>>The Wildlife Center of Virginia is one of the world's leading teaching and research hospitals for wildlife and conservation medicine, providing state-of-the-art veterinary care for more than 3000 wild animals each year.

The Center draws on lessons learned from each patient admitted, to teach the world to care about, and care for wildlife and the environment.

>>Funding for Untamed is made possible by... (water rushing) (birds tweeting) (bright upbeat music) >>Over the years, I can't tell you how many people have come to me and said, "You know, I'd really love to have a job "in wildlife conservation like you "and your colleagues at The Wildlife Center."

I just don't know how to go about that.

Well, the truth is most of those folks don't really understand what goes on at an organization like ours.

They don't really know what it means to have a job in wildlife conservation or they have an idea that's just too narrow.

We're not sitting around playing with bear cubs all day or having meaningful relationships with wild animals.

There are certainly jobs that have job specific education requirements.

If you wanna be a wildlife vet, you have to first go to vet school then you learn to apply general veterinary skills to wildlife clinical medicine.

Now that's very specific, very structured and it's a tough row to hoe.

There are people who wanna be wildlife biologist.

Well, obviously you have to study biology, but beyond that the roles are limitless.

There are so many opportunities to be involved whether it's wildlife research, whether it's policy advocacy, promoting legislation, law enforcement, public education, and public outreach, even roles for things like graphics, artists, art, music, and design.

These are all opportunities that can be applied to the field of wildlife education.

Now, there are also many diverse venues or context within which to get involved.

Certainly, state and federal agencies are out there, but there are also many private nonprofit organizations involved in every aspect of conservation, whether it's wildlife in general or sometimes even very specific species, but each organization has many different roles.

Here at The Wildlife Center of Virginia, we've got folks involved, certainly in wildlife medicine.

We're a leading hospital, but our mission is not fixing broken animals, it's teaching.

So education is an important opportunity here.

We rely heavily on technology.

So we need people to manage our social media, our website, our internal servers, and the other technology through which we do what we do.

There's not one formula and there's not one pathway.

Now, students come to me so many times and they want an easy answer.

They wanna know, "What do I study "to have a career in wildlife conservation?"

And a lot of them are truly surprised.

My response invariably is follow your passion, do the thing you love the most, the thing at which you are the best and from which you get the greatest amount of joy then find a way to apply that to help conserve wildlife.

That's the way to a happy future and a productive one.

(gentle music) >>My name is Katie Martin and I am a wildlife biologist with the department of wildlife resources.

And my title is deer, bear, turkey biologist.

So as a wildlife biologist for our State Wildlife Agency, The Department of Wildlife Resources, we are here to provide wildlife opportunities for all of those across the Commonwealth.

So wildlife are held as a public trust resource And so as a state wildlife biologist, our duties are to conserve, connect and protect and connect people with the wildlife across the state of Virginia.

There are pretty much no typical days.

Every day is pretty flexible and you never know what's going to come up.

So our jobs though, do have some seasonality to them.

You kind of know during the fall or the winter and the spring things that may be going on.

So in my position as a deer, bear and turkey biologist, a lot of the fall obviously our hunting seasons are in.

And so we're working with our hunters and other constituents that are out and about in the field.

In the winter time, I do a lot of work with our black bear project.

So we're going into bear dens and monitoring bears throughout the winter.

As we get into the spring, then it's a lot more of our turkey population monitoring is going on and also the hunting season for turkey comes in.

So there's never really a typical day.

You have to be pretty flexible as you're not sure what might come off in any given day out there.

My work environment varies pretty much by the day or the week or the field season, what type of season or time a year it is.

When we're in the summer and the spring a lot for a lot of our field work, the office can be the great outdoors.

So it is anywhere that we might need to go across the state that's in the outdoors.

Our trucks are also a pretty important part of our office.

We spend a lot of time driving around to different areas across the state.

Our trucks are kind of set up as little mobile field offices.

So we've got everything in there.

Should you need to capture or handle a wild animal?

Should you need to pass out information to somebody in the public?

We've got brochures and books and all kinds of things in it.

So most of my office is either out in the field, in my vehicle and then of course, time at the computer.

There is always that computer true office time that has to take place as well.

Ever since I was a little kid I've always loved being outdoors.

Always spent just a lot of time out in the woods hiking, playing, running around outdoors.

And my parents always instilled in us that you didn't need to be afraid of being outside.

So there was nothing out there to be afraid of or to be worried of and just show taught us respect for being outdoors and being around wildlife.

