Uncovering the Elusive Ocelot

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:00:00] Peter, I gotta say, one thing that's just become blatantly obvious is that in our lives, cameras are everywhere. I mean, traffic cameras, home security cameras, and you know, everyone has a high -powered camera in our pockets just right on our smartphone. [00:00:17]

Peter Gros: [00:00:19] It's true, small digital cameras have created a world where everything seems to be recorded, which can be kind of concerning. [00:00:26]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:00:27] Yeah, I agree, but the good news is that all these cameras have been awesome for conservationists and researchers who use camera traps to capture high -quality footage of animals in the wild without having to disturb them or be near them at all. [00:00:41]

Peter Gros: [00:00:42] These cameras have helped deter poachers and gather population data on rare species worldwide. They've also helped us find one of North America's most endangered wildcats, the ocelot. [00:00:54]

Ben Masters: [00:00:55] If you see an image and you see this just exquisitely beautiful animal, you can't help but want to have that animal continue to live here and to have more of them. [00:01:06]

Peter Gros: [00:01:09] Hi I'm Peter Gross, wildlife expert and educator. [00:01:12]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:01:12] And I'm wildlife ecologist Dr. Rae Wynn -Grant. And this is Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom the Podcast. Episode four, uncovering the elusive ocelot. Ocelots are a species of wild cat that are found from southern Texas all the way down into northern Argentina. They're a bit bigger than a house cat and are covered in spots and stripes. Two hundred years ago, in the United States, they could be found all across the southwest and even into Arkansas and Oklahoma. But unfortunately, habitat loss to agriculture and urban sprawl, as well as being killed by ranchers, greatly reduced ocelot numbers. [00:02:03]

Peter Gros: [00:02:04] But these days there's only about a hundred ocelots left in the United States and they're almost all in South Texas, and even though we know they're there, it's really tough to see them. [00:02:15]

Dr. Ashley Reeves: [00:02:16] Some researchers have been researching for 30 years and have never seen one in the daylight. I have personally never seen one walking around in the field. [00:02:22]

Peter Gros: [00:02:23] That's Dr. Ashley Reeves, a research veterinarian who's working to bolster the population of ocelots in South Texas. Rae, you met her while filming our recent television episode about ocelots from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild. [00:02:38]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:02:39] Another person I met on that trip is our guest today, filmmaker Ben Masters. [00:02:43]

Ben Masters: [00:02:44] Let's go on a brush crawl. [00:02:45]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:02:45] Alright, let's do it. I want to see these traps of yours. For the past decade, Ben has been making movies about wildlife in the American Southwest, focusing on wild horses, mountain lions, and even bighorn sheep. But that day, Ben and I hiked out onto a 27 ,000 -acre ranch near the southernmost tip of Texas, where Ben had set up several camera traps in the hopes of capturing an ocelot on film. [00:03:11]

Rae/Ben: [00:03:13] It's a kitten! Is that a kitten? That's a kitten! Is that a kid? That's a kid! No way! Yeah, it is, it is! [00:03:22]

Ben Masters: [00:03:23] You did not get so lucky to get getting on day one. to get a kitten on day one. I did. [00:03:26]

Rae/Ben: [00:03:26] I did. [00:03:26]

Peter Gros: [00:03:27] I loved watching you in that moment, right? You were like a kid at a surprise party. [00:03:31]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:03:32] That was a really genuine moment of surprise that we got on film. I recently caught up with Ben to find out more about how he uses camera traps for conservation efforts in South Texas and why he's so pumped when he sees an ocelot. [00:03:46]

Ben Masters: [00:03:47] people I think forever have been fascinated by wild cats. I mean, you'll go into the petroglyphs across the Southwest and there's mountain lions up there. You go into Central America, it's jaguars, it's ocelots. And people have just kind of seen their prints in the sand, maybe a little. you know, walking through the brush, but nobody's ever gotten to be able to have this glimpse that is so intimate into their lives until the last few decades. And to be on the front end of that has just been this amazing chapter of my life. And I am so grateful for it. And to get to share that and to get to show people like this is freaking rad, it's fun. [00:04:35]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:04:35] How would you describe your background and kind of where you grew up and tell me if wildlife and documentary filmmaking was something that was kind of on the horizon for you since childhood? [00:04:47]

