JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today, kind of a hard topic to describe. We're calling it animal minds, animal minds.

ROBERT: Or maybe the better way to say this is minds other than our own.

JAD: Which would be the animals, no?

ROBERT: That's the animals.

JAD: We're animals though. Yeah you're right.

ROBERT: No, yeah.

JAD: Yeah you're right.

ROBERT: Yeah, so we live with other—yeah so we live with—we're having enough trouble just talking to each other. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: But imagine if I were trying, if you were a Labrador.

JAD: That'd be tough.

ROBERT: See then we'd have a problem. Or a whale.

JAD: No, maybe we wouldn't. That's kind of what we're looking at. How much can you really share with, you know a Labrador or a whale?

ROBERT: Right, and we're not solving this problem in this show at all.

JAD: No.

ROBERT: But maybe we can do this. Maybe instead of talking to scientists about other minds, maybe we should talk to ...

JAD: A writer.

ROBERT: Yeah.

PRODUCER: Paul can you hear me? Paul can you hear? Paul, oh Paul. Paul? Paul?

ROBERT: The writer we chose to look for, you may now know, was named Paul.

PRODUCER: Okay stand by.

ROBERT: Put Paul through.

PRODUCER: I'm not hearing anything.

ROBERT: He's the author of any number of travel books, novels.

JAD: Didn't he win a big prize?

ROBERT: I'm sure.

PAUL THEROUX: Yes. Is that Jad?

JAD: Yes, hi.

PAUL THEROUX: J- A- D?

JAD: That's me.

JAD: Like a Pulitzer or one of the—one of the big ones.

PAUL THEROUX: Okay.

ROBERT: No, he didn't win a Pulitzer, but he—he won the prize of my heart when he wrote The Patagonian Express.

JAD: [laughs]

PAUL THEROUX: Oh, so you're taping. Okay great.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: Anyhow, Paul Theroux travels all around the world writing about all kinds of things. But the reason we called him is for something that actually happened in his backyard.

ROBERT: Which luckily for him happens to be in the state of Hawaii.

PAUL THEROUX: I own seven acres on a slope, a west-facing slope on the north shore of Oahu.

ROBERT: Oh!

PAUL THEROUX: And I had very, very long grass. And someone said "Oh, I know what you need are some geese. They'll take care of that grass." So I got a couple.

ROBERT: And you decided not to go to the hardware store and buy a lawnmower. You decided to buy two animate birds.

PAUL THEROUX: That's right. I would have needed a really, really serious industrial mower. Instead, I got two non-industrial geese. Well, I actually got three, two ganders and a goose, and a strange thing happened. One of the ganders imprinted on me.

JAD: So what does that mean?

ROBERT: So it means the baby chick boy looked at you ...

PAUL THEROUX: Yes.

ROBERT: And, and ...

PAUL THEROUX: The first moving thing they see is the mother figure. This goose became very attached, very protective. It would sit in my lap. When another goose came up it would peck at them. It was both protective and attentive.

ROBERT: But as the gander grew up, strange things began to happen.

PAUL THEROUX: First, it became detached from me, then aggressive toward me, and then needed me. It was very strange, and it made me think I want to get some more geese, and I want to read more about them, and then—and then watch them.

ROBERT: So he—well he asked friends, and friends said to him "Look, if you want to know everything that's important to know about geese you have to read E.B. White."

PAUL THEROUX: Most people mention E.B. White when they talk about geese, and of course I know and love E.B. White.

ROBERT: And if you're not a Martian you probably love E.B. White too.

JAD: Well, you—I mean. What do you mean? People it's possible ...

ROBERT: How many people have read Stuart Little, or how many people have read Charlotte's Web?

JAD: It's true. True.

ROBERT: And if you don't love the children's fiction, he's certainly one of the great, greatest of all American essayists.

JAD: Yeah, see that's the point. He's one of the great American writers. He actually wrote the bible for writing.

ROBERT: The Elements of Style.

JAD: The Elements of Style.

ROBERT: By Strunk.

JAD: Which is still the bible for writing, weirdly, and it was written like 50 years ago.

ROBERT: So when people point to anything by E.B. White, you point seriously.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: And in this case, very late in life after he'd moved up to a cabin in Maine, he was in his 70s, and this particular essay we're gonna talk about is called very simply ...

PAUL THEROUX: The Geese.

ROBERT: The Geese.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, E.B. White: Allen Cove, July 9, 1971. I have had a pair of elderly gray geese—a goose and a gander—living on this place for a number of years, and they have been my friends.]

ROBERT: So Paul Theroux opened the essay fully expecting to learn all about geese. But then he kept running across these little phrases and adjectives that made him cringe.