And so really from a young age I've just loved being outdoors and loved being around wildlife.

And then once I got to college, I realized, "Hey, there's actually a degree in this.

"You can go and learn how to go play outside for a career."

And I said, "Yep, that sounds like a pretty good option."

I went to Virginia Tech and got my undergraduate degree in wildlife science and then while I was there I (mumbles) in forestry which was kind of an odd path, didn't have a lot of foresters and wildlife crossing over, but for me, a lot of the species that I knew I was interested in use forest as their habitat type.

So I thought, "Well, I probably need to know a lot "and how to manage forest."

So once I completed my undergraduate degree, I decided to stay around and got a masters in forestry also from Virginia Tech.

So it's a good fit to merge those two together and have that forestry background with the wildlife sciences.

So for somebody that's interested in becoming a wildlife biologist, I would say key number one, be willing to go and learn with anybody.

If there's an opportunity, if you have somebody willing to teach you a skill that you don't know or that you're not really proficient in, be willing to go with them and learn those skills.

Take every internship, volunteer opportunity that you can, be flexible to try out different jobs.

You may come out of school and there's a job that you don't think is the right one for you, but it might teach you some new skills.

So I would say, just be flexible to try out a lot of different positions until you really nail down that spark, the way you wanna really spend most of your time in.

So just be willing to learn from a lot of different people and be flexible.

I think being a wildlife biologist or working for a state wildlife agency is pretty important work just because as we have more and more urban areas across the State of Virginia and other States, we do have wildlife out there and people need to understand and learn how to live and co-exist with wildlife right in their backyard.

And for many people they did not grow up with wildlife, they maybe didn't grow up in rural areas where they had a lot of experience with that.

So I think being a state wildlife biologist, our mission is to just teach people more about the wildlife that are out there and how they can safely interact, co-exist with them and to provide opportunities for them to recreate, whether it's hunting, fishing, wildlife walking and watching, bird watching, any of those activities.

So I feel like our job as state wildlife biologists are to bring the public more in tune with the wildlife that's out there around them.

(bright upbeat music) >>My name is Richard Howald and I'm a K9 officer for the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.

What does it mean to be a conservation police officer?

So it depends on the time of the year, what's going on.

You mainly work with hunters, fishermen, and boaters.

You work out in the outdoors every single day.

You know, if you start at the beginning of the year, it's cold, the duck hunters are out there.

So you're gonna be on the water, you're gonna be checking duck hunters.

And then right around the corner we got trout stocking in there, kind of mixed in there.

And then you're coming in the spring turkey season.

So you're gonna start looking around and see if anybody's bait and see where the turkeys are at, you're gonna start working that.

Then in the summer, you're primarily gonna be on a boat.

During that summer time, you will respond to a lot of wildlife calls, a lot of fonts and stuff moving around, things like that, or bear coming out.

So you respond to those types of calls.

And coming to the fall, you got early archer season, urban seasons, that dove season and then into muzzleloader general firearm.

Pretty much every day, you're dealing with general public, people that are out trying to do the right thing.

They're trying to enjoy the outdoors.

They're trying to spend time with their family.

That's who you go outside with.

They're trying to enjoy nature.

Now, people make mistakes and we understand that.

And then there's other people that are out there to make a mistake, that's why they came out today.

So communication, be able to talk to landowners, be able to talk to hunters.

Sometimes, a lot of times you're a referee.

You're there trying to protect the rights of the hunter, you're trying to protect the rights of the landowner, but also you're there to protect wildlife.

You're enforcing the state laws that protect our wildlife and preserve that for the future.

So a lot of times your referee and you need to be able to communicate well with other people and explain what the laws are, whether that's to the landowner or to the hunter.

So our office everyday is outside.

You can see my patrol vehicle, that's what we work out of.

So every morning when I get up, I sign on from my house.

I go out and patrol, whether that's at night or during the day, it depends on the time of year and what we're working, but my office is my patrol vehicle.

If I need to go to a meeting or something else going on, we do have region offices where you can go and turn in your evidence, get material that you need to work a case, but majority of the time is out of your patrol vehicle.

Coming from the military, always wanted to be in law enforcement, but I love to be outside.

I love to hunt, I love to fish and that's really why I wanna spend my time is outdoors.

And as a conservation police officer, that's what we gotta do every single day.

You get to be around some really great people, people that are hunting and fishing or just enjoying the outdoors, birdwatching or hiking and that's who you get to come in contact with every day.

So within our agency, we started the K9 Program approximately 10 years ago.

A lot of other States already had them.

