Brooks Falls, and asked about going there because it's a park. And the Ranger said, Wait, do you have a camping permit, or do you have a room? There's a fishing lodge here? And I said, No, I don't have either. And he's, well, it's full up. It's July, and you really have to have a permit.
And I said, Well, I said, nothing at all. He's well, there's one campsite along the bear trail. He says it's legal, but nobody wants it, because the bears walk within feet of it along the lake. And I said, I'll take it.
And not at that time, knowing a lot about bears, this in 1987, so a while ago. And so I went to KMart and bought a sleeping bag and a tent and some pots and pans and some freeze dried food, etc.
So I went there. I walked to where the Falls were, and I spent a week just trying to capture that image. And there were two or three bears they would fight over the Falls area but at the top, because that was a prime fishing spot. A lot of bears were down below, fishing and diving and doing all kinds of different fishing techniques.
But all I did was spend my whole time with a 600 millimeter on the tripod and just focusing pretty much on the bear. And whenever I saw a fish coming close to the bear’s mouth, I would click it. But again, it was manual camera, and was pretty much one or two or three frames at a second, not 30 or 40, like we have today with our digital camera.
So it was more challenging, and I didn't know I actually caught the picture. A couple times I said like, oh, you know some words I won't repeat on film here, but like, Oh, my God, it was close, you know, oh, this or that. And, and I thought maybe I had got something close, but I didn't know until two months later, when the film came back from the lab that I had actually caught that.
I was looking at the photos, the slides over the light table. Oh, that's pretty, pretty cool. And it became pretty, pretty famous. And. It. They say it's one of the most copied photograph probably, or tried to copy.
Wendy Corr:
How do you get those photos out there? How do you get your work seen with you're just a photographer in 1987 and you're a wildlife photographer, and you're just really starting your career. How do you then say, here, I want the world to see my photos. How does that happen?
Tom Mangelsen:
Well, in those days, there are a lot of magazines, wildlife magazines, like National Geographic, Audubon, national wildlife, and they will print images like that. And Geographic did a story about bears and most all them do stories about bears. And there had been thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures published from Brooks Falls, but none quite like that.
So it was, it stood out to them, and it got published in different places. And they also started - when I first started, I was doing limited edition prints at like craft fairs. And in Boulder, where I moved to, in Park City, where I opened a gallery, I still have a gallery there, 40 years later.
And in Jackson Hole, where I now live. So my main thrust was doing limited edition prints in these galleries after I did the craft fairs, which weren't very satisfying. So I opened real galleries and displayed my work. And, of course, Catch the Day was one of the more popular images in the galleries. And it just sort of, you know, became famous, I guess.
Wendy Corr:
Did it launch your career, really? Was that kind of what got you noticed as a wildlife photographer? Or had you already made inroads into that?
Tom Mangelsen:
I had made inroads into that, but it was, it became my most sort of iconic image. And I use it on my business cards and things like that, because people do recognize and they say, Oh, you're the guy that you got that. And I say, you mean the fish with the bear, yeah, but they always go collect this, and that's what I was doing,
Wendy Corr:
Now you have been more well known in the area recently, in the Greater Yellowstone region, for your work in capturing images of Grizzly 399, and so you really have become the iconic expert on this bear who you know we tragically lost last year.
But tell us about your work with 399 - when did you start following her? Because I know the images of the quadruplets you had so many of those. In fact, there's a great bronze, series of bronzes in your gallery that I saw, that is 399 with the quads. And I just thought that was fantastic. But tell us about 399 and what she meant to you.
Tom Mangelsen:
Well, I always loved bears. I started off obviously shooting waterfowl and cranes and mostly birds in my early days from the Platte river experience. And my professor, I went to graduate school at the University of Nebraska. So I'll back up a little bit.
In 1969 I thought I was going to get drafted and end up in Vietnam, as there's a lot of people my age. That was during the heights of Vietnam War, 68, 69, 70. And anyway, I went to see this professor, who I saw his story about in Midlands magazine in Omaha. His name is Paul Johnsgard, Dr. Paul Johnsgard, and the story was in like an Art section, or it's called Midlands anyway, it's in the Sunday section.