Ben Masters: [00:04:48] Well, I grew up in Amarillo, Texas, the southern end of the Great Plains in the Texas Panhandle, South Oklahoma, east of New Mexico. And my family is farmers and ranchers, fourth generation Texans. So I grew up riding in the back of the truck with a bunch of dogs, my dad driving around and hunted and fished and hiked and spent a lot of my childhood outdoors. Uh, which I'm incredibly grateful. You know, I'm a father now and I realize how difficult it is to haul around a bunch of toddlers and a bunch of kids. I grew up watching mutual of Omaha and PBS nature. And that's just kind of how I was transported across the world and fell in love with wildlife and decided to study wildlife at Texas A &M university, which kind of led me to where I am now as a wildlife filmmaker. [00:05:40]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:05:42] How did you start? I mean, did you just like go out on your own one day with 20 cameras? I mean, what was that beginning like? [00:05:49]

Ben Masters: [00:05:50] I was going to school, and I didn't have a lot of skill sets at Texas A &M, but I'm really good at training horses. And I met a friend that convinced me to drop out of college and to adopt 12 wild mustangs from the Bureau of Land Management, adopt them and train them, and then ride from Mexico to Canada on the Continental Divide Trail, which took about six or seven months or so. [00:06:13]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:06:14] Sounds amazing. [00:06:14]

Ben Masters: [00:06:15] We did that trip and then that kind of introduced me to the importance of our public lands in the American West. So we ended up deciding to make a film about that endeavor. So we did the trip again a few years later and we filmed it and the title for that film is called Unbranded. And it turned out a lot better than I think any of us had anticipated. And we were able to get hundreds of horses adopted. [00:06:43]

Ben Masters: [00:06:44] And then I was also asked to sit on the Bureau of Land Management's Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board to represent the interests of wildlife on 32 million acres where I was able to have a legitimate influence on the management of our public lands in the West. So that experience made me realize as a 26 year old that movies and film and entertainment and storytelling has a tremendous impact on culture and policy So from that moment on, I was like, man, if I want to make a difference, I believe films is the way to go about doing that. [00:07:21]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:07:22] I really want to talk about your experience filming ocelots. But first, I think, Fen, it's important for our listeners to really understand what they are. So, can you describe ocelots? Like, what do they look like? [00:07:34]

Ben Masters: [00:07:34] An ocelot is about the size of a bobcat, but it's a little bit more athletic. It's beautiful. It has rosettes and spots and stripes and these amazing bars, uh, above and below its eyes and almost kind of looks like a little linebacker. It's, you know, this little ninja of the forest. They have territories where you'll have a dominant male that covers the range of two, sometimes three females. Whenever they have kittens, they typically have one. Sometimes they have two. Whenever they do have two, typically only one survives. [00:08:14]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:08:15] And I know that ocelots used to be way more common in the United States. So, can you give us some of the history there? [00:08:21]

Ben Masters: [00:08:22] Sure. So, in a nutshell, during the 1800s and 1900s, there was a lot of trapping. There was a lot of habitat destruction. There was a extensive decades long war against carnivores, both privately, as well as the state and federal government, where there was aerial dropping of poison bait balls with an attempt to kill off all the coyotes, especially, you know, up until around the seventies or so. And there was never an attempt to eradicate ocelots from the state. I think it was more of a bycatch of other trapping and predator removal efforts and due to all of these changes over the last two centuries, their population has shrunk to where ocelots now only exist in deep South Texas. There's only about a hundred of them left and where they live at is on the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, and then they also live on a handful of private ranches that are just north of there that have large cattle operations that has not removed the brush and the native vegetation. And within those big ranches, we still have tens of thousands of acres of tomaleap and thorn scrub and oak forest, which is the ocelot's habitat where they currently exist. [00:09:45]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:09:46] I'm curious how you first became interested in ocelots, by any chance when you were growing up, were ocelots around or were they one of those species that you saw on TV when you watched documentaries? [00:09:57]

Ben Masters: [00:09:59] I wasn't introduced to ocelots until I was in college and studying wildlife and I felt almost kind of deprived as a Texan to have grown up in a state where our most endangered and beautiful wildcat exists and I didn't even know about it until I was 20 years old and in wildlife biology and people showed me these grainy black and white photos And I was like, that's in my state. Like, are you kidding me? why in the world has nobody ever gone in and captured stills and video of these absolutely magnificent cats and just shown off how beautiful they are and how beautiful their habitat is and how important it is. And I think that was kind of shocking to me to know that they hadn't ever been really documented before. And I think that was probably 10 or 12 years ago. [00:10:48]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:10:49] So at some point, you chose to dedicate time and energy to getting ocelots on camera. And I have a note here that it took you over one month with maybe 20 or so cameras and a lot of effort before you actually got an ocelot on one of your camera traps. So like, what was that process like? Like, talk to me about failure. [00:11:14]

Ben Masters: [00:11:15] I guess I got into filming ocelots five or six years ago, I had made a film called lions of West Texas that was about a study going on in West Texas, figuring out what they eat and how large their distribution was. That was my gateway drug into camera trapping and I got hooked. [00:11:37]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:11:38] Still are, I take it. [00:11:39]

