Unlocking Nature's Secrets: Insights from 'Just the Zoo of Us' - Part 1

(This is Part 1 of 2)
Most people underestimate how deep their connection to nature really is—and how the smallest action can reshape our relationship with the environment. Imagine discovering that your passion for animals and wildlife could be your pathway to influencing conservation, even if your career path didn’t follow the traditional route.

Join host, Rick Schwartz for an engaging conversation with Ellen Weatherford, host of the popular podcast 'Just the Zoo of Us,' as she shares her journey from wildlife enthusiast to podcast creator, her insights on neurodivergence, and the importance of connecting with nature and community. Discover how curiosity, passion, and understanding ecosystems can inspire conservation and personal growth.

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Links mentioned in this episode:
Just the Zoo of Us
Just the Zoo of Us on IG
Just the Zoo of Us on FB


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ZoologyRick.com

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Podcast Music: Positive Carefree Folk Pop
Artist: Burgberg
Used with Full Music Standard Lic.

Transcript

0:00

At any point in my life, it's always been this sort of anchoring point of interest. I've been kind of a hobby skipper. I would pick up all these hobbies and get really, really into them, but they have always centered around animals. When I've gone through periods of time where I've been very into like drawing and illustrating, it was always I was drawing pictures of animals. Or when I got really into photography, I was doing a lot of photographs of animals. That that has always been the through line. So it seemed pretty natural that if I was gonna do something, I was gonna somehow make it about animals. Over the years, my curiosity and experiences, along with the many people I have worked with, revealed to me we all have a desire to feel connected to the natural world. You're listening to Animals, Nature, and You, a podcast that explores a connection between animals, nature, and humans. A podcast that celebrates learning more, following our curiosity, and reconnecting with the natural world. Welcome to another episode of Animals, Nature and You. As you know from the intro, my name is Rick Schwartz. I'm your host and the producer, and I'm also really glad you are here. Now, if this is your first time listening, if you're here because you know Ellen or you saw Ellen post about this or you just happen to find the podcast, hold on, buckle up. This is a long, very divergent conversation that goes all over the place, but it is really, really good. And it's reflective of the nature of animals, nature and you. Because the I've always had this idea. Back when I was out of college and started really doing wildlife education, working at a large nonprofit zoo, a lot of people always approaching me saying, What can I do? How can I help people? My job was educating people about wildlife, getting them to fall in love and care and learn more, and then hopefully take action. But then often I think people outside, once they stepped outside of this zoo and back into their normal lives or their day-to-day life, whatever it might be, that it was it was lost. It's like, well, what can I do? What I'm looking around in my space and I can't see how I can take action that's going to be impactful. I want to see the impact. The conversation that I have with Ellen, we cover so much. We cover personal experiences, wildlife education, neurodivergency, moving across the country and how we experience nature differently in those spaces and all of that. It is very much reflective of the human experience. We go through changes, we go through eras, we go through all sorts of things in life. And this conversation goes through all sorts of things, and I love it. So just so you know, I've recorded several episodes ahead of time. I'm going to be taking a vacation here in June. This is the first episode of June, so it's already been recorded. But this intro, I want to, I wanted to preface this. I want you to pay attention to the passion, the excitement, and the human side of things in this conversation. Ellen, my guest, she was nice enough to reach out to me and ask me to be a guest on her podcast, an incredibly cool podcast, just the zoo of us. Been around for a while, been doing some great work. Of course, all the links will be below. But this is going to be broken into two parts because it's such a robust conversation. And I do recognize that often you go over 50 minutes or so. It's a bit hard sometimes to have time to go through the entire episode. So we're breaking it into two parts. So I'll interrupt as we get to the end of part one here. And don't worry, if you're listening to this on Thursday when the episode comes out, part two will come out first thing Friday morning. If it's already Friday, good news for you. Both both parts are already out. So with that, let me give you a quick introduction to Ellen because, you know, if if nothing else, it's it's funny. I think we cover this in the introduction a little bit. We've had overlapping connections up until she invited me just a couple weeks ago to be a guest on her podcast. We had never talked. We have never met in person. I've been to Seattle where she lives. She's been here to San Diego where I live. We've never actually connected in person. These two conversations where I'm a guest on her podcast and she's a guest on mine is is really our first conversations. And yet it's one of those things where it's just, it's like hanging out with someone you've been around for a long time. And I hope through this interview, through this conversation that she and I have, you feel a part of that circle. You feel a part of that community. You feel like you're just hanging out with some friends, having a conversation. It is great stuff. So just a quick introduction for you, just in case you don't know who she is. Ellen Weatherford is a Washington-based science communicator who focuses on educating general audiences of all ages about wildlife and nature, with of course some humor, which is probably why she and I get along so well. In 2019, she turned her passion for wildlife into a hit podcast, just the zoo of us, and has been writing and producing fun, approachable science