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Traveling throughout North America and sharing inspirational stories of conservation, Peter and I constantly encounter incredible wildlife.
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You are kidding me.
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Both large and small.
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Wasn't that long ago you were emerging from an egg?
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That's right.
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These moments are always magical and often unexpected.
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Oh, my goodness.
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A mother and a baby.
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Yeah.
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Today, we're on a journey to encounter animals in their natural habitats.
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We begin today's journey on the Texas Gulf Coast.
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Elsao's ranch has been a working cattle ranch for more than 150 years.
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It's also home to some pretty impressive wildlife, from ocelots to antelope.
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James Powell is showing me around.
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So I honestly didn't expect to see things here in South Texas.
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So rush and breathe.
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It's beautiful.
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This is the perfect time of year to come and visit us.
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Everything is blooming, blossoming.
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Elsaus is home to three ecosystems found in South Texas coastal sand plains, Gulf marshes and scrub country, which is where we are now.
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Now, these look like wildlife trails through here.
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It is.
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You can picture an ocelot coming through this pretty easily.
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They're low to the ground.
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They're snaking their way through.
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But what you'll see also, whitetail deer, no guy antelope, all those other big mammals just working their way through this stuff.
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We'd be caught up on everything and struggling, and they just ghost through these trees.
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It's amazing.
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Hey, look at that.
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That's a Texas tortoise.
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Texas tortoise.
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That's a Texas tortoise.
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And this is about full growth.
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Yeah, that's that's an adult.
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They are not an endangered species, but they are state threatened.
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Unlike their desert tortoise relatives across the Southwest, the Texas tortoise doesn't typically dig Burrows.
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They find shelter in the cool shadows of this thick vegetation, exploring all sales.
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Ranch is amazing, but it's also best to keep your eyes and ears on high alert.
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Oh, wait, wait.
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Hold on a minute.
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Look at this.
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This is a Western Diamondback.
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And this is.
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This looks like an adult western.
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This is an adult.
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He's not a he's not a super large one.
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Seems to know where we are.
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Yeah, he knows where we are for sure.
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Yeah.
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So he's basically sensing our heat.
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He knows we're a large, warm object.
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They're a lot more scared of us than we are of them.
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So historically, people fear snakes.
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The first thing they want to do is kill them, and they're afraid of them.
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They don't understand them.
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Why are they so important?
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If they weren't here eating the things that they eat, that could throw the entire ecology of this area out of balance.
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I agree.
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So I think we're doing the right thing.
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We've observed him.
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We appreciate him.
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He's a magnificent looking snake.
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And now we'll let him go on about his way.
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We let him go do his thing and we'll go do ours and.
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And hopefully not cross paths accidentally.
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Absolutely.
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Yeah.
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Our rattlesnake encounter was unplanned.
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But other wild animal encounters are carefully prepared and carried out by professionals here in the remote mountains of New Hampshire.
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We're about to come face to face with a mother black bear and her Cubs.
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Black bears were nearly wiped out across New England just a few decades ago.
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Now the wild population is making a comeback, thanks in part to the New Hampshire Department of Fish and Game.
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Right now, the biologists here are preparing the sedative that we'll use to tranquilize the mother bear.
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They've been monitoring the location of the mother bear for several months using radio telemetry.
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It's the same technology we highlighted on Wild Kingdom over 40 years ago.
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Wildlife biologists have been putting radio telemetry collars on bears in recent years to track them in their habitat.
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The collars send out radio signals that can be picked up by the antenna as far as 5 miles away.
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It is necessary to change the batteries in these collars each year.
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The easiest time to do this is in the winter when the black bear is in her den, has delivered her Cubs and the new little family is hibernating.
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We got the mother bear anesthetized.
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I can already see a little cub.
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It's like a light kind of a grayish color.
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I got to get in there checking on bears in their hibernation dens.
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It's something I've done many times in my work as a wildlife ecologist.
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But I got to say it never gets old.
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OK, we've got 2.
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We've got two.
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Hello.
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And we've got, we have three newborn Cubs to this Mama.
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I'm going to pass them off to some of our crew to keep them warm.
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They are too little to thermoregulate right now, which means they cannot produce their own body heat.
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They need their mother's body heat or a volunteer to keep them warm.
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Welcome to motherhood.
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This is science, but it's also magical.