And it was about this guy who, I think it was called Birdman, or something like that. And he was the world's authority on waterfowl, ducks, geese, swans and cranes. And he was an artist, and he was a photographer, and he was a professor at the University of Nebraska.
And I wrote to him and asked him if, if there's any chance, if I don't get drafted, if you might take me on as a graduate student. He said, bring down your transcripts and we'll take a look. And I took them down, and my grade average was about a B minus overall. What you had to keep if you wanted to student deferment to stay out of the draft, which was a smart thing to do.
But he said, I only take five students, and they're all straight A students. I only take five. And he says, Your grades don't really, really match up to most of my students. But so I said, Well, I had won the world's goose calling championship twice - and that didn't impress him too much - but he got, I thought that might, since he was the world's authority on waterfowl.
And I said, Well, we have a cabin. My family has a cabin on the Platte River. Now that caught his attention, because he loved the Platte River, and he thought maybe he could maybe use our blinds in the cabin and be friends.
And so he went to the went to the other advisors, and he said, I think this kid, he told me later, I think this kid actually has some potential, which is totally bull crap, I'm sure, but later we became best of friends, and he ended up doing 106 books in his lifetime.
And he passed away a couple of years ago, but we were best of friends, and he took me under his wing, and I was his field assistant for a few years. We traveled across the US and photographed ducks and stuff. So that's how I got started with photographing birds. So I started photographing birds, and then I still go to the Platte River in Nebraska every year in March. And Jane Goodall has been coming out for like 20 years every spring to see the cranes.
Wendy Corr:
We need to come back to that. I want to talk about Jane Goodall.
Tom Mangelsen:
Okay, so, so anyway, I love bears. But you know, of course, there are no bears in Nebraska. There used to be, historically, and I would have to go to Alaska or Canada to photograph bears. And I spent the early, mid 80s in Canada photographing polar bears for like, nine or 10 years. I did a book on polar bears called polar dance, and I fell in love with polar bears.
But I'd moved to Boulder, and was there for eight years, and then I moved to Jackson Hole, and I lived just on the edge of Teton Park. I'm surrounded by the Park on three sides where I'm sitting now.
There hadn't been any grizzly bears in Teton park for about 50 years, and this is in the mid 70s. I moved here in ‘78 but so I had to go to, you know, to Alaska.
Yellowstone had somewhere around maybe 100 and the population of grizzly bears was really tanking and looking at extinction, basically, in the lower 48. And the endangered species act was formed in 1975 to help protect bears, and you know, to stop the hunting and the poaching. The parks had actually killed off a lot of bears themselves.
But, so when 399 showed up in 1996 about 20 miles north of my house, I got pretty excited. She had three cubs, and my partner at the time, she came home, and I went up, and we saw her briefly on the Oxbow bend, which is a bend in the Snake River, and she was eating on a moose carcass.
And that was really exciting. You know, it's almost dark, and I just got a few pictures, and thought, well, I saw a grizzly in Teton Park. And the following spring, she came back to the same area, and she was there with yearlings, and she started feeding along the roads a lot.
And what we deduced was that there was food along the roads other bears didn't eat because other bears didn't like the roads with people and cars and traffic, and by doing that, she avoided having male bears maybe kill her cubs in the back country. So there's a very intelligent move on her part.
She'd lost her first cub a few years before that, and the theory was that maybe a male bear had killed her cub, and maybe she just learned from that that she needed - she accepted people in her area more than a back country bear. So she became, quote, a roadside bear in the sense, she didn't just hang out on the roads, but she would cross roads and then hang out and eat some fresh grasses and stuff that nobody else was eating.
And so for that spring, Sue and I went up every day and started photographing her, and she was a beautiful bear, and all the senses that you know, her demeanor and her color, and she had a kind of a golden stripe on her side, which is recognizable, and the beautiful cubs.
And so year after year for, well, 19 years now, 18 years when she died last year, almost a year ago now, in October, I followed her, documented her more. I got to know her and her offspring, and their offspring and her grandkids and she had, over the years, 18 offspring, and those offspring had another probably 18 or so, so somewhere around two and a half three dozen bears that she contributed to the population.
And all of her offspring had similar characteristics, would go to the same places that she taught them to go to eat berries or go to the willow flats to catch elk calves in the spring when they were being born, and etc, etc. So it was interesting to see how smart she was and what personality she had.