content for both web and print ever since. So, with that, as I always do, I want to welcome Ellen and say thank you so very much for taking the time to be on Animals, Nature, and You today. Anything for you, Rick. I'm so excited to be here. So excited to get to talk to you. I know we're gonna have a great time. We always do. Yes. And for those listening, I'm gonna tell you up front right now, just knowing how Ellen and I can talk for a long time. This might be broken into two parts because if it goes over 50, 60 minutes, I try to break it into two parts just to be gentle with my listeners. So who knows? We'll see what happens. But if there's any guest who's gonna go over your allotted time, it is gonna be me. Amen. Amen. Well, fair, that's fair. Um, so to start off with, you and I have kind of had a lot of connections through other people that we know. You're in the Seattle area. I grew up in Washington State, have a lot of roots back in the that and connections back in Seattle as well. We've been in tights on social media over God knows how long. And but what's I think most probably interesting to my audience, if they don't know who you are, you are in charge of and run this incredibly cool podcast that is well, it started sort of with a different concept from what you shared with me, anyhow, and to versus what it is now, but it's still you're well, it's so we're recording what this is May. You're at 330 some episodes right now. I know that's crazy to me. That in itself is crazy to me. How long? So when did it start? Let's start with that. Let's give a little background to the for the audience. For sure. Uh, my husband and I started this podcast together in 2019. So it is now seven years old. I think maybe as of the day that we're recording this, like possibly exactly seven years old. Oh, happy birthday. And we started it just a couple months after we had gotten married. Uh, so we were newlyweds and we were really just like looking for a fun, silly hobby to do together. We just wanted something that we could work on together that would be like creative and engaging and like a fun new thing. And we really just ordered a couple of cheap mics off Amazon. USB plugged them right into the laptop, like came in from zero. We'd never done any media before, never certainly never made a podcast, but never really had done any creative media, not anything like that. Uh, and it really was just gonna be a silly little thing we were gonna do for like a few weeks and maybe put up a few episodes that like our friends and immediate family could listen to. Uh, that would just be a fun and silly thing we'd try out for a few months. I'm one of those people that like starts a hobby and gets really, really into it for like three months and then moves on and forgets I ever did it. So I fully expected it was gonna be one of those. Um, but just to like say we did it and to have the experience, um, and then you know, it went really well and we just never did end up stopping. We clearly went past the three months. Yeah. I remember the very first time when we had been at it for a few months and put out a few actual like serious episodes that I had put actual effort into. Um, I still remember the first time that someone I didn't know tweeted about the podcast, and that was like when it really started to sink in, where I was like, oh, this is a real thing. Like this is this has escaped containment. Like there's been like a containment breach. So the format has changed a little from its origin. What was the origin that you and your husband came up with? Like, let's just do this for funsies, and then how did it start to evolve and grow? Yeah, so it really surprisingly has changed kind of little since we started it. Um, the original idea was just uh rating animals out of 10 uh in different categories, and uh the the categories have actually stayed the same the whole time, which is effectiveness, so physical adaptations, traits built into the animal's body, uh ingenuity, so like behaviors and clever things and ways the animal is solving problems, and of course, aesthetics, possibly my favorite category. How nice is this animal to look at? And I would say the biggest change that we there was a change we made super early on, uh, was that at first for the first few episodes, we would do this sort of like overall score where we like averaged all the scores together to give you this like overall. And then pretty quickly I was like, I don't like this because I feel like they're all averaging out anyway. It's not really very comprehensive. It wasn't I feel like it wasn't really adding anything to the format. So we stopped doing the overall scores at the end because everything else, everything felt like it was kind of averaging to about the same number. Whereas like the interesting thing about it would be where if you had an animal that was like, I don't know, like really, really well physically adapted, but maybe not the brightest bulb, you know, like or an animal that was maybe like really, really, really intelligent and had some really fascinating behaviors, but like physically wasn't that specialized or anything like that. Like that was what I felt like was interesting to me, whereas everything was like averaging out to about a seven, like a seven or eight or something like that. I was like, that's just not interesting. So we abandoned that. But then as I've brought guests in over the years, um, who maybe have like a really, really wide variety of topics that they study, uh, I we have started including things like having guests come on to do like top threes. So like a guest might come on and they might want to do like their top three, I don't know, carnivores or like uh their top three stories about such and such. Or I've had people come on to do like history reviews in the sense of like I had a a guest on. We I think we ended up having to split this episode because it was so long. I don't remember if we split it or not, but it was like a history of the evolution of bugs. So like from like the beginning of arthropods to the present and like how bugs, how the evolution of bugs has like impacted the world and like how the world has been shaped by the evolution of bugs. So like I've we've gotten creative and we've gotten really flexible with the format. I really, especially when I have guests on, I don't want guests