Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I had never in my life considered that anything would ever be too much for me. We were going to be dealing with, my goodness, spiders and snakes and gorillas and elephants, the elements. And I remember there was a little bit of panic that set in with me where I thought to myself, oh my gosh, are they going to think I’m a fraud? And I found a little paper bag, like a lunch bag, and I did the classic thing where I put my mouth into the lunch bag and used it to catch my breath and telling myself, “You’ve got to do this.”
I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show, a podcast all about the human drama of saving animals. This season, I want to share my story, but I also want to introduce you to the other amazing wildlife scientists out there. Some of my friends who study hyenas, work with lizards, and even track sharks. The animals we study are great, but who we are as people and how that affects our work is just as interesting. And we’re going to talk all about it. This is Going Wild. This was the very beginning of 2019, and I had finished my postdoc. I was several months into a research fellowship studying grizzly bears in Montana. And on the side, I was also an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University and I was teaching principals of ecology to graduate students.
And so while I was with Johns Hopkins, I pitched an idea to teach a field course to the graduate students. So it’s kind of a glorified field trip where we go somewhere in the world and I’d be able to teach wildlife ecology outside of the classroom. I was in search of stability in my career, and also to demonstrate how valuable I was. Being an adjunct faculty member is not a secure position, but if I was teaching the most popular field course, then I would be in really good shape.
So I was a little bit nervous when I pitched this idea to the department chair, but it actually ended up being so straightforward because basically he told me, “Hey, that’s a great idea. Why don’t you plan out the course and then circle back to me ASAP?” So this was definitely an unexpected yes. And because it was a time in my life where I was branching out left and right, just do something new, do something a little risky, do something that you have no experience with. Instead of designing a field course in a country that I had lived in or worked in, I decided, “You know what? I’ve always wanted to study lowland gorillas in Central Africa.”
So this was a big double opportunity. The idea was that I was going to start this field course for the students at John Hopkins, and then through this field course, I would have access to this site so I could start a gorilla research project. And this is a big deal because gorillas are super endangered in this area, and their habitats are also threatened. So if I could start a research project there, it would essentially be one of the first studies in that area, learning about where the gorilla population was and what needed to be done to help them grow and thrive and remain protected.
And so I found myself at the top of 2019 I guess having this moment where I realized this might be that moment of inflection in one’s career where things can skyrocket pretty rapidly. And so I spent tons of time putting together a proposal and a syllabus. And before I knew it, it was time to present this to both the department chair and the dean of the school. So I met with them and I gave them my vision of the project, and they loved it pretty much right away.
I mean, this was something wildly different than any other field course they had. And so on top of approving the proposal, they also gave me funding to do a two week recon trip to scout the field site, which was in a rainforest in the Congo Basin called the Dja Faunal Reserve. And this way I could make sure it was a good place, not only to bring the grad students, but also for me to start my research project. And I was so excited about all of this from a career perspective. But what I didn’t realize at the time was the toll that it was really going to take on my personal life and also on my mental health.
It was around this time in my life that my personal and professional lives became almost fused together because I became a single mom in that year. I had ended the relationship with my husband. I had moved to Washington D.C. with my three year old daughter, Zuri, and started this single mom life. And my goodness, I had no idea, no idea how hard it was going to be. In those six months that I had been living this new life, I had experienced depression like I have never before. There were a couple of moments where I almost gave up just entirely. It was too hard, but I didn’t, and I really credit Zuri with that. Oh my God, I didn’t think I was going to get emotional.
But I guess I often really realize that she kind of kept me alive and I’m so grateful for her and for me for ultimately being strong enough to carry on and keep going. And in full disclosure, one of the biggest reasons that my marriage had broken up was professional reasons. It was because I wanted so strongly to have the opportunity to do things like go to the Congo Basin and start up a lowland gorilla study, and that my husband hadn’t been supportive of that. But then less than six months later, the opportunity is actually in my lap. And then all of a sudden I was in my kitchen, found myself on the floor, alone, having a panic attack. Being a single mom, going through a divorce meant that if there were to be a custody battle, I would need to be able to prove to a judge that I am the most responsible parent there is. And when I do have to travel, I make sure that the health, wellbeing, and security of my child is top notch.