Ben Masters: [00:11:39] I am. Yeah. I think probably I have around 200 camera traps in the woods right now, and it's never enough. But I approached Dr. Michael Tuas, who is the OG of Ocelots in Texas. And he's, I don't know, 65 or so, but about 40 years ago, it was presumed that the slots had been extirpated. And Dr. Tuas went out to try to find whether or not there were still some left. And he succeeded. He found an ocelot on Laguna at Tascosa National Wildlife Refuge. Uh, he trapped it with a chicken in a live trap. He didn't kill the ocelot, obviously. And he was able to show like, Hey, this animal is still here. Yeah. And then he proceeded to dedicate the rest of his life to better understanding ocelots and to better conserving ocelots. So we went to the East Foundation's El Sal's Ranch where you and I got to go camera trapping for ocelots. And Mike and his team at Caesar Clayburg Wildlife Research Institute, they took us out into the brush. They showed us the ocelot habitat. And then they showed us this one particular spot where this ocelot mother had been living for several years and showed us some particular groups of brush where she was frequently visiting. and said, this is a great place to start. And I thought, cha -ching, this is gonna be so easy. Yeah. EASY! and it's definitely not like a plug and play type of system. We went almost two months of camera trapping just with failure after failure and tick after tick and gallon of sweat and thorns in the knees and in the eyeballs and got to this point where it's like, are we gonna be able to continue to throw resources and gas money and time into trying to. get footage of this Sasquatch -like myth, and it was about that moment where we were beginning to really doubt our abilities that we got the first ocelot footage. And it was this gorgeous male ocelot that just rounds the bin next to this beautiful big mesquite tree, and it was one of the best hides ever. and I just... was hooked from that moment on and had camera chaps running for years after that. [00:14:20]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:14:21] Yeah, so it's just like, it's just like a, it's a magical moment. It's a feat. It's fascinating. It's fun. And it's important. You know, it's also very, very important. I mean, at a bare minimum, getting footage of an ocelot, no matter where you are, is evidence that they are still there, right? And it's not guaranteed that they're always going to be in these places. Right? So just knowing that they're still there is great. knowing like in our case when we were in the field together that there's a breeding population and that they are reproducing, and the kittens look healthy. I mean, all of this is data as well as these emotional triumphant moments. [00:14:59]

Ben Masters: [00:15:00] we gave all of the footage to the Caesar Clayburg Wildlife Research Institute and their new feline specialist, Lisa Ann Petrocha and her team, they're taking all of that footage and they're able to quantify it. And those glimpses into their lives has given, I think, a lot more understanding of the species, especially as we're engaging in... how to move forward with ocelot conservation in Texas and how to reintroduce them across their historic range. I think that the science of what has been accomplished is so critically important, but to have some of our footage also contribute to the understanding of the species and what their needs are has been a huge validation of we're not just producing art, we're able to actually contribute to the understanding of the cat and that's been really rewarding. [00:15:52]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:15:55] So you just talked about reintroducing ocelots, and I kind of want to take a moment to touch on the relationship between these wild animals and then the land that they live on. So how do ranchers and landowners today in Texas feel about ocelots? [00:16:10][

Ben Masters: [00:16:11] So the ocelots relationship with ranches in Texas is becoming much better. In the past, there has been concern that ranches that have ocelots, and ocelots are an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act, that having an endangered species on their property could be a liability rather than an asset. and that it could come with government restrictions on where you can build roads, where you can do controlled burns, where you can graze, that type of activities. One of the most exciting things that's happened over the last decade is the East Foundation, which is big private ranches in South Texas. They own a little over 200 ,000 acres of land. Rather than kind of being afraid of ocelots, they've really embraced the ocelots and the Ocelot Recovery. that have taken it as an opportunity to show that these private lands can be not only, you know, profitable agricultural enterprises, but also be a beacon of hope for wildlife. And in this case, the ocelot. And there's a tremendous amount of support within the landowner community in South Texas for recovering the species, which is fantastic. And not only for ocelots, but I think that it's really important as a bellwether for a lot of endangered species. If we can recover this animal that's beautiful and has rosettes and spots and stripes, maybe there's hope for other animals that may live in holes, like a black -footed ferret or something like that. So, for me, you know, the ocelot is kind of a litmus test on whether or not we can successfully recover endangered species, utilizing private lands. And certainly, the case in Texas right now is we're kicking ass. [00:18:06]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:18:07] Ben, thank you so much. Hanging out with you on the television show Wild Kingdom was such a joy and such an educational experience. And then being with you here on the podcast has been also. So, with that, thank you so much, Ben. [00:18:20]