to feel like they have to like you know, make themselves fit into the boxes of our existing format. I always tell people, I'm like, do what you want, talk about what you want to talk about, I'll make it work. You know what I mean? So so I guess over time, like it has changed a little bit, and especially because I'm kind of a repetition averse person, I get sick of doing the same thing too many times. So I do have to kind of build in some flexibility and build in some variety so that I myself don't go insane doing this podcast every single week. Understandable, understandable. So let me ask you this it started with the raiding animals. Are you or your husband scientists, biologists, zoologists? Where'd that come from? No. So where did that come from? Like, why of all the possible topics and things you know about, what was it that was like, we're doing this? And I mean, obviously, what, seven years later, it it works. Yeah, it's certainly wildlife and nature has certainly been what I would consider a special interest for me for my entire life. And anyone that's ever met me will tell you that. At any point in my life, it's always been, you know, this sort of anchoring point of interest. Like I mentioned earlier, I I've been kind of a hobby skipper. Like every time I would pick up all these hobbies and get really, really into them. But the they have always centered around animals, like animals and wildlife and nature. Like uh it when I've gone through periods of time where I've been very into like drawing and illustrating, it was always I was drawing pictures of animals, or when I got really into photography, I was doing a lot of photographs of animals. Like that that has always been the through line. So it seemed pretty natural that if I was gonna do something, I was gonna somehow make it about animals. And truthfully, I did really want, you know, as a kid, I was a big zoo kid. I was always at the zoo. Uh I wasn't maybe as outdoorsy as people would expect, but I was always at the zoo, always at museums and science centers and stuff like that. So, and always watching nature documentaries and reading nature encyclopedias and stuff like that. So definitely had this sort of like foundation of interest and knowledge and really wanted to be a zoologist as an adult. Uh, life did not take me down that path. I had a baby. I was a teen single mom, had a kid when I was freshly 18, ended up dropping out of my biology degree program, did not finish my biology degree, and just the academic path did not work for me. I could not see that through to the end, um, which unfortunately locked me out of a lot of like biology and wildlife careers. But I was like, by God, I'm gonna find a way. I'm gonna I'm gonna weasel my way into this industry one way or another. So this was kind of my backdoor approach of, and now that I've done this for years and I've had these guests on, I've had a chance to like make these connections and get to know all these incredible people that do those jobs and have like brought me into the world. Like people I've gotten to like go behind the scenes, like at zoos and museums and research labs and stuff like that. So I feel like I I get little tastes of the life because of the connections that I made through doing the show. And I'm gonna just jump in because a lot of, and my audience is probably sick of hearing me say this, but it's it is a drum I will never stop beating. So much of my career as a spokesperson and being an outward-facing entity of a large organization doing zoo and conservation work, I would always hear, whether from an adult or a kid, well, what can I do to help this? What can I do to save that? How can I? I'm not a scientist, you know, or oh, I thought about getting into wildlife biology when I was in college, but I took the surefire route of taking a business degree instead, so I have a job. So I can't do that. And so many stories of the people that I talked to, and your story is right in line with that, had to make the choice to step away from doing pursuing that level of education so you could be the mom role that you needed to be and what was going on in your life. And yet here you are now, seven years into a solid podcast, putting out content that's educational, informative, entertaining, bringing in guests that are from all walks of life. And this is your contribution to what needs to be done for wildlife, for nature, for animals, for conservation. And it's impactful. And sure, 18-year-old you is probably like, well, oh well, it was it was a dream. But here you are. And I I I I'm reflecting that back to you and pointing it out because I want my audience, whoever might be listening, whether it's someone who feels that they can't pursue this kind of dream or passion, they can find a way that everyone finds their own way in doing that. And it would have been very easy to just go, well, never mind then, you know, and and walk away from it. The other part of it too, we've got to recognize and total hat tip to just passion. We have our passions, and sometimes like you had you just said you had multiple hobbies over the years that had some involvement with wildlife and animals and all that, and you'd pick it up, you'd put it down, you pick it up, you put it down. The theme seemed to be the same all the way through, and now here you are with this one that's become so much more. So that's awesome. I I love that story so very much. That's the that's the power of a special interest baby. Yeah. Right. Especially for I think a lot of neurodivergent people struggle with traditional academic settings. That's usually like that's the pipeline, right? Like you you go to college, you get a degree, and then you get like a professional job. You get hired by an entity, right, to do uh the work that you do. And I think that is a huge barrier for a lot of neurodivergent people who do not thrive in that type of like rigidly structured setting. Um, and so a lot of us have to find our own way. We have to sort of force our way. Like uh you all of this has been, I've I've only been able to do this because I can work independently, like work on my own insane schedule, where literally last night I was up editing and posting my episode at like 12 30 a.m. Where like if this was like a regular nine to five office job, you know, I probably would have been fired within the first few weeks because I'm regularly, you know, having to work with my own weird, flexible schedule. Um, but a lot of that is, I think, like you mentioned, it does feel in the same sense that it is passion, it also feels like some there is something in my brain that will never let me will never let me let it go. You know what I mean? Like I Yeah, I do know exactly what you mean. Yes. It's it's like something in your brain that's like, if I'm not, if I'm doing something that is not related back to animals or nature or wildlife, there's always this thing that's clawing at the inside of your skull that's like, this isn't right. We need to go home. So since you brought it up, may I ask, you identifying as neurodivergence, what is your neuro neurodivergency secret sauce? What is it? Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what I refer to mine as a superpower. So I just was curious as to because I also think too, a lot of people in that neurodivergence spectrum sometimes feel pushed to the side. And especially those of us who don't do well academically, who have challenges in the traditional academic sense, you look at something that requires a master's or PhD, and you're like, okay, well, not for me. So I would love to hear your story. Yeah, I was not diagnosed with ADHD until uh like a lot of people, 2020, because I feel like 2020 forced a lot of people into managing themselves and having to look very critically at like, why is this such a struggle for me, right? Like, why am I struggling so much with setting up a routine and sticking to a routine for myself? So I think that forced a lot of people to confront uh some neurodivergent aspects of themselves that maybe they were able to uh push to the side in more traditional office settings. I worked in an office job, but having to work from home made me look around and realize, like, oh wait, there was I was relying on a lot of guardrails to keep me functional. And then just to to give you an idea of what that looked like for me when I had my my first meeting with a psychiatrist to like assess me for ADHD. Um, I was 15 minutes late to my appointment and I did not have the paperwork with me that they had specifically given me to fill out and bring to this appointment. So I was late and unprepared. And they were like, Well, you just so happen to be here for assessment. Checking all the boxes early. Yeah, yeah, that was a really quick appointment. And a history of like failing classes and dropping out of college and stuff like that. So it made a lot of it's like it made a lot of things made sense in retrospect. Yeah. Um, I was like, oh, yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense now. But I do feel like, like you mentioned, like considering it a superpower. In some ways, it is certainly not a superpower, but in some ways it certainly helps in the sense that like I can be laser focused on those special interests, right? If it's about nature, if it's about wildlife, it's about natural science, those are things that I really can lean into and laser focus on to the extent that I think a lot of people their eyes glaze over and they're like, I can't look at this anymore. Whereas I'm like, I can't look away from it. Like, I can't not focus on this, um, which is just the way that my brain has decided. Like, that is the thing. That is the thing you're not gonna be able to look away from. Unfortunately, uh, you know, doing my taxes and maintaining my schedule and, you know, things that would I'm gonna do it. Other adulting things. Right. Things that you need to like function in society, not so much with those, but like I can sit here and read a paper on like, I don't know, moth reproductive behaviors until it's like 2 a.m. Super helpful for what I'm doing, not helpful in literally any other context. Right, right. And thus a successful podcast. That's how it gets made. I I do have the benefit of like having a lot of my audience, a lot of my listeners, share some of these traits with me and are luckily very understanding and very accepting when, for example, my episode's a day late, or you know, I have to put up a replay because, you know, I wasn't Able to get a new episode out in a week or anything. So like it does require a little bit of flexibility and a little bit of like understanding from my audience, which luckily they're like the best people in the world and they're super sweet. Like, I'll just drop a message in my Discord that says, like, hey guys, episode's running late. I'm so sorry. Like it'll be up, but and everyone's like, you're fine. It's great. We all, we've all been there. Having like being neurodivergent and also having kids and having other stuff going on, you know, like it's it and and putting this episode out, which I I I should also clarify like this podcast is a lot of work. As you know, as someone who produces a podcast, it's a lot of work to do every single week. And also when you care about it deeply and you want it to be good, it would be a good thing. Yeah, you don't want to put out junk. Yeah. It would be one thing to just, you know, record for an hour and then slap up whatever you, you know, whatever comes out, comes out. But I go through everything very, very thoroughly. I edit, I'm fact-checking as I'm editing. So I'm making sure that I can like, you know, if we say something on mic that ends up not hand not standing up to fact check, I can take it out or I can edit in, you know, I can put in a little correction or something like that. So like, because it means so much to me that it is good and that it is correct and that it is helpful and educational, yes, that is a lot more work, but I'm willing to take on more work so that it can what so that what I'm putting out can be something that I'm really proud of and happy about. Right. And I think it also then is something the audience can appreciate more, you know, something that has been. Well, I mean, but I seriously, you and I both know the podcasting world can be the audience will will show up when it's good and they'll leave when it's not. And so the fact that you are this far into it with this the success level you have had or obsession with putting out a good product is clearly important and and and working well. So I I do want to jump back real quick to what you said about how you know yes, I I refer to it as a superpower, but that superpower