If anything goes wrong, it’ll be used against you. Not only will your child suffer, but it could have ramifications for the rest of your lives. And this was my first long international expedition since I became a single mom. And I wasn’t just going anywhere. I was going to this super remote place where there would be absolutely no contact, right? No WiFi, no electricity, nothing. I would be totally cut off from my daughter and from the people taking care of her the entire time. And I was scared.
And I guess I had never in my life considered that anything would ever be too much for me. I had told myself, I’m better off a single woman and mothering on my own than I am partnered in this. And so then I had to walk that talk. I mean, I freaked out. I absolutely freaked out and crumbled. And then I found myself in this pathetic posture on the floor of my kitchen of my apartment, and I found a little paper bag, like a lunch bag, and I did the classic thing where I put my mouth into the lunch bag and used it to catch my breath.
You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to try. You’ve made this promise that you were going to keep going and keep trying. And you know what? Somehow I did, I pulled myself together and I knew that what was actually going to get me through feeling so overwhelmed and soothe my mind would be to over prepare. So I just hit the ground running and I started planning crazy for this two week expedition.
I made sure everything was taken care of from all of the transportation to down to literally like how many pounds of rice I would need to pack in my backpack to hike into the field site in order to survive. And even more than all of the actual expedition logistics, the main thing that I had nailed down was exactly what I would need for my daughter to be safe and cared for while I was on the other side of the world. I had a whole system and plan in place for her to not just be cared for, but to be taken to preschool every day, settled in. I mean, I was on it, on it.
And on top of all of that, obviously the biggest part of this expedition was finding the gorillas. And I had done a little bit of primate work before, and so I had this expectation that it would be challenging to actually find these gorillas because they’re so elusive. And then in this area, they hadn’t even been studied yet. But after doing a ton of research, I learned about this group of people who were living just outside of this rainforest, and they’re called the Baka tribe.
So basically if anyone was an expert on lowland gorillas in that area, it would be someone from that group. And so I tracked some folks down and asked if I could hire anybody as a guide on this project. And a couple of men agreed, and I was able to basically grill them in advance. I mean, just asked them tons of questions about what they knew about these gorillas. And everything I kept hearing was, “Yes, lowland gorillas are there. Yes, I’ve seen them in this area before. Yes, I’ll be able to take you to them.” And I was so excited because everything was going according to plan.
And then just a couple of weeks before I was going to leave for this expedition, I got word from the folks at Johns Hopkins that they actually had a rule that was going to make a major change to my plan. For any travel done under the Johns Hopkins University name, some full-time staff member had to be a part of it. And I couldn’t think of a single full-time faculty member who would want to or would be able to accompany me, first of all, in such short notice. And second of all, to do research on gorillas in a rainforest in the Congo Basin.
And I thought, after all of this effort, I think at the end of the day, it’s not going to happen. And then a few days later, I got a message from the head of the department at Johns Hopkins who said, “Oh, hey, I think actually I have a solution here. We just had a staff meeting, and you won’t believe it, but someone from the staff actually volunteered to go on this adventure with you. I think you should come and meet her.” And I definitely don’t want to sound like a jerk, but my first impression of Jen was prim and proper and small. She’s a very petite woman, short, red hair, all buttoned up just this nothing like what I would’ve imagined for someone volunteering to come with me to the Congo Basin.
Jen, who is being her full forthcoming self, shared with me that she had never traveled outside of the United States, saved for one trip she made years before to Germany. She’d never been on an adventure, not in the outdoors, not on a long backpacking expedition. We were going to be dealing with, my goodness, spiders and snakes and gorillas and elephants and like the elements. I truly felt that she was not the right person for this expedition. But I didn’t have another choice. There was too much on the line, and it wasn’t like I could just find another volunteer in such a short amount of time.
And so a few days later, Jen and I flew to Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon and started our adventure. So a little geography lesson here. I’m talking about the Congo Basin, which is a region that is humongous, and it encompasses a good part of Central Africa, and it spans across multiple countries. And one of those countries is also Cameroon, and that’s where the Dja Faunal Reserve is located. And so once Jen and I arrived in Yaoundé, we ended up taking a day long drive to this little tiny village on the outskirts of the Dja Faunal Reserve. And we were in place there so that the next day we could begin our expedition to hike to the field site.