PAUL THEROUX: You know, he talks about a gosling that grows into—I'm quoting now ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, E.B. White: A real dandy.]

PAUL THEROUX: ... a real dandy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, E.B. White: Full of pompous thoughts and surly gestures.]

PAUL THEROUX: Pompous thoughts and surly gestures. You know? [laughs]

JAD: I mean, come on. I mean, doesn't that make the goose a little bit more easy to relate to?

PAUL THEROUX: All right take one word. Malice.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, E.B. White: I could not tell whether the look in his eye was one of malice or affection.]

PAUL THEROUX: Malice? Malice is a word you use for, you know Mussolini, or, you know, somebody else. Not for—not for a goose.

ROBERT: But what's the sin in that? If a man who's a professional storyteller, and one of the greatest ones, says "Let me tell you about my geese," and then talks about them as though they were uncles and aunts and neighbors with moods that are distinctly human. So what?

PAUL THEROUX: Well, I suppose you could say so, or you could say but so what if he put them in, you know, little Halloween costumes too, for that matter, so what?

ROBERT: [laughs]

PAUL THEROUX: But I'm in the writing business, the writing business should be unsparing. He could be quite unsparing himself in his writing. You're giving E.B. White too much license if you're saying it really doesn't matter. It does matter to me.

ROBERT: And the reason it matters, says Paul Theroux, is that E.B. White got so attached to the idea of those geese as aging critters like himself that he missed something deep and important about the geese.

PAUL THEROUX: The elements of that behavior that is—that is pure goose.

ROBERT: Paul pointed to the end of the essay.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, E.B. White: Suddenly I heard sounds of a rumble outside in the barnyard where the ganders were.]

ROBERT: Where a formerly great gander gets unseated by a younger male goose. There's a big fight, lots of squawking. And the old gander loses.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, E.B. White: I watched as he threaded his way slowly down the narrow path between clumps of thistles and daisies. His head was barely visible above the grasses, but his broken spirit was plain to any eye. I felt very deeply his sorrow and his defeat.]

PAUL THEROUX: Wow, the defeated gander goes off. Well, this isn't true at all. When a gander loses a battle he goes off, gets his strength back, and waits for a chance to attack again. That gander is gonna come back and fight again.

ROBERT: So you're saying he got it wrong about the geese?

PAUL THEROUX: Yes, of course. Of course. Here is a man who is solitary, he's a New Yorker who goes to Maine and becomes a gentleman farmer of a kind. And begins to relate to his geese, and then writes about them as though he's one of them. I know I'm not one of them.

ROBERT: But if you can't use words that are, you know, very human and psychological words, and if you can't because you're not a goose have whatever it is that geese have on their insides, then what if you wanted to share something with a goose? And I'd bet you you do. Is there any way in which you could honestly describe yourself as a friend of any of these geese?

PAUL THEROUX: I would say, you know, that this is a very good question. I had a very "surly," to use an E.B. White word, a very—a very rambunctious gander, and he got very sick. You know, the thing is sitting on the ground just fouling its nest. I thought he was really gonna die. And I nursed him back to health. I gave him an antibiotic with a turkey baster, and it took about three or four weeks. And the first thing he did when he was nursed back to health was he got up on two legs and I came up with the turkey baster to give him one last drink, and he bit me.

JAD: [laughs]

PAUL THEROUX: And I thought ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Where did he bite you?

PAUL THEROUX: He bit my leg. Hard. And I thought, "Okay he's back to health."

JAD: You didn't think, "Ow! How could you?"

PAUL THEROUX: Well I thought he's—he's healthy. He's healthy again, and he's behaving just as goose would.

ROBERT: But don't you see though that if the moment of true—of your true most goose-y moment is a moment when you're with a goose that you help bites you, then you are out of this story in effect.

PAUL THEROUX: I absolutely agree with that. In all of this there's an implied loneliness. I'm not his friend, I'm not a feathered creature. I'm a human being among birds.

ROBERT: Although curiously, Paul Theroux does have an approach to communing with his geese. He takes a chair, puts it on the lawn, plops down in the chair and disappears.

PAUL THEROUX: You know, my writing day ends in the early afternoon. I have lunch, and after lunch there's a long sunny period in the afternoon when I'm alone, I'm with the geese. And I sit around with them, and try to make out what they're doing among each other, and paying no particular attention to me. It's simply watching the world as it was. You're seeing creatures who are behaving as though cities don't exist, presidents don't exist, governments don't exist, roads don't exist.

ROBERT: Ah.

PAUL THEROUX: As if it's before the fall.

JAD: Hmm.

PAUL THEROUX: As though it's the peaceable kingdom. Simply watching animals who are content doing their thing. Then you feel a bit like Adam.