And sometimes her cubs had similar personalities, or sometimes different, like people. We're all different, but we're all the same in many ways. And as I learned more and more about her and her emotional attachment to her cubs and how much she protected them - she would come to the highway, and she would look both directions to see if there's any cars coming and go across and call her cubs and come across.
And sometimes one cub might wait on the side back on the road, and she's okay, you guys stay here, and they would stay there, and then she'd go back and get Charlie and bring Charlie back, and again, that's a sense of - it's like a, maybe a dog in the city that knows how to get around cars and vehicles.
And so she just grew on me. And we would spend most of the spring and early summers watching her, and then she would go to the high country, and we wouldn't see her for a month or two. And then she'd come back down and have berries.
And then in late winter, usually December, January, she'd head to her den, which is in the wilderness area, 20 miles from the road, kind of thing.
And I flew up one day, got a pilot. I just followed her tracks, so I knew where her den was the following spring. We just wanted, I just wanted, I was curious where it might be, and it was under a big Douglas fir tree, and she dug a den, and there's that must have been sort of like the four seasons to most bears.
Wendy Corr:
I bet. Yeah. Wow. So you really got to know her as a person, in so many ways. I mean, not a human person, obviously, but you got to know her personality and what she was all about.
Do you think that the numbers of people that we now have in the parks, both in Yellowstone and in Grand Teton, did that contribute to her demise, do you think? Do you think that this is a healthy thing for the wildlife, that this many people are now interested in all the things that are happening with the bears? Tell me about your thoughts on that.
Tom Mangelsen:
It's a complex story, I think. But a lot of people came to Teton Park to see her over the years and more, her popularity became big. She had - when she had 610, which was of the first three cubs I was mentioning, who became an adult at six years old, she had two cubs, and one day we saw her with three cubs, and 399 only had two cubs, so we don't know exactly what happened.
They were probably feeding together, and something disturbed them. They ran off, and one of the cubs thought, well, it's a big brown butt going through the willows, who smells just like mom. And I'll go follow that one. And she ended up with her, 399’s daughter, and her daughter, 610, raised her. 610 is still alive today.
So that was kind of cool, and that kind of made news. And it went to - when she had cubs, 610 had cubs, that was, you know, 399’s cub has cubs, and that became news. And then when they had transferred cubs, her daughter adopted the mom’s cubs, that became news and actually went viral.
And Jane Goodall called me and said, I see your bear is on the Sunday Daily News, London News, and the story, it was an AP story. So I asked my assistant, just to check and see how many newspapers carried that.
And he came back with 226 newspapers, online and real papers, even one in Turkey. So that was, that was pretty thrilling.
So she had her own Facebook page. Somebody started a Facebook page where - she had her own like, what music, what books she liked, what food she liked, elk tenderloin and that kind of thing. And then here's what happened.
Game and Fish, fish and wildlife service, Governor and the senators and the legislators all wanted to take grizzly bears off the endangered species list, and they did. And when Game and Fish wanted to hunt the bears, give their constituents something else to shoot at, I mean, it's like shooting your couch, obviously. And these bears have been used to people and everything else.
And 399, could have been one of those bears. They wouldn't hunt in the park, but outside the park, they would.
And they had a lottery. I’m trying think, what year that was? Now, 10 years after ‘75 or so, so ‘85 maybe, I should know - to have 18 tags, licenses that you could go out and shoot your bear kind of thing. And so me and all my friends, including Jane, applied for these permits.
And I think 7000 people entered the lottery, and I was number eight, so out of some 7000 something, I caught one of the tags. And I decided that I would use my tag to hunt bears with a camera. And I decided that I would not take any money out of outfitters’ pockets or anything.
And I found an outfit who was against bear hunting, and he had horses, and he had camps, and he was an elk Hunter too, and he said he would take me out. And I said, We’ll hire you. I'll rent the tents and the horses and and so you won't, nobody will lose money, or nobody's going to be pissed off at me for taking money out of some outfitters hands.
But in the paper, when it came out, when I got a tag, there's a couple people who were upset that I would not actually kill a bear. And they said, When I get back to Jackson, all they're going to find is your camera and your body, Tom. So a little brutal.