Jen and I woke up early in the morning, put on our clothes and our hiking boots and our backpacks, which probably weighed, I mean, a good 45, 50 pounds each. We walked out of the little hut that we had been staying in, and we met up with our guides and we mentally prepared ourselves to start this 15 kilometer hike, which is over nine miles to the field station where we’d be camping for the next two weeks. We got on the trail and the weather is hot and humid, and it smells moist, and it’s constantly drizzling. And if you were to look down, you would see that the forest floor was just teeming with life like centipedes and giant ants and every kind of insect was just making the forest floor move. There wasn’t even a proper trail. So the guides were just hacking through this dense forest with a machete. It was the most intense hike of my life. And I noticed that Jen was less and less able to keep up.
And at one point she called out to me and she said, “Rae!” And I heard her from a distance, and I walked back to her and she said, “I’m so sorry. I don’t want to cause problems. It’s my feet.” She hadn’t broken in her shoes, so she was kind of breaking them in at this rapid pace on this hike, and it hurt. And I remember at this point, we had something like six to seven hours left, and she even said, “I might need to turn back. If my feet hurt this bad already, I don’t think I can keep going.”
And I thought about it, I was the leader on this expedition, and I sat down with Jen and I said, “Jen, you got to decide right now because if you can’t keep going, we have to go back the other way immediately.” And she started to cry, and through a little bit of tears, she bravely said, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but we’re going to keep going.” I took a little bit off of her backpack, and I think we just reassembled everything so that she was carrying much, much less weight.
And we kept going. And honestly, Jen’s tears didn’t stop the whole time. And six hours later, we finally made it to camp. And I called to Jen because I didn’t see her yet. I said, “You’re almost here, Jen,” to give her a last bit of hope. And oh my goodness, her face was full of tears and she was limping. She was limping to the end of the trail. And I told her that I had set up her tent and she limped all the way over there, and she took off her shoes and her socks, and there was blood and there were blisters, and she was really not okay. Looking at her then outside of her tent, bandaging her own wounds is like, wow. Never in my life would I thought I’d be saying that this woman is a (beep) but she’s a (beep). I’m impressed with her. She’s a really good partner for this. I’m really glad we’re here together.
So we had an idea that lowland gorillas has existed in this forest, but we needed proof. And the proof would be visual observations, photos and data of where we found them and how many of them. And that way I could report back to Johns Hopkins that this is a viable area for a lowland gorilla study, both for the field course and for the long term research project that I’d be leading.
And luckily, we had these two guides with us, and they were from the area, and they told us that they had seen these gorillas. So now we just needed to find them. So a few days later, after Jen’s feet had started to heal, one of our guides, Romeo, took us on this incredible hike to look for the gorillas. And he would stop me every so often and point. So he’d point up and show me a beautiful, beautiful bird like a toucan. And we would see monkeys, colobus monkeys would swing through the trees and we’d hear their calls. And I mean, the amount of biodiversity was truly, truly overwhelming. But at the same time, we didn’t see any gorillas.
Not even signs of gorillas like paw prints or a bed because they make these little beds in the branches and the grasses and stuff. And so we just kept trying. And so it was around day four and we still had seen no signs of gorillas, not a single thing. And I remember there was a little bit of panic that set in with me where I thought to myself, oh my gosh, I told Johns Hopkins University that there’s a field site in the Congo Basin where there are lowland gorillas. Oh my gosh, are they going to think I’m a fraud if I don’t come back with a picture or some kind of proof of these animals?
And I was like, “What are we going to do?” And as we were walking through the rainforest on these long hikes looking for gorillas, my mind would start to wander. And I think that it was probably around that time that I started checking in with myself about whether this place was the right place for me to build a new project. And I had every reason to think, yes, yes it is. But there was something that was just nagging me. But it was probably about a week in that we were walking and walking and walking, I was looking up at the beautiful tall trees, and the guide stopped really, really quickly. And he pointed down and he said, “Look, poop.”
And I’m a bear biologist. I love poop. I look at poop all the time. Poop tells us so many things, and not only tells me the species was literally right here, I could take a GPS point to say, “This animal was here very recently.” So they’re alive, they’re well, they’re thriving, they live here. But I can also then dissect the poop and figure out what the animal is eating. And so poop isn’t super flashy or exciting always, but it is really, really important data. And so I looked down and I saw the poop, but I didn’t necessarily know what I was looking at. Is this buffalo poop? Is this chimpanzee poop? What is it?