can be a hindrance sometimes in things like taxes or adulting. I've I've come to the the comparison, the analogy. So for me, it's dyslexia, praxia, and other processing issues that just can throw me uh and and causes a lot of mental energy to be spent to read a sentence sometimes um or write one. But the point that that it gives what my superpower is, it gives me uh uh perspective on things, a creativity and the ability to do find workarounds in everyday tasks that normally other people are like, Whoa, what? And and I I started comparing it when I was discussing it with my daughter as she was growing up about what it's like to have uh these things. It's like being a cheetah. That you know, cheetahs are celebrated for being the fastest land animal and all these, but no one talks about the fact that they they can't fight like a lion or they can't deal with a challenge from a group of hyenas, or that it takes them an hour or more to recoup from their high-speed chase. They just celebrate the fact that they're the fastest land mammal. Yeah. And so I've always kind of looked at it that way. It's like, yeah, there's there's deficits to being a cheetah, but there's also that one couple of cool things that they have. And so I look at it, I try to remind myself when I get down to myself about neurodivergency that it's it's just like that. You've got a specialty, you've got that thing. There's also uh there's a book series. Anyone who is listening to this, who is a normal listener of just the zoo of us, knows it's time to reset the counter to zero. Zero days since last children of time mention. But my favorite book series is called Children of Time. Have you ever read it? Have you heard of it? No, uh-uh. No, I don't read much. Okay, it's a sci-fi series. Um, and each book centers on these spacefaring uh civilizations where uh each one started from an animal on Earth, right? That has basically been either genetically modified or like had their evolution accelerated to the point that they reach these, you know, civilization levels of um so the first one's about spiders, jumping spiders, the second one is about octopuses, uh, and in the third one there are crows uh who have reached these like levels of being like you know hyper intelligent civilizations. And in the the one where there's crows, I'm sorry, this shouldn't really be a spoiler. This is sort of like at the fund fun fundamental level of the narrative. But if you haven't read it yet and you want to, just pause for a little bit. Turn the volume down, come back in a box. Right, right. Um, the crows basically there, because uh what I love about the the author, Adrian Tchaikovsky, actually has a background in zoology. And so he into he incorporates the natural like intelligences of these animals in fascinating ways. And the one with the crows that really stood out to me was that he incorporated this nature of the crows being often in mated pairs, like being uh in pairs together. And basically the the crow civilization in his story, the pair of crows functions as one combined intelligence, where one of them is very novelty-seeking and is always looking for new things in the environment and looking at like patterns and looking for new patterns or looking for things that deviate from patterns, whereas the other one is the very like past looking, like always looking back and analyzing the data they've already corrected, already collected. So like one of them is always looking for new things and the other one is only looking back at what they've already got. Together, they make an extremely functional unit and extremely intelligent together. Whereas alone, either of them would be useless. And it it made me think a lot about like I see a lot of myself and like the novelty seeking, like always looking for something new, crow. And then I see a lot of my husband and like the analytical like data, like backwards looking, like let's look at what we've already got. And I wonder if, you know, that natural variation in the way that human intelligences work is just built into us being a social species, you know? Like we're meant to complement each other and we're meant to support each other. And like what we're our our strengths are supposed to work together, right? Like no one person is ever supposed to be relying on just their own strengths, right? Like you should always be part of a herd, part of a like a unit, a a community where everyone's strengths are covering each other's, right? Whereas like I have glaring weaknesses in my functional, uh in my functions, but they're they're made up for by like things that my husband or other members of my family are really good at. So I really enjoy thinking about humans as animals and like the interesting ways about us, like the things about us of like what was the context of this trait evolved in and what could this behavior have helped with? That is, I don't know. I I know some people are like made uncomfortable by that, but it it is comforting to me. It is, it is a true, it is true, excuse me, that I think some people try to distance themselves for whatever reason from the concept that humans are animals. But I I mean my own personal journey was I never really felt that I I fit in anywhere with because of my my neurodivergency and dyslexia and everything. And I never was able to feel like I fit in, whether it was really true or not. That was a perception that that I gave myself. So I always gravitated to towards animals, loved being around them. That's where I decided I or found out that I could have a career working with them. And through the process of working with so many different species, because I I never specialized. I always worked with birds, mammals, and reptiles, always loved learning more, super curious all the time. And as I realized that you the best way to communicate with animals is to understand their body language, understand their nuances, and and that's how you really get to know them. I realized that that's also what I did as a child growing up who couldn't read. That as I'm trying to learn these things, I was reading the body language of each teacher or adult who's trying to help me to understand what I was getting right and what I was getting wrong. I was picking up all those little nuances in body language, started to realize that in college that it all it all trained, whether