Yeah. So it hasn't all been easy, because there's a lot of people who have that sort of, you know, hateful attitude, I guess. But at the last minute, the night before, Judge Christensen in Montana, a federal judge, ruled that they would put the bears back on the endangered species list, and the hunt was over. So it never happened.
So that was in the Washington Post and everything, that story, and, of course, ever since then, there's still been trying to, the same people, Governor, everybody else in Miami, all want to take the bears off the endangered species, all the Senators and Representatives. And it's really - they don't understand how important these bears are to the public, how important they are to themselves.
We don't own them. They have a right to live. And they are emotional beings. They, you know, really have personalities and like I said, a lot of intelligence, and they feel pain. They feel loss. I've seen 399 and 610, running up and down the highway when they've lost a cub, either temporarily or permanently.
One of 399 cubs was run over when she only had a single cub, and she went out to the highway and picked the cub up. Her cub’s name was Snowy, it was particularly white and named it Snowy, nicknamed Snowy.
And the mom, 399, went out in the middle of the road and picked up the cub and carried into the woods and laid it by a big spruce tree, and then ran up and down the highway all night long, bawling and crying like, you know, a different sound than we make, but just like we would do if we lost somebody by a car accident, in many ways.
So she felt pain and she felt loss. And so for us to think it's okay to shoot an animal like that, whether it's a wolf or a bear or a cougar, is pretty inhumane and barbaric, and Neanderthal as far as I'm concerned.
So again, we're in that situation today where all these people want to take the bears off the endangered species list, and hunt them. And like this outfitter that said he would take me out. He said, be really simple to get pictures of a bear. I'll shoot a elk with my bow and arrow and then I'll skin it out and take the good meat and I'll leave the rest. And we'll just sit on our horses or sit on the hillside and wait for a bear to show up to eat the rest of the meat. It'll be simple.
And that's what they do when they hunt. So there's no real hunting per se. There's no danger, really. So it's overall pathetic. And I, as I mentioned, I grew up hunting. I know what hunting feels like. I know the, you know, the drive for it and everything. But there's a difference between ducks and maybe pheasants and real ascension being like bears and cougars and wolves. So I've been spending a lot of my time fighting that issue the last well, the whole time, basically.
Wendy Corr:
Because it's become your life's mission in so many ways.
Tom Mangelsen:
Yeah, it is. So to answer your question, sorry for that long answer. So, about people coming, and some people say, Look what you've done, Tom, all these people are coming because you published your book, and in your books about 399 and stuff, and you've done films and things, and PBS Nature just recently did a film called “399 Queen of the Tetons,” which obviously reached a big audience.
And that came out last year before she died, but I tried to weigh that out the millions and millions and millions of people that came to see her and realize that she was a sentient, emotional being, and bears are not big tooth, marauding, terrible killers.
So I think the trade off between a lot of people in the parks, and the knowledge that they gained from 399 and her offspring and their cubs, far outweighed anything else, in my opinion. It's huge and so she's done more to probably keep bears on endangered species list than any, obviously, any bear, and the most famous bear, and probably most famous animal that ever lived, for that matter.
So she has been a super ambassador for her species. And now, since she's gone, there's this move again to take bears off the intended species list, and it's always been there. But without her fame and her being around, it's easier. And the Game and Fish in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, really, would like to hunt them and give them their constituents this opportunity, because they said they're demanded or mandated by their constitution to provide hunting opportunity to their constituents.
And that's lame to me, because it's you know, why don't they just go take pictures or something, or want to go fishing, or you don't need to kill a bear to prove yourself. If you're that insecure, then do something else. But so that's a big problem now, and Representative Hageman just introduced a bill to take the bears off the endangered species list and not be able to fight that with the bill.
But that's not going to fly, I'm sure, and we'll just be in another brawl, kind of, so to speak.
Wendy Corr:
Tom, I want to go back to what you were talking about with the real sentient nature of the bears. I'm looking behind you, at the print above your fireplace, there at the elephants. And what you're describing with 399, and 610, and their obvious grief at the loss of a child. We've seen that behavior in elephants, and I know that you have with your camera, had the opportunity to capture the behavior and these images of animals all over the world.
