‘Yellowstone Live’ shows off ‘epic’ park

Nat Geo puts muscle in conservation message

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyoming – Chris Packham still holds onto a copy of a 30-year-old National Geographic magazine about this iconic place.

Growing up in a British suburb, he could only read about Yellowstone and look at pictures of its wildlife and vast tracts of mostly untouched land, an uncommon sight on the comparatively small island of Great Britain.

“We cannot even imagine national parks on this scale,” said Packham, a wildlife ecologist who regularly appears on TV programs. “It’s one of those landscapes where it’s truly epic in its proportions and scale.”

Packham visited the park years ago during the winter, when the temperatures on his short visit dropped to a numbing 30 degrees below zero. Now, he’s back – and this time he’s bringing a message.

“You don’t know what you’ve got here. What you’ve got is absolutely astonishing,” said Packham, who appears in “Yellowstone Live,” a National Geographic Channel series that premiered Sunday and runs through Wednesday (9 p.m. EDT/6 PDT).

“In an over-crowded world where our natural resources are running thin, where our species are ever-increasingly imperiled – we should push the balance to protecting those species,” he added.

That conservation effort is crucial in Yellowstone because, over the course of the year, many of the animals move far outside the boundaries of the protected park, where hunting is not permitted.

“I’m seeing a lot of inspiring and exciting things coming together around conserving these migrations, but it’s slow,” said Arthur Middleton, a wildlife ecologist who researches animals’ movements inside and outside the park. “This stuff is the ultimate patience test in conservation because it takes people time to figure out what they can work together on. It’s happening, but it takes years.”

Part of the conservation efforts involve reducing human-animal conflict, especially when it comes to the big predators – wolves, grizzly bears and mountain lions – that butt up against the interests of ranchers and hunters eager to protect livestock and other animals that fall prey to the wildlife.

“Yellowstone’s always telling a story, and I hope that can one day be the story it’s starting to tell – to project how can people find common ground, whatever the issue is, and come together around a set of solutions that works,” Middleton said. “We need to figure out how people can coexist with these creatures.”

The number of creatures in the park, which opened in 1872, is staggering. In addition to the top predators, more than 60 mammal species, 285 bird species and a number of fish, amphibian and reptile species coexist within the park’s 3,472 square miles, roughly the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.

More than 4 million visitors annually stream into Yellowstone, the nation’s first national park, not only to see the wildlife, but to experience the largest concentration of geothermal features in the world.

“I don’t think people realize how much actually goes on here,” said Jenna Wolfe, a former correspondent on NBC’s “Today” who will be a roving reporter on “Yellowstone Live.” “For most of America, Yellowstone National Park is about the postcards, and it’s about the beautiful sunsets and it’s about the glorious mountain ranges and whatnot, and if you peel back that first layer there’s an entire world of wildlife that is not touched – that’s just out living here in our country.”

That larger world of wildlife is just what National Geographic hopes to capture during its live broadcast, which will use 34 cameras, including nine Go Pros and a thermal one to measure heat radiating from the park’s hot springs and geysers, including Old Faithful.

The show hopes to capture a wolf pack in a remote area of the park and also will show live footage inside a beaver den.

“They are natural wonders that you just can’t park your car next to and kind of get the schedule and see it,” said Middleton. “That’s one of the things National Geographic can do through its platforms and through this broadcast is bring the hidden lives of these animals, that kind of natural wonder, to an audience that people like me will never reach otherwise.”

When asked whether “Yellowstone Live” is specifically targeting a message of conservation, Allen Berman, executive producer, said he wants to leave everything up to the viewers.

“We’re simply showing Yellowstone as it really is. We’re letting people take away from it what they want,” he said. “Our expectation is that we will have people falling more in love with a place and therefore wanting to be more protective of it.

“We really are being true to it: This is the park and you’ve never seen it this way.”

KATHARINE LACKEY/USA TODAY An elk gets some sun in Yellowstone National Park, which is home to 60 mammal species.