[ALEXANDRA HOROWITZ: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad and Soren Wheeler, Michael Rafael, Ellen Horne.]

[CLIVE WYNNE: And Lulu Miller. With help from Addie Narian and Tim Howard.]

[ALEXANDRA HOROWITZ: Special thanks to Brianna Breen and Kelly Carmody. Apologies for butchering any names.]

JAD: Wait a second. Stop. Stop the machine. It just feels weird to end the show this way, with this lonely geese thing. So we're gonna play for you one final story. It's kind of a continuation of Paul Theroux and his geese, except it involves a very different guy in a very different climate.

JAD: First of all who—who are you? What's your name?

PAUL NICKLEN: My name's Paul Nicklen, and I'm a contributing photographer to National Geographic Magazine.

JAD: Paul Nicklen is basically National Geographic's Arctic guy.

PAUL NICKLEN: It's—I've been pegged as their polar specialist.

JAD: And this particular tale involves his attempt to photograph one of the great Arctic predators.

PAUL NICKLEN: The Leopard seal.

JAD: Leopard seal, which by reputation is a very nasty creature.

PAUL NICKLEN: Preface to this story is in 2003, tragically a scientist was actually killed. Kirsty Brown was doing underwater research, and she was taken down by a leopard seal and drowned.

JAD: Was she just yanked off the ice, or ...

PAUL NICKLEN: She was swimming and it just came up and grabbed her.

JAD: Ooh.

PAUL NICKLEN: And took her down to 300 feet.

JAD: Nonetheless our story starts with Paul and his guide Godan. They're in a boat in the Arctic Ocean looking for seals.

PAUL NICKLEN: The first seal we encountered, I'd never seen a leopard seal before, and we came around into this bay where there was a penguin colony. And right away Godan, who's seen many, many leopard seals, he said to me "You know, bloody hell, that's the biggest seal I've ever seen." And she came up to boat with a penguin in her mouth, and she went underneath the boat and she started ramming the penguin underneath the hull of the boat, lifting the bow out of the water. And that's when Godan looks to me and he says "Paul, it's time for you to get in the water, yeah?"

ROBERT: [laughs]

PAUL NICKLEN: In his thick Swedish accent.

JAD: Wow, were you freaking out?

PAUL NICKLEN: I had dry mouth just from the nervousness. I was trembling and, you know, I put my mask on and slipped over into the 29-degree Fahrenheit water. And there she was, instantly right there. Massive, huge.

JAD: Well, how huge?

PAUL NICKLEN: Probably over a thousand pounds.

ROBERT: Oh my God!

PAUL NICKLEN: Twelve feet long. She dropped her penguin, she came right over to me, and she opened up her mouth. And she engulfed the front of the camera, her canines were on top of my head to where below my chin—you know, I'm basically staring down her throat.

JAD: I can't believe you managed to take a picture of this. Because I'm looking at this picture, and these teeth are huge!

PAUL NICKLEN: The canines.

JAD: You know, like, massive!

ROBERT: So you were doing business at this moment?

PAUL NICKLEN: Yeah, I'm working at that point.

JAD: You can even see the textures of the seal's tongue. Like, she has these little fibers on them.

PAUL NICKLEN: Oh, it's 180-degree view, so you had to get that perspective. I'm basically in the mouth to get that shot.

ROBERT: Wow. So then what happened?

PAUL NICKLEN: She backs off, looks at me, sniffed my flipper, touched them with nose, poked me in the bum, came up did this open mouth threat display again, and then she swims away.

ROBERT: Oof.

PAUL NICKLEN: Wow. I was just getting ready to swim back to the Zodiac, you know, I've been in the water for quite a while, and I'm cold. And all of a sudden she shows up with a freshly caught live penguin chick in her mouth.

ROBERT: Huh!

PAUL NICKLEN: And I'm sitting there staring at her, and she stops about 10 feet away from me. And she's got the penguin by the feet, and the penguin is flapping its flippers trying to get away. She lines the penguin up to face perfectly in my direction and she lets it go. The penguin swam right by me, and she chases off after it and grabs it, comes back and does this again and again and again.

ROBERT: Why?

JAD: Yeah. I mean, what was she doing?

PAUL NICKLEN: At first, I couldn't figure out what was going on. I thought maybe she was having a hard time eating it, and then it dawned on me she was trying to feed me.

ROBERT: Did you make any attempt during this period to say no thank you?

PAUL NICKLEN: No. Nope. I'm so—in such disbelief at this point, I'm just trying to capture it.

ROBERT: Well, didn't you feel compelled as a social human to just offer some kind of gestural explanation. I mean, if it was me I would have made some look like, "Come—I don't eat that stuff!" Or ...