you're talking about training a dog, working with an orca, or studying elephants or chimpanzees, humans fall into that category as well. And then we are a collective species. We're a species that does better in groups. You look at our history as a species, you look at modern times, you know, it's that multi-generational collection of people making up a small group, does best it socially, emotionally, health, physically, everything. And and then, of course, just being able to survive in the world in general. Yeah, it reminds me of the idea of menopause being exclusive, unique in the animal kingdom to humans specifically. Weird that it's no other primate, just humans, and like a few species of toothed whales. So like orcas, I want to say beluga whales, there's like a few like closely related toothed whale species. No other animal in the world has like a programmed like phase of life where despite being completely physically capable, you just reproductively stop. Like you are done reproducing and you just but your lifespan continues for decades after that point, but you are reproductively done. And for anybody listening, not sure, there are species where that happens, but it's usually very close to end of life. Right. You're you're done with life. Right, right. So uh anybody who's familiar with elephants might be like, well, wait a minute, I thought there's older elephant females that are still part of the herd before they pass away. It's like, yes, but that is usually much, it's a window of time for when reproductive ability stops and life stops, is is much closer. And what you're talking about is decades. I've also heard that elephants in captivity will have a longer period of menopause. But like Sure. And I I know from my own personal experience being around female elephants that reach their 50s, a lot of that though has to do with if they were not under human care, they would have passed away. But under human care, they have medical assistance available. They have uh we I mean, you know, tooth wear is usually one of the big things we've seen. Elephants, once those last set of teeth wear down, they usually starve out because they can't grind up that food. In the zoo or animal, you know, or human care type environment, we can create food sources for them that can extend beyond those teeth starting to wear out. So I think when we talk about looking at something like what you're talking about uh with the menopause, uh zoo animals bend the line a little bit because we can offer medical assistance on a variety of ways or nutritional assistance as well when they wouldn't have that uh naturally in the wild. Yeah. The as I I was reading this paper about the like how weird it is that it's just humans and toothed whales that will have menopause for decades at the end of their life. Like you have a lot of life left when you enter menopause. And the biggest like explanation for this that seems to be like the most accepted one is that it's because we live together and help take care of each other. So that like the idea is that there should be an extended period of time at the end of life where like a grandmother would be helping take care of her grandchildren, which would be expected in both humans and in you know, orcas, like a pot of orcas or something like that. Uh so I that was really interesting to me how like the social behavior of a species has like a physiological impact on like how the body is programmed to work, right? Yeah. That is fascinating to me. That is crazy. It really is. It really is. And it also makes you start to look at the the social side of things as far as how we interact with those that are older in our life, and what is it that we maybe need to reconsider about that engagement and that time together? What can we learn? You know, all of that. It's just it is so fascinating when you start to look at it, you step away from being human to look at the human. Yeah. You know, it that it is an opportunity. I'd love it. Right, because it's an opportunity to observe and go, oh wow, wait a minute. Tell me if you felt this way, because you have a kid too. Uh I felt both times after giving birth, because I've given birth twice now, and both times after giving birth, you know, I feel like uh there is an expectation, almost like a pop culture-y sort of idea that like after giving birth, there's a sort of like ethereal, angelic, a very like spiritual, like connected, emotional, you know, like a very uh clouds parting rays of sunlight kind of moment after giving birth where you're just basking in this sort of magical afterglow. I did not experience that at all. What I did experience felt like reverting to a feral primal being. Like I felt like a like a boar in the woods. Like I'd like this very sort of like I it was it it was interesting to me because I have never felt more like an animal like than after giving birth. Like it felt very grounded in like biology as like a an animal on earth. You know what I mean? Like it felt very grounding to me, not in a romantic and sort of like so. I did feel this sort of emotional uh surge, but it was a very primal protectiveness. It felt like a very much like I would defend this thing with my actual life right now. Like I would, I, I would like fight a bear. I don't know if that was something that you experienced at all. Uh, but what I for me, the birth the experience of giving birth was the most like animalistic feeling I've ever felt. Yeah, I have never given birth, and I can only imagine that experience and sensation. And and as you're describing it, it makes complete sense to me that you would feel that. I'm just wondering if like if you felt that at all from a parent's. I can say definitely as a dad, I remember very clearly there um my daughter needed a a little bit of extra medical attention, thankfully nothing major, just a little bit when when she was delivered. And there was a point where they needed to take her to the room next door, and um my hackles went up. I was like, not out of my sight. Like you do whatever you need to do, but not out of my sight. Like I'm going with. You know, like I was like immediately, I was just like, and it and it was I don't want to say aggressive, but I like you said, I would have fought a bear to get in that other room if I had to. You know, it was it does feel like it's a very protective