And so tell us about some of your exploits and your adventures around the world. Recently, you just came back from Africa and you were able to, my understanding is, capture a rare black leopard. Is that right?
Tom Mangelsen:
Yeah, yeah, I've traveled to Africa a lot, and India, we were in India a few months before that, in, like December, January, photographing tigers. But, you know, I think what’s great about 399, and those experiences, and all my experiences over my lifetime, is that I see similar behaviors in other animals.
Like, elephants are like number one in a sense of intelligence and memory. And, you know, they have these calls to each other, these sounds they make that is sort of subsonic. We can't hear them ourselves without, you know, a special recorder. But their communication may be over a mountain range to their herd, which was only 15-20 years ago, and then they didn't know how these animals were finding each other and all that.
But then once it was - Cynthia Moss, is sort of one of the grandmothers of elephant behavior, and her assistant, started studying these sounds of elephants, like people have studied sounds of whales, it's similar. You know, whales we can't often hear, but if you're with the right microphones and recorders, you can pick up these frequencies that we don't hear, but they do communicate, and communicating all kinds of stuff.
Again, we don't understand the language necessarily, but we understand that they are communicating. So you get incredibly intelligent beings like whales and elephants, and you take that down to tigers and cougars and wolves, and, you know, on and on, down to jellyfish, more or less. And you probably saw, maybe, the movie “My Octopus.”
But, yeah, it's a fabulous film. And shows there, they have an intelligence of sorts, and you can pretty much apply that to almost any animal these days. So we really need to look at, you know, understand animals for what they are - and they are beings, and hopefully respect them and protect them and keep them on dangerous species list or whatever it takes.
And this current administration, endangered species list is really threatened, and environment is really threatened. And all of our clean air, clean water, and you name it, is really threatened. It's the worst time for the environment in my lifetime.
But I had opportunities to see an elephant called One Ton, which is one of the last 25 big super Tuskers, as they call them, these elephants that have tusks that reach the ground. So there's only like 20-25 of them left in all of Africa.
Tom Mangelsen:
So that was a big treat. And then I heard, had heard about this black leopard in northern Kenya for the last three or four years, and it's a rare color face. It's not all like an albino, but it's melanistic, so it's black instead of white and and she doesn't have pink eyes or anything. It's a female, young female that's about six years old now, named Giza.
And I went there, to this place in northern Kenya, and we did find her at night. And after a week, I still hadn't gotten a good picture, because there's all, we used sort of spotlights and filters and things. And she would hunt at night. She was hunting dik diks, which is a real small antelope. It's the smallest of antelope, size of a jackrabbit, basically.
And she would kill one for herself, one for her two grown cubs, and then maybe another one for them. She was like, they were everywhere. They were, like jack rabbits used to be in Nebraska when I was a kid. And she was a great hunter and beautiful cat, and one of only a half a dozen, probably in, well, I won't say all of Africa, but certainly in Kenya and other places.
And we also, my partner, Tiffany and I, we went to India to look for a black leopard there the year before, and we never found it. So it was a really incredibly rare cat. And I thought we better go because, you know, cats don't live all that long, not like other animals.
So we were lucky enough, and I decided to spend another week after the first week because we hadn't gotten what I had hoped would be a nice picture. So after the last week, actually, I did get a few really nice photos.
Wendy Corr:
Wow, oh my goodness! You know, I don't want to forget to come back to your friendship with Jane Goodall, speaking of Africa and all these amazing places. How did you first meet Jane and in what ways have you collaborated with Jane Goodall?
Tom Mangelsen:
I first met Jane actually at a book signing in Boulder, Colorado, when a lecture she gave there, very briefly and shook her hand and just told her how much I appreciate her work and inspiration, et cetera, like anybody probably does most people.
And she came to Jackson the following year and and she stayed with some friends of mine, and I left my friends a book for her on polar bears, polar dance book. And she came back two years later and asked if I would introduce her.
And so, of course, and I was totally freaked out about introducing somebody who's my big hero, and her husband, Hugo, who was one of the great wildlife filmmakers, had filmed her, did most of her early films and books together and writings and stuff.
