Near-Death Experiences in the Field

Being a wildlife ecologist can be dangerous in a lot of ways, even if you take all the proper precautions because there are always these little things like even mosquitoes, you know, they can carry diseases. There are snakes, they bite you, or scorpions. And then of course I deal with large mammals usually, and, you know, wild animals are unpredictable. And then there can be these more surprising things that are really, really hard to see ahead of time.

::And as I get up to turn around and head back down the hill, I am face to face with the bear.::

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. I want to tell you my story and what it’s actually like to track bears in the Sierras, chase Lemurs in Madagascar, live with lions in Tanzania, and do all of that as a Black female scientist. This is Going Wild.

So today I’ll be sharing multiple stories and they’re about near-death experiences I’ve had while doing my job and traveling, but the stories themselves are pretty distinct and pretty different. And the first one has to do with a type of animal that I used to really not worry about. I wouldn’t necessarily say I have a deep fear of this animal, but after the experience that I had, I now try to avoid them at all costs.

When I was living in Tanzania in 2009, I was working day-in and day-out tracking a lion population and living in a tent at this pretty awesome field station outside of the Tarangire ecosystem.

Living in a tent was great. I mean, we had all kinds of adventures. I remember one time an elephant came to steal the water from our water barrels. It was just so exciting and just such an authentic, like bush experience. But, I learned early on that some of the most dangerous snakes in the world exist in this area.

Every night we had to check outside and inside of our tents to make sure nothing was in there.

One day I was coming back from dinner, all ready to be jumping into my sleeping bag and go to sleep, and I did the thing that I always did where I circled my tent with my flashlight, looking for any type of snake on the outside. Didn’t see any. So I took off my shoes and went butt-first into my tent.

And then slowly, after a couple of minutes, decided to start shooting my flashlight around to look for anything crawling in there. Immediately, when I laid down, I saw something in the corner squirm.

To me, it looked like a tiny little worm. And by tiny, I mean, tiny compared to a snake. The worms in Tanzania were actually pretty huge. So it just looked like there was a dark worm in the corner. And I thought to myself, oh God, I was looking for snakes, but I didn’t realize there was some giant Tanzanian worm in my tent. If it were a snake, I’d at least be able to call for help and someone else would take it out for me, but with a worm, I can’t do that. That would be embarrassing. I have to get it myself. And here I was in my pajamas. So I hopped up really quickly because I didn’t know where that worm went. And I started picking up the little items that I had in the corners of my tent to try to see if I could uncover it again. It took me a while and I started thinking that maybe I had lost it.

I realized that I really needed something else to catch it with like maybe a Tupperware, or some type of container. So I hopped outside of my tent, zipped it back up, and went into the kitchen to see if I could get something to put this worm in, in order to then toss it back outside.

Edie, who was one of the staff members on this trip, was still in the kitchen because he did a lot of the cleaning up for the camp. Edie was awesome. He was probably the hardest-working member of our team and he did all of the extra things. He fixed the cars when they were broken, he put away tons of supplies when we were done at the end of a field day, he was a real jack of all trades.

I asked him for what I needed and told him that there is a big worm in my tent. And he looked at me and said, “Is it black?” “Yeah, it’s a dark color. I can’t really tell because it’s night outside.” He said, “That’s not a worm!”

He explained to me that it must have been a baby black mamba snake and black mambas are one of the deadliest species of snakes in the world. If they bite you, there’s a pretty good chance that you weren’t going to make it. I couldn’t believe it. I had been chasing a black mamba around my tent for the last several minutes and was about to hit the hay with my head on a pillow, right by where it was.

Edie told me that he needed to be the one to get it out. He told me to stay in the kitchen, but of course, that wasn’t acceptable for me. I wanted to at least watch what he did.

Edie crashed into my tent, messed everything up, threw everything around, but came out valiantly with the little baby black mamba in the bag. I felt like such a fool. Like of course my little American brain thought that it was a worm when really it was the deadliest snake in the world.