nature of the physical, it feels like a physiological urge, you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is the time when I have felt the most driven by like pure instinct in my life, like that where like instinct took over, and I felt like I was not making like logical thought processes, like or like my thought processes were not being informed by like my upbringing in the modern human world. It felt like my thought processes were being informed by like something deeply rooted in my cerebellum. Yeah. Well, you know, it and and to go back to what you just said, it wasn't angelic, it wasn't ethereal, it wasn't what our pop culture tends to push on us. You know, it is one of those things that coming from the biology world, we know that at that point, during the last parts of pregnancy and then the giving birth and afterwards, the hormones and everything that's that is put into a mammal's body is to make sure they're protective of that offspring, that they don't view it as something foreign, it's part of them. All the things that you know the wolves will go through and and everybody else that I've ever studied, it is a chemical hormone change that occurs for the success of the offspring. And when you look at that, then you also know with all mammals, with all individuals, it's different. The chemistry is different, the hormone level is gonna be different, how the body re responds to those hormones, everything, right? One female wolf is gonna act different than another, one pant is gonna act different than another, all of that. So now let's look at that with humans, right? So someone has this ethereal thing, they're gonna talk about it, it's gonna get romanticized, and that becomes the expectation. Yeah. But everyone's different, you know. I'm sure a lot of people I know I know personally a lot of people that did have that like ethereal glowing feeling. And I was like, I might bite somebody. I've never bitten anybody, but like I feel like I might. But let's not say it can't happen. But then the other side of the tube. Right? That's the general rule. If it's got a mouth that can bite. Next question, please. It's like my bite rate skits climbing. What I was gonna say, and I want to acknowledge too, there are those individuals out there who are on the other side of that spectrum. Yeah. That there are the situation inside the chemistry of their body doesn't give them that ethereal sense, doesn't even give them that protective sense. They feel distant, they feel disconnected, and you and you've got the whole world of postpartum. I've got an acquaintance of mine, she's on the TV side of stuff, and she it took her a long time, but she finally came out publicly with and and was part of a documentary movie that she helped produce about postpartum. And the challenge is that not only are you not you know hitting those social expectations, but then why do I feel this way? I don't even feel like myself. And so it's just very interesting. It is very interesting how the animal side, when you can step back from being a human and watch humans like animals to really look at the same things we would look at with other species and try to get a broader sense of what makes us tick. How do we work and why? I I'm not to like turn it around and be like interviewing the interviewer, but I wanna I wanted to like rewind a little bit and go back to something that you mentioned earlier about how you mentioned struggling with reading and with dyslexia and having a hard time with like printed materials or with with you know reading written materials. Do you feel like that has influenced your um path into podcasting and video stuff because it's something that's not necessarily read, like it's it's more verbal and it's more auditory. Like, is that absolutely that that has influenced like you're getting into this? It it influenced my I well it didn't influence it as an like I never looked at this as this is what I want to do with my life. I never honestly when I I landed at the San Diego Zoo in 2000 as a part-time keeper after many, many years of doing other work with animals. I'm like, this is where I will, I'm gonna retire as a keeper. I love it. And I get to interact with people and tell people about animals, and I'm good. But that being said, all the way back into you know, I think it was middle school, I had one teacher who was like, look, I know you know this material because we can talk about it and you know it. You're paying attention in class, but you have no notes. Uh, but I can ask you questions and you can give me answers. You you don't read the books, but you listen to the discussion in class and you you understand. So what's going on? You know, we we didn't know. I wasn't diagnosed then. So she we were given uh we had to do a book report, and then we had to write up the book report after reading the book and turn it in, and I didn't turn it in. She's like, why didn't you turn it in? I'm like, I I could barely get through the book and I'm not about to write about it. And so she sat me down next to her and she just asked me questions about the book and I answered them. And that was and then later on we had to do a book report, an oral report. And instead of having to do an oral report about a standard, like uh, you know, of mice and men, she let me give a report about keeping fish in an aquarium because I was I was doing that. I had three aquariums at home. I was obsessed with these ecosystems and these fish and and each role they played, you know, in in the in the aquarium. And so I was reading books about keeping fish and about the the different species, and I knew them inside and out. So she let me do a report on that, qualifying it that I did read the books about the fish. And through that process, that's where I knew my strengths were. My strengths were being able to be to give an oral report, to listen, to engage in that way, to digest in that way, to be creative in that way. Fast forward into high school, I got into theater, absolutely just tearing my hair out, trying to read scripts, but I enjoyed embodying somebody who wasn't a dyslexic kid. And then we did these theater exercises that weren't part of the performance. It was improv. And I was like, you don't have to read. You don't have to read, but you can still perform. And I was that that then I did improv through college. I did