And he said it was gorilla poop. And so this poop was fresh and warm. I know this is so gross, but it’s true. And so that meant that I don’t know, the gorilla could have been watching us. It could have been very, very, very close, but just all the days before and for the rest of the expedition, we never actually ended up seeing a gorilla with our own eyes. And it’s funny, we came halfway around the world looking for evidence of these gorillas, and then all we ended up finding was this poop. But even though it was just poop, it was still that proof that gorillas were actually living in this rainforest. And they were here all around us the whole time. And so we did have enough evidence to bring back to Johns Hopkins. And even though we didn’t get to see a gorilla, Jen and I were able to return home feeling really optimistic.
When I got back, I wrote a big report about the expedition and presented it to the chair and the dean of the school. And they were really impressed. And they were like, “Okay, great. We would love to formally give you the opportunity to teach this field course.”
And of course, I was thrilled. I mean, this is why I had gone on the expedition and even done all this. And I don’t know why, but I started thinking back to that moment when Jen and I had first arrived at the field site in the Congo Basin, and I was watching Jen bandaging her bloody feet. And I was really seeing this woman who was pushing herself. And of course, being challenged can be totally rewarding. And I think for Jen on this expedition, it absolutely was. But when I was reflecting on my own life and the way that I was challenging myself, it’s like, God, it’s almost like my whole life was these bloody feet. I wanted to do the most. I wanted to explore a new place and study a new animal and take on a new project and do it all as a single mom.
And I was proud of myself, but I was also experiencing so much anxiety and stress. And I thought about this opportunity in the Congo Basin that I had worked so hard for, and I thought, yeah, I could do amazing work there. But at that moment, it didn’t feel quite worth it. Does my whole life need to be a challenge? What if I give myself the permission to scale back? What if all of this were easy? And I surprised myself and I went back to the department chair and I explained, “You know what? There’s a lot that has changed in my personal life, and I know that I came to you all with this idea, and I asked for this funding to go out and do this thing, but the way I feel right now is that this isn’t the right choice for me to make. I don’t think I should teach this course after all.”
And instead of canceling it, I did come with a solution. One of the guides, Romeo, was actually interested in wildlife ecology and had been studying it. And he had been the one who had taught us the most about that area. And I realized that everything these students would be learning from the forest, they would be learning from him anyway. So I’ve recommended that he be the one to teach the field course and the folks at Johns Hopkins agreed. And a group of 12 students went to the Congo Basin to study with Romeo.
And they had the role that they would still need a full-time Johns Hopkins professor to accompany. And believe it or not, it was Jen who volunteered. Jen went and the students went, and it was a huge success. They loved it. And I never regretted saying no to teaching this course because it didn’t as much seem like I was saying no to the Congo Basin opportunity. I felt more like I was passing the baton to someone else. And what I truly couldn’t have predicted was that passing the baton was actually giving me what I needed, which was a permission to do less.
And once I let go of this idea that my whole life needs to be a struggle, basically to prove that I’m working hard and to prove that I’m deserving of success, well, that’s when success started coming to me more easily. Now, I live within an hour of my field site. I don’t have to cross continents just to go to work. And I’m leading a groundbreaking research study on large carnivores that have never been studied before. My life just got easier and more stable. I’m not a single mom anymore. I have a partner who’s super supportive of me and my work and of our family, and we even had another baby together. But that’s a story for another time.
You just listened to season two of Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant. We want to thank all of our guests for sharing their amazing wild stories and you, our dedicated listeners, for coming back for season two. And now we want to hear from you. What did you think of this season? What was your favorite episode? What kinds of stories do you want to hear in season three? Let us know. You can leave us a review on your favorite podcast listening app, or you can send us an email at naturepod@wnet.org. You can also get updates on bonus content by following me, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant and PBS Nature on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook. You can find more information on all of our guests this season on each episode’s show notes, and you can catch new episodes of Nature, Wednesdays, at 8/7 Central on PBS, pbs.org/nature and the PBS video app.