I was so thankful to Edie. It was at that moment that I realized the seriousness of those warnings I’d been given about looking for snakes. My whole snake tent checking exercise completely changed after that. I was super careful, and it was on another one of these checks that I think I saved my own life, but possibly put someone else’s in grave danger.

At this point in the summer, it was about halfway through and I saw something slither just like around the corner of my tent on the outside.

So Edie comes over and I was able to kind of let him know that the usual was happening: I think I saw a snake. I needed him to help me find it so that we could decide if it was dangerous or not, and take it away.

He and I circled my tent over and over. We both kept hearing the rustling sound.

And all of the sudden… I shone my flashlight exactly on the face of a red spitting cobra.

It was up in the air. Its hood was out. It was showing its fangs. It was beautiful. It was gorgeous. It was stunning. It was terrifying.

The most important thing to know about a red spitting cobra is that they spit their venom and they’re really able to target their prey because they shoot the venom into the eyes.

I yelped and started to back away, which is exactly the right thing to do. And he came up behind me and kind of pushed me out of the way and I saw the whole thing happen: the snake shot its venom through the air, right into Edie’s eyes.

He screamed. The snake retreated. It just dashed off. I mean, this man was howling in pain. I thought like the chances of this actually happening were so slim to none, but this snake just shot him in the eyes. I was screaming, “Help! Help!” Edie was screaming, of course, in a language that I didn’t understand. And he started to say, “I can’t see! I can’t see!”

The thing about red spitting cobras is that they blind their enemies. They spit the venom into their eyes and you go blind. It was happening to Edie.

We kept getting tons and tons of water to try to get the venom out. And at the same time, Peter who was a big strong member of the crew picked him up — quite literally carried Edie in his arms — and brought him to the Jeep.

There was a venomous snake center in the general region of Tanzania, where we were living. They did a lot of conservation work, but also they were known to have antivenom. Of course, this place wasn’t easy to get to. And no one in my team had ever been there… except Edie.

Edie at this point was laying down in the back seat. He wasn’t screaming anymore, but he was in pretty tough shape. Like, he wasn’t moving around a lot or saying anything barely, just kind of weeping quietly and saying a lot of things I couldn’t understand in Swahili.

I thought Edie was going to either die or go blind permanently and that it would have been my fault.

By some miracle Edie knew enough, he could explain enough to Peter in Swahili that we were able to get there, but it took all night.

So it was like medicine in the eyes, antivenom into his body, and he had to spend the night. They realized that he was in such critical shape, at least for saving his vision, that he would have to stay to be monitored.

After the snake center, Edie was taken back to his home for several weeks. We got updates here and there to learn about his recovery and it was going so slowly. And of course, I was back at camp absolutely freaking out, just overcome with worry. What if he was blind for life and what if that made it so that he couldn’t work in most jobs ever again?  I was worried that I had absolutely, and quite honestly ruined his life.

And then one day we got a call that Edie himself was returning back to our camp.

My mind was racing and I had all these questions like, well, does this mean he’s okay? My biggest fear was that he was going to return to camp for the sole purpose of yelling at me for putting him in danger, creating this horrible situation where he loses while my life got saved.

He pulled in, and everyone truly ran out to greet him. I mean, there were cheers that he was back. I joined everybody in the cheering, but I was one of the first people he saw.

He opened the door and he just smiled so big, this big, beautiful smile. And I remember I couldn’t help, but look in his eyes and they looked as bright and healthy as ever. And he looked at me He just said, “From now on, you’ve got to catch your own snakes.” And everybody erupted in laughter. I erupted in kind of that nervous, like relieved laughter. But I realized that it wasn’t my fault. We’re all in this together. We’re a team. And as a team, we welcomed him back in.

So at this point, the snake experience was quite a long time ago and my life and career and lately my long-term research projects have been based in North America and particularly focused on large mammals, like bears and mountain lions. And so I don’t get asked as much these days, you know? Oh, have you ever been attacked by a red spitting cobra, but instead, I get questions like, well, Rae, have you ever been attacked by a bear?