improv through my first goodness. Uh I was part of an improv group in Vegas for a while when I was working there. I was a part of an improv group in Portland when I was there for a while. Uh all the way until I got here to San Diego. Um, I was doing improv and loved it. And again, so at when I was in college, I learned how to or use those talents to communicate to people about wildlife and learned through the process of switching care jobs in my career that I loved being a wildlife educator, that I loved communicating. So I don't doubt that dyslexia definitely played a part in channeling my passion and energy and finding workarounds uh to put me in a place now where I can. Launch an independent podcast and have a blast doing it. And yes, it's a lot of work, but I mean you're my second interview of the day and I'm loving it. This is this is a you know, it's great stuff. You're not totally over it yet. Like Oh, I d well, but you know I did four seasons with the San Diego Zoo too as as a podcaster. You know, launch around. I do feel like you do have to kind of build in little breaks though. You know what I mean? Just to like recharge your like social battery and you know, you can't be on all the time. No, but see, I learned that too. I learned that too. So as a spokesperson for the zoo, we would go on these media trips where you're doing four three to four interviews a day for four days in a row, whether it's radio, television, all the above, morning shows, evening shows, midday, whatever. And you know, you you're just riding high doing those, but man, by the last day or the drive home or the flight home, you're cooked. And it would take me days. Like I would be like, don't talk to me. I don't want to talk to anybody else. I'm going to my room. Like, please, just I'm gonna go out in my yard, I'm gonna garden, I'm gonna weed, I'm gonna do whatever, but I'm I'm not talking to people. No, I don't exist for like three days. I did my first uh like live uh in person. I've done live shows before, but I I did my first like presentation to like a big audience a couple months ago, and I had the most like intense crash afterwards. Like I felt I was so exhausted. And I was just like, I didn't feel like emotionally, I felt awful. I was so drained, and like even though I got such great, you know, feedback and everyone had a wonderful time, and I didn't feel like anything went wrong, I just like afterwards I felt like I've never done anything right in my life. Like I everything I've done has been awful, and nobody will tell me. Like I just had that awful emotional crash. But it it's it's true though, it's true. And I will I will say from my own personal experience, because I at first, you know, coming from being a zookeeper who's physically active all day long, or I just I was always on the go, physically always moving, and albeit I was younger, but nonetheless, transitioning then and doing the spokesperson work, it was a different kind of exhaustion. Yeah, it was I was sitting all day, I'd get up and I'd I'd do a presentation and sit for a while and do a presentation, you know, and it is a different kind of draining. It's a yeah, I always looked at it like an energy exchange. I'm I'm showing up and bringing this level of energy to communicate, to try to meet the audience where they are, to then bring them to the space where I want them to be of understanding about the animal or conservation. That's a lot of energy. You're really bringing a lot to the table, and it's mental energy, it's emotional energy. And so, yeah, it's a different kind of exhaustion draining. And to your point, after your presentation, like, oh, I don't I've uh I've never done anything right ever. And then after a couple days, you're like, I'm fine. Right, right. It's fine, it's all right. Yeah, I it and you know, I do a lot of trying to, you know, get out in nature. I I have the benefit of living in a beautiful place. I live in in um western Washington and have access to a lot of gorgeous trails, also a lot of really awesome zoos in our area, great aquariums, and uh we have the benefit of going. I get to uh a lot of times with our listeners, like people from like our Discord or people from our social media or something, um, we'll set up things like tide pooling days where we'll all meet up and there'll be like a really low tide at the beach, and we'll all meet up and go tide pooling together, which is really, really fun. Hey, I'm gonna jump in real quick and interrupt. Again, just like I told you at the beginning of this episode, we're gonna break it into two parts. We're wrapping up part one right here. It's a good spot where we transition to talk about backyard ecosystems and spending time in your own space, and she goes into talking about the tide pools and everything else that she's experienced. I do hope you stick around for part two that comes out tomorrow. If you're listening to this on Thursday when it's released, uh part two comes out on Friday. If you're watching on YouTube, same thing, it'll be out on Friday. If you if you can't wait, if you want to get a hold of Ellen, find out more about her, all the all of the links, excuse me, all of the links are down below in the episode notes, whether you're watching this on your podcast player or check it out on YouTube. And if you haven't, let me just recommend go ahead and hit subscribe or follow. Or however, you can stay in touch with this podcast Animals Nature and You has a new episode every Tuesday called Ten Tuesdays, short, sweet solo episode to talk about a particular species or interesting fact, or just something that's topical, the time for animals and nature or people. And then every Thursday, just like today, we have an interview with an awesome person doing awesome work or just having a good time, having a good conversation, or all the above, intermixed. You never know. It's always fun to check out. So again, make sure you subscribe, hit follow, whatever it might be. That's gonna wrap it up, though, for this particular part one. I do want to say if you haven't already, you can check out my information down below. ZoologyRick.com is my website, all of my social media, and Animals Nature and You has its own account on Instagram as well, so you can check that out. All right, we're gonna wrap this up. Check out part two tomorrow. Have a good one, everybody.