But that, that evening, well, anyway, she was in the gallery, and Dan Fulton, who was my manager,
asked her if she'd have been to Yellowstone, and she said no. And he said, Well, you should get Tom to take you. And he said, Well, he's probably too busy. And he said, Well, I'll take you if he's too busy. And of course, I wasn't too busy. I would have dropped anything to take her to Yellowstone.
So that night, she did the lecture, and then in the back room, she was sitting under a little light bulb, doing some notes for her talk, and she said, No, Tom, you don't need to tell my story. I can tell my own story. So just make it short.
I said that's not a problem. I'll just talk about your husband, your former husband, and talk about his work, as he also was my hero, Hugo van Lawick. So then I just wished you know, how he had inspired me.
But she said, Now we're going to go to Yellowstone tomorrow, right? And I said, Yes, we are. And he said, Well, don't tell anybody, because I don't want a bunch of people who are following us around. Oh, no problem. So we spent the day in Yellowstone. We went to all the places, like a couple tours. I took a she had a video camera. She asked me if I would help her to video her with her four grandkids, and I did that.
And then it was a very long day. We talked about cougars, and she realized how special Cougars were. And she said to me, we're having a picnic along the Yellowstone River. And she says, she said, you know, Tom, this is the first time I remember that my first love was a puma.
And Puma is mountain lions, cougars, right? Just have different names, different places. And she said, I read a book when I was a child, and she said, I wonder where that book is, must be in my book shelf in Bournemouth, England, where her home is.
And so that spurred me on to talk about my issue with cougars, and what I had done. And she said, Well, when we get back to the house, why don’t we look at that little video? Because I was working on a video. And so, this is like, one o'clock in the morning.
And we had had a whole day, and saw wolves. We saw bears, black bears, Grizzlies, everything possible. And she mentioned - that is called, Jane magic, because basically, Mother Nature looks down on her and tries to give her, you know, recognize her specialness, I guess.
But that's, I've learned a lot of things about Jane magic over the years. And, you know, she'll go and be an outside lecturing, and it'll be raining, and when she goes up to the podium, it’ll quit raining, kind of thing, you know.
And she asked me about the crane migration in Nebraska, and she said, Do you know anything about that? I said, Yes, I actually did a film called Flight of the Whooping Crane, which was nominated for an Emmy against your wild chimpanzee film in 1981. And they were both National Geographic. And of course, her film won.
So I said, I did another film for PBS nature on Sandhill cranes, and I have a camp on the Platte River in the heart of crane migration. And I said, What are you doing in March? And she says, I'm coming with you to see the cranes. So that's how we got to really know each other. And she has been coming there maybe 20 times in the last 23 years or so.
Wendy Corr:
Well, my goodness, Tom - your adventures and your exploits, and the proof of all of that, that you are able to share with us - there's just no words, and there's no way to measure that gift that you've given to all of us.
But, Tom, one last question to wrap it up - when your career, which will never be over, because there's no limits to the number of years that you have yet with a camera, what do you want your footprint on this world to be? When you're all said and done, it's like, this is what I've done. Can you put words to, really, your contributions and what you want those to be?
Tom Mangelsen:
Well, I think it's fairly simple. And would just mention was, as Jane always said, everybody can make a difference every day, and I would hope that that I've made a difference, and hopefully continue for a while to make a difference.
Wendy Corr:
Wow, goodness. This is fantastic information, Tom, and we really appreciate your being able to - your years of experience and observation and truly scientific method, in that way, being able to bring that to us is just invaluable, and so is your time.
And so we are so grateful that you were able to spend some time with us today and share your memories and your experiences and and your wisdom with these animals that you've spent so much time with, and the gift that it is to us to be able to experience just a little taste of what life is like for bears and these other animals around around the world.
So Tom, thank you for your career, and we are so looking forward to your next set of photos that will come out. Really looking forward to seeing the black leopard and and all of these, these great things. Tom, thanks so much.
Tom Mangelsen:
You're very welcome. My pleasure.
Wendy Corr:
And folks, thank you for tuning in. I hope you have had as much just eye opening, chills, as I have during this conversation with Tom Manglesen - and don't go away. I mean, come back and see us. We've got so many more wonderful people to have conversations with - not very many who are as iconic as Tom Mangelsen, but just as interesting.
So thanks for tuning in today. Come back and see us next week. Have a wonderful week.