You know, and the answer is no, I hope I never ever am, but I did have this one really scary, close encounter.

So what you’re supposed to do if you encounter a bear is back away slowly from the bear, remaining very, very calm looking above its head or below at its feet, but not making eye contact. If it’s a black bear and maybe you have a jacket on or something, you try to kind of intimidate the bear. So you might put the jacket over your head to make yourself look much taller, speak in a low and resonant voice. You can yell things like, “Get away, bear!” and if the bear continues to approach you spray bear spray to create that barrier, and then you’re really able to get away. You absolutely in no way ever run, turn your back on one of these animals and run.

It was the point in my career where I was doing my Ph.D. and I was spending most of my summers in Nevada studying bears. So I was trapping them, tranquilizing them with a team of folks from the State agency and we were really trying to gather as much data, get as many collars on black bears as we could to understand their movements and their behavior.

They have home ranges, which is basically their territory. That can be like a hundred square kilometers, you know, so we can basically go out camp set traps for a little bit, but it’s not abnormal for us to miss them.

This time was going to be a really long stretch. I was doing about 10 days of this camping. It was actually going to be pretty physically challenging.

And like the task was for me to drive the Suburban as far as I could on the road and then I was hauling an ATV behind me. So then I was going to get off on the ATV and then buzz up into these mountains as best as I could. And then I’d have to get off the ATV at one point and hike in, maybe a mile or so, into these canyons to set these bear traps.

And the biggest thing is that when we set bear traps, especially in the summers in Nevada, we have to check them at least once a day. The best case scenario is twice a day. But in case we were to ever trap a bear, we don’t want them to be caught in that trap and not able to access water or something or shade for too long. So in order to be responsible, we have to check them over and over again, even if they are in these super remote areas.

It was just like pretty brutal, pretty serious fieldwork. And then there was this one particular day.

I was about eight out of the 10 days into this trip. Hadn’t caught a thing and my morale was pretty low.

I remember, you know, driving the truck as far as I could go hopping off, buzzing up the mountain in my ATV, as far as I could go, hopping off. And at that point, I was so hot. I was so sweaty. I was so miserable that I remember I threw my backpack. I just threw it on the ground. “Rae, nobody’s around. Nobody knows what’s going on. No, one’s gonna see you. Just leave the backpack. It’ll be fine. That way you can get up and down much faster, and maybe you’ll have a little bit of a chance to chill back at camp.”So I did.

And it does feel way different. I mean, without having those, you know, 25- 30 pounds on my back, I was able to kind of spring up the hill.

I’m hiking, hiking, hiking. I get close to where I set the bear trap.

No bear, just like I knew. I knew there wasn’t going to be a bear. And so I go over to the trap. I noticed that the bait hasn’t been taken. I noticed that nothing has been tampered with, just like I predicted.

I did this all in a big hurry. And as I get up to turn around and head back down the hill, I am face-to-face with the bear.

This giant male black bear.

It was huge. And it was maybe six feet in front of me.

He was angry. He was threatened. He was absolutely ready to pounce on me. The reason I knew is because when black bears are being aggressive, they often paw the ground a little bit. It’s almost like they make this kind of stamping posture and then they sway their heads back and forth, back and forth. Almost like they’re shaking their heads really big. That’s exactly what the bear was doing to me.

Now, this is really embarrassing for me to say because I am a trained bear biologist. I was a trained bear biologist when this happened and I still reacted in the worst way possible.

I ran.

That is the worst thing you can do. And yet, that is exactly what I did in that moment. My instincts just made me book it out of there. And of course, the bear started to chase me because I hadn’t shown it that I was intimidating. I hadn’t shown it that I wasn’t prey.

I ran and ran and ran. I fell down. I twisted my ankle. I scratched myself. And every time I looked back behind me, the bear was like right on my tail. It was like, I could hear it breathing in my ear.

I couldn’t believe that this is how I was going to die.