We knew they could be useful for what we're doing, finding evidence, tracking people that were trespassing or lost people.

And so I was one of the first handlers selected to go to Indiana and train with their DNR and start the program with three handlers and three dogs in 2011.

I worked with K9 Skye.

She's a three-year old black lab.

She originally came from Oklahoma, went to Arkansas, then to Virginia.

And she failed out of being a field trial dog because of her high energy.

So when we're looking for dogs, we want that energy, we want that drive to succeed in doing their job which can be overwhelming for a lot of people.

So Skye is a fast working dog.

She has a lot of drive, a lot of energy.

I've been working with her for several years now.

She's made a lot of cases just like all of our dogs in our agency.

They're able to track people.

They're able to find evidence with human scent or gunpowder in a wooded area and then also detect different species of wildlife.

It's really rewarding in the end to see your dog succeed to find that piece of evidence that someone else has spent hours looking for, or to rule something out when everybody in the area saying something happened, or you're looking for somebody, the dog comes through and says, "No," you go back and re-interview them and somebody has told you the wrong area or made up a story.

I would suggest, if you wanna be a conservation police officer to contact our recruiters up in Richmond, at our headquarters.

They're gonna walk you through.

They're gonna answer a ton of questions.

And as you get closer to an age where you can look at that career is think of a college degree you can get.

It's not required to be one, but the majority of the people that we apply now, are either have a military background, or they have some kind of degree, But if you really enjoy the outdoors and you really wanna protect wildlife, this is a field you can get into and be outside and work with people and wildlife every day.

I think it's important to do our job, to be a conservation officer 'cause you're protecting that wildlife.

Your main goal is to enforce the laws that the biologists have looked at to either increase the population of species or decrease and to protect the landowners' rights, protect those hunters' rights.

So it's a combination of things that you do every single day, and that's gonna make it so people in the future can hunt, that they can fish, that they can boat, they can go boating and they can do it in a safe manner.

(gentle music) >>Some folks are drawn to wildlife because they think they're gonna get to work outdoors or work hands-on with animals and have that kind of relationship.

And frankly, a lot of folks would rather work with animals than with people.

But the truth is conservation is a people heart.

It's a social science not a hard science.

Education and public outreach are what is needed to change human behavior.

(gentle music) >>My name is Lauren Edzenga, and I'm the outreach educator at The Wildlife Center of Virginia.

My job as an educator is to connect to people that aren't necessarily in this field to things that they encounter every day, which means that in the larger scheme of things, I'm helping people connect to where they live, the resources that they use and the places that they enjoy.

which means that my impact is essentially helping people to change their everyday lives and change little things that they do in order to add up to a bigger movement.

My office environment as an outreach educator is very different from a typical nine to five desk job.

So while my job includes definitely some computer work, I am also outside feeding birds and working with them and training possums as well as talking to different people from all over the world sometimes.

And so my average office environment is ever changing.

A lot of people going into this field focus on wanting to work with animals, but I chose to work with people because I wanna be able to be a part of the impact that is a positive future for the environment.

And working with people is the greatest way to do that.

As an extrovert, I am naturally drawn to people.

I also love animals and I love the outdoor world and so putting all three of those together just really made sense for me.

Being a jack of all trades is very helpful in my career choice because there are many times that I have to adapt to different situations or reach many different people.

So for example, if I'm doing a program with children as well as adults, I'll have to be able to speak to both of them at the same time.

Also nature is ever changing and so I have to be able to adapt to many different scenarios, whether it be windy like it is today or rainy, there's always something to learn, but I just have to learn how to change my message to match up with what's going on.

In the environmental conservation field, there are many ways to be an educator.

There are different ways that you can connect to the public, whether it be as a park ranger in a local or national park, you can also be a school teacher or a college level professor.

And then there's also of course, working at a nature center or a wildlife center.

To work in this field, you have to be extremely people oriented.

So a lot of my job involves talking to people and you have to have a lot of patience as well as enthusiasm for what you're talking about.

If you're interested in this career choice, I would encourage you to start volunteering at a local organization to get some experience and to learn whether or not you even like doing this kind of thing.

There are many different facets of conservation and only one of them is education.

So if this is not the avenue for you, there are plenty of other ways that you can make an impact.

The earth is our home and so it's very important for me to be able to teach people to appreciate our home.

There is no plan B for this planet and so if we are able to treat this world well, the world will treat us well.

I'm very passionate about this field.

And so anytime I can ignite somebody else's passion for the natural world is a win for me, because that means that I've made an impact in somebody else's life.