JAD: Or maybe it's like you take—you take the penguin at that point.

PAUL NICKLEN: Well, I mean I couldn't catch him.

JAD: I mean when in Rome, you know?

PAUL NICKLEN: The penguin is swimming 15 miles an hour, you know?

JAD: Oh, so you mean when she lets go, it just goes—fyoom!

PAUL NICKLEN: Like a bullet.

ROBERT: No, he's pathetic is what he's saying. He's saying, "I'm a pathetic creature, I can't actually catch the thing."

PAUL NICKLEN: I'm thinking exposures, get the shot, keep shooting.

ROBERT: You're such a photo dude, you know?

PAUL NICKLEN: [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

PAUL NICKLEN: Well I'm—I work for National Geographic.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

PAUL NICKLEN: I don't want to anthropomorphize too much, but as the penguin was swimming by this huge seal, she looked over at me and I swear she had a look of disgust in her face.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

PAUL NICKLEN: So she goes off and gets another penguin, and this penguin now is quite weak and tired looking, so I think she's worn it down. She lets the penguin go, the penguin takes off. She grabs it, does that a couple of more times.

JAD: And you're still not eating the penguin.

PAUL NICKLEN: Right. Next encounter was bringing me dead penguins. And sometimes she would just drop off a dead penguin right on top of the camera, and she would just sit there with this dejected look on her face, staring at me.

ROBERT: [laughs]

PAUL NICKLEN: And then she went to the stage of flipping dead penguins on top of my head, and trying to force feed me these penguins. Telling me at this point, you know, "Eat these damn penguins, I'm trying to feed you. And why won't you eat my penguins? Eat the penguins." And then she would start to eat the penguins right in front of me, and show me how to eat them. She would rip them apart on the surface, get the skin off them, and she's shredding them in the water in front of me.

JAD: And—and how much time is passing here? I mean, are we talking minutes, hours?

PAUL NICKLEN: This went on for four days.

JAD: Four days!

ROBERT: Four days? [laughs] Oh God!

JAD: And when you're in the water, you know, day after day, what's happening for you at this point? Are you still just a guy with a camera, or ...

PAUL NICKLEN: I mean, I was starting to fall in love with this seal. It's just this animal that's just so intelligent and so powerful, and it can kill you in an instant, yet your—I mean ...

ROBERT: But when you say you were in love, were you in love with the idea of this, or did you really like her?

PAUL NICKLEN: I really liked her. She was beautiful, she was big. She had this—this beautiful face, beautiful silver color to her. She kind of glowed underwater. I'm just so in love with this seal at this point. I'm not sleeping at night, I have a hard time eating. I just can't wait to see her. I can't—the first thing in the morning, you know, the first sign of light I'm in that zodiac.

PAUL NICKLEN: And then on the fourth day is when, you know, I was thinking okay maybe she's weary of me, and she's getting tired of me, so I'm just gonna totally leave her alone. That's when I started going off and presenting myself to other seals who were swimming around the rookery.

PAUL NICKLEN: And I was in the water, and the same big female came up to me, and she started to do all these really beautiful ballet-like moves. I'm photographing her, and looking at her, and all of a sudden she drops her penguin, she turns upside down, and she does this big guttural "Go go go go," this big jarring noise that's vibrating my whole body. I can really feel it in my chest, it's so loud. And I'm thinking am I being attacked? She finally told me that she's sick of me and wants me off her feeding grounds.

PAUL NICKLEN: But, as soon as she did that, another leopard seal shot out from right behind me. And so this leopard seal had snuck in behind me, and she did that noise to chase that seal away, a smaller seal. She chased the seal away, it too had a penguin. She grabbed its penguin and brought me that seal's penguin and dropped it off in front of me.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: Wow!

ROBERT: You're a lucky guy. Wow.

PAUL NICKLEN: I mean, I'm almost getting emotional reliving that. I mean, it's very powerful.

ROBERT: Have you ever been in love with an animal quite this way before?

PAUL NICKLEN: Never. Never.

JAD: Have you every had an experience with—with another human that rivals this?

PAUL NICKLEN: Perhaps when I was kid with my mom. Someone taking care of you, and feeling safe and nurtured, and protected, but I've never had that in my life as an adult.

JAD: It sounds—this is such an interesting species moment here.

ROBERT: Yeah, it sounds like you're doing something ...

JAD: You're transgressing or something.

ROBERT: It sounds like you're stealing something from the gods right here, right at this moment.

PAUL NICKLEN: I mean, I don't know what words I can find to explain it.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Thank you so much.

PAUL NICKLEN: Thank you, guys.

 

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