I remember at one point I stopped hearing the bear’s, like, breathing in my ear, but I kept going and kept going and would not stop to turn around and check. By the time I got back to my ATV, I grabbed my bag, I threw it over my shoulder, I jumped on the ATV, I turned it on, I sped away and went as fast as I could down. And it was only at that point when I was on the ATV, actually driving it forward through a little bit of a path that I turned to look back again. I couldn’t see the bear. I couldn’t see it anymore. All I could see was the trail of dust and rocks that were still kind of pluming in the air.

I realized very quickly that the reason I escaped, the reason that I didn’t get mauled by a black bear was because that bear itself let me escape. It wasn’t that I ran so fast or tumbled so fast down the canyon. It was that the bear chased me for a while and then decided it was going to let me go.

All of this was because of my own negligence. The fact that I left my backpack full of supplies at the bottom of that hill, the fact that I didn’t have my bear spray, the one thing that could have protected me so I didn’t have to run, the fact that I forgot all of the proper protocols when I did encounter the bear. I was able to properly scold myself and also give a lot of thanks to the universe that I didn’t end up dying.

So I am probably the biggest ambassador for bear spray. Absolutely ever. And I have this serious commitment because of personal experience to always do things the right way, whether it’s inconvenient, whether it’s exhausting, whether it seems silly, I am so strict with myself to adhere to procedure because I know exactly how just a little bit of laziness can be catastrophic.

But sometimes there is nothing that can prepare you for what you’re going to experience in the field.

::And we just heard gunshots, gunshots, gunshots, gunshots, gunshots, to the point that we all hit the floor.::

So my job can be dangerous for lots of reasons. Sometimes it’s the big, ferocious animals, sometimes it’s the tiny little critters, but oftentimes it’s also the people.

My team and I had spent about half of the summer working on tracking these lions in the Tarangire region and halfway through the summer we actually needed to go all the way to Arusha, which was the nearest city. And we all decided, okay, if we’re going to go all the way to Arusha, let’s actually make a big production of it. Let’s, you know, spend a whole weekend. Let’s really sink into, you know, being in the city for a couple of days before we head back to the field. So we all piled up into one of the trucks and we started the long, long, you know, six or seven-hour drive back to Arusha.

We struck up a conversation in our truck about maybe we should go out to dinner. This was like music to my ears, going out to dinner. We had been eating beans and rice for so long in our camp. And a little bit of giraffe here and there.

I jumped at the opportunity. I said, “Yes! Oh my goodness. Please, let’s go to a restaurant.” Everyone else seemed to be on board. All the choices were laid out for us, you know, Indian, Chinese Ethiopian…

We all said Ethiopian for sure.

As we were getting closer and closer to Arusha and my belly was grumbling more and more, I remember that one of my colleagues piped up and said, You know what, actually, I kind of think we should get Indian food. And then the argument ensued and as we started entering the city and navigating to the restaurant, the consensus in the car was, yeah, let’s save Ethiopian for next time and we’ll get Indian food. And this might seem like a tiny little decision, but it was actually one with life-changing implications.

The Indian restaurant and the Ethiopian restaurant were on opposite sides of the same street, just a little dirt road on the outskirts of town. So that meant if one of them happened to be really busy or it was taking forever we could easily walk across the street to the other one.

As we pulled up towards the restaurants, I could see them one across the street from the other, but they were just engulfed with flowers and trees and vines. And it was, to me, it just, it was so beautiful and so tropical. And it was like, these restaurants are little wooden shacks where most people just sit outside at a plastic table in a plastic chair and eat.

We sat down at one of the outdoor tables, you know, pulled up some chairs, waited for someone to notice that we were there, and bring us some menus. And as we sat and kind of took a load off and looked around and surveyed the scene, this all happened so quickly, but this really big truck came like barreling in, right in front of the restaurant.

And there’s a whole bunch of men in the back, like maybe, 10 guys in the back of this pickup truck. And they were holding what was obviously these really big guns, like machine guns. They jumped out of the truck and they ran right into the Ethiopian restaurant that we were staring at from across the street.