Ben Masters: [00:18:21] Thanks for having me. Let's do it again [00:18:23]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:18:29] Now it's time for conservation connection, because we know that the more we can connect with animals, the more likely we are to protect them. So today, we're bringing you the story of a migratory bird found in the American Southwest that you may have not heard of. [00:18:44]

Peter Gros: [00:18:45] Here's Kristin Ovosted, Education Coordinator at Tucson, Arizona's Reed Park Zoo, talking about the Lucy's Werbler. [00:18:52]

Kristin Ulvestad: [00:18:53] The Lucy's warbler is a small songbird that occurs in Central America mostly, but it does come into southern Arizona during parts of the year. And it is very interesting because it's one of the few cavity -nesting warblers. And it nests in cavities of mesquite trees, so a little bit different than other cavity -nesting birds that might nest in, like, woodpecker holes. What I love about Lucy's Warblers is the fact that Tucson, Arizona is one of the few places in the United States where you can see them. So people come from around the country to view these birds. They say once they hear a Lucy's Warbler call, they know spring has come. Since I do live in a very hot environment, any little signs of the change of the seasons is really fun to hear. One of the threats that they face locally is the loss of that native mesquite trees. Our mesquite bosques are being removed. Some of that is agriculture, some of that is just expanding human population. So our local Audubon Society chapter, Tucson Audubon has actually designed specially made nest boxes for these warblers since they do typically nest in bark that is peeling from mesquite trees. and they did a study where they compared the different types of nest box structures to try to figure out which one was the most visited by Lucy's warblers. So their nest box is a triangle shape. Songbirds have a really important ecological role. A lot of them are insect eaters or seed dispersers. Some of them are pollinators, at least indirectly. When it comes to birds, it's a good indicator of a healthy ecosystem. They have a really important role in maintaining that ecosystem, making sure that a certain species of insect, especially crop pests, that people may not want to have in their agricultural fields, making sure we have those songbirds that will help maintain that population. so we don't have to rely so much on pesticide use to protect those crops. There has been studies that have come out recently, the state of the birds report, that looks at bird populations in general, and they have found across the board that a lot of our native species are in decline due to climate change, pesticide use, habitat loss. But knowing that is happening now gives me hope that in the future we can really make a difference. there are some taxa of birds like ducks, raptors, woodpeckers that are increasing thanks to conservation efforts. So if we can continue those conservation efforts and also expand them to our songbirds, that's really gonna be a big impact. [00:21:41]

Peter Gros: [00:21:43] That conversation was recorded at the 2024 Annual Conference of the AZA, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in Calgary, Canada. Thank you for listening to this episode of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, the podcast. And remember, if we protect wildlife and the environment today, we can ensure magical moments in the wild kingdom for future generations. [00:22:12]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:22:13] Next week, we're doing something a little different. [00:22:16]

Ben Jones: [00:22:17] I just think the story of the mountain gorilla coming back from the brink of extinction because people cared and they stepped forward and took action, that gives me hope. [00:22:27]

Dr. Chase LaDue: [00:22:27] I love elephants, and I know a lot of other people love elephants too but realistically moving forward we have to find solutions where humans and elephants can coexist. [00:22:35]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:22:35] Instead of just one short segment with an expert we met at the AZA, we're gonna do a whole episode. There'll be gorillas, elephants, and maybe even a dinosaur. Make sure to join us! [00:22:46]

Peter Gros: [00:22:53] Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, the podcast, is a production of Pineapple Street Studios and Mutual of Omaha. Our senior producer is Stephen Key. Producers are Elliot Adler and Jenny Van Soelen. [00:23:06]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:23:07] Associate producer is Lisa Cerda. Editor is Darby Maloney. Executive producers are Barry Finkel, Gabrielle Lewis, and Jen Wulf. Pineapple's head of sound and engineering is Raj Makhija. Senior audio engineers are Marina Pais, Davy Sumner, Javi Cruces, and Pedro Alvira. This episode was mixed by Davy Sumner. [00:23:31]

Peter Gros: [00:23:31] production music courtesy of Epidemic Sound and Hearst Media Production Group. [00:23:35]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:23:36] Episode Clips, courtesy of Hearst Media Production Group. Marketing and promotion by Emily Poeschl. This podcast is hosted by me, Dr. Rae Wynn -Grant. [00:23:45]

Peter Gros: [00:23:47] Peter Gross, a special thanks to Katelyn Williams, Sophie Radmelamich, and Stephanie Diaz. [00:23:52]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:23:53] Today's episode is based on the Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom series created by Don Meyer. Our next episode will be out in a week. [00:24:00]

Peter Gros: [00:24:01] Make sure you listen on the Odyssey app, or wherever you get your podcasts. [00:24:01]