(gentle music) >>I'm Nick Nichols, and I'm retired National Geographic photographer.

I was the editor-at-large for like 10 years before I retired.

I took a photo course in college and that got me started and I just was so focused.

I just kept going.

But I'm from a little town in Alabama, so I had no connections.

So I had to develop those.

But I had a secret weapon, I explored caves and I photographed caves and nobody else does.

So when it came time for me to start, I had a set of pictures that opened the doors for me.

I graduated from college and this man, Charles Moore, who become famous for civil rights pictures for Life Magazine.

If you know the pictures of the dogs attacking people in Birmingham, and Life Magazine covered civil rights.

So he was the guy that did all that.

When he come back to the South, to my hometown, that was his hometown.

And I knew it was coming And I latched onto him, like a puppy dog, just followed him around.

And at the end of that time, he said, "Well, you shouldn't go to Syracuse to graduate school, "come San Francisco and be my assistant."

And I'd never flown on an airplane.

I had, just by seeing, never been anywhere.

And we did our first assignment was DuPont annual report.

We went to New York.

I saw his agency.

I showed them my pictures and they looked at them and they said, "There's something here.

"There's this new magazine, GEO, across the street.

"Go see them."

They made an appointment for me.

The taxi cab circled the block five times, 'cause I had a Southern accent.

So I left my cameras in the taxi to go up to the appointment.

I went up, I showed my pictures first to the secretary then the assistant director of photography then the associate director of photography then the director and finally the editor.

And he said, "Wow, there's something here."

And he gave me an assignment to photograph the cave that I was showing them.

And that started my career.

And (mumbles) I got a full page fold out and all this stuff happened and I was off and running, but I really wanted to work for National Geographic.

That's what I dreamed of my whole life.

And this was the competition to National Geographic, but that competition was really good thing.

And after 10 years, another cave was discovered, that my friends found, I photographed it for Smithsonian and the geographic saw that and that's when I started my career at National Geographic in 1990.

And I didn't work for anybody else the rest of my life.

I ended up the editor-at-large where I was influencing the whole show.

There's a famous picture I have Jane Goodall, chimp is reaching out and touching her hair and he's in captivity in African zoo.

And that picture represents Jane Goodall's last half of her life.

It has power.

I think that most people care about wildlife, but they're not educated.

So they care about, say bears.

They care about bears 'cause they're cute and they wanna feed them and that's the lastly thing you can do to bear, is feed it.

It's gonna be a dead bear if you feed it.

So getting educated through photography, through other means, we start to realize that a wild is a very fleeting thing and we have wildlife and we gotta give it space.

We gotta find a way to give it space and still do what we've gotta do.

Storytelling is the word we use now 'cause you combine all the disciplines and you make up a story that the public finds interesting.

You're educating the public with something that is fairly popular.

There's nothing more important than telling the stories of conservation wildlife, nothing more important.

(gentle music) >>If you wanna work with wildlife and contribute to the field of wildlife conservation, there are many opportunities.

If you're at the beginning of your career, decide what gives you joy and follow that passion.

But maybe you're in the middle of your career or maybe you're even retired and you have professional experience to draw on that you can bring to the game, but you're not ready to go start a whole new career path.

Well, there are many things you can do to engage.

Now, certainly if you're just starting out, maybe you're in college or ready to go to college or thinking about going to college or starting a career, get involved as a volunteer, try internships, try a variety of experiences, to be sure that what you're targeting as a career path really ends up being what you expect it to be and really brings you the joy you think you will find.

Now, maybe you already have a career.

Maybe you're involved in something that you don't think relates to wildlife.

Well, the truth is that wildlife conservation includes roles for people with every background.

Contact a local conservation organization, tell them what you know, the thing at which you're an expert, the thing you love doing the most and find out if there's an opportunity for you to get involved, maybe as a volunteer, maybe as a board member, maybe just as a consultant or an advisor, but there are ways to bring your knowledge and experience to bear on wildlife conservation.

Now, certainly you need to create some connections.

So one of the things you can do to simply broaden the network and find opportunities is get to know some people who are involved.

Go meet them, go talk to them, attend public events and spend some time finding out what they do, learn about their organizations.

There are more opportunities than you can imagine.

And ultimately use your professional skills, your knowledge base to make a difference.

Maybe you're just gonna do it at home, but maybe you have the opportunity to bring something special to a course, to an issue, to a campaign that is just waiting for you.

>>Funding for Untamed is made possible by... (water rushing) (birds tweeting) (bright upbeat music)