And we just heard gunshots, gunshots, gunshots, gunshots, gunshots.

Folks were screaming, but I didn’t know if the screams are coming from where we were or across the street. I was on the floor, like with my arms over my head, kind of not knowing if I was dead or alive or hurt or not.

And then all of the sudden, hearing that same truck and a lot of, you know, voices like barking and hearing it kind of screech off and go.

You know how some people say that when they’re having a traumatic event, like something horrible is happening, it seems like it was lasting forever? This to me seemed like just a brief one moment. It seemed like a second. And I don’t know how that works because it did happen quickly, but it must’ve been at least, you know, 60 seconds of this going on.

I remember, I felt like a man’s hand on my back, you know, like kind of like pressing down on my back and like shaking me and I got lifted up off of the ground and it was Peter, the guy I’d been working with all summer. He was big and strong and always on it. He hoisted me up by the collar of my shirt and pushed me kind of like never letting go, but pushed me back towards the car.

It was a few minutes before I finally asked what happened? Peter was able to say there was an attack at the restaurant across the street. But that was it. It wasn’t the time for me to push my colleagues for more answers. We had just narrowly escaped, being killed ourselves by choosing the Indian restaurant across the street from the Ethiopian place.

I learned that night that it must’ve been some type of terrorist attack, that there are certain types of political, cultural, religious groups that are at odds with each other in this part of the world. And there are some really, really bad people out there who commit these acts of terrorism. Too many people have been killed because of mass shootings. And it’s all terrorism. All of it. Whether it’s in the United States or otherwise, these are all terrorist attacks. And I was witness to one.

This was a tragedy and yet it comes to mind for me fairly frequently when people ask about, Isn’t your job dangerous? And, and what about the wild animals and you know, what close encounters have you had? You know, I can’t help, but think of, terrorism, mass shootings, you know, the threat of people gets in the way of me doing my work a lot of times. I didn’t lose my life that night, but I was really kind of reluctant for a while to travel more, to leave the house, to expose myself, to even get back on the road and go back into the bush. And so that’s, that’s the truth. Like that’s a big part of the truth about my experiences and my work and where I’ve been and what I’ve seen and what I’ve lived through and grown through. And what I still think about.

I’ve had many moments where I’ve thought to myself, maybe I shouldn’t do this career anymore. Maybe I shouldn’t do the fieldwork part. Maybe I shouldn’t do the travel part. I’ve had so many of those moments. But usually, I’m able to remind myself that, you know, every job has its hard things. Every job has its threats and its risks. You know, every job can feel like work sometimes. And usually, those thoughts and those feelings are balanced out by all of the wonderful things that happen. You know, the wonderful, like mental health benefit of spending time in nature, the wonderful way I feel when I am making an impact on improving the natural world.

I particularly feel that humans are a part of nature, not separate from it, but I understand that not every human being necessarily feels that way, but I do. And so, working to understand, and to help protect nature feels like working for the greater good of this wonderfully connected world to me.

It just feels like a proper service that is also fun and interesting and thoughtful. It truly hits my personal purpose. The risks are worth it. For me. And it’s an individual decision. All of the people that I’ve worked with, in all of these stories, are still doing this work, not just me, so it seems that the risks are worth it for most of us.

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This episode of “Going Wild” was hosted and written by me, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, production by Rachel Aronoff, Danielle Broza, Nathan Tobey, and Great Feeling Studios. Editing by Jakob Lewis. Sound Design by Cariad Harmon. Danielle Broza is the digital lead and Fred Kaufman is the executive producer for Nature. Art for this podcast was created by Arianna Bollers and Karen Brazell. Special thanks to Amanda Schmidt, Blanche Robertson, Jane Lisi, Chelsey Saatkamp, Natasha Padilla, and Karen Ho.

“Going Wild” is a new podcast by PBS Nature. Nature is an award-winning series created by the WNET Group and made possible by all of you. Funding for this podcast was provided by grants from the Anderson Family Charitable Fund and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.