Hi there, I'm Lale Aricoglu, and this is women who travel.

Today I'm talking to someone whose job can be anything from welcoming newborn black bear cubs

into the world or examining the stomach of a dead animal.

Despite having numerous near-death experiences, though,

she has one of the coolest jobs on the planet,

researching lions in Tanzania,

lemurs in Madagascar, and bears in the Sierras.

What was this, like, dusty brown huge bear and it was right it was probably 10 feet from me right so it was very very very close it had silently crept up I mean there, there was no noise around me. And so one thing that

struck me was like how silent it was. In the media, people see bears roar and growl. And in real

life, they're very quiet, almost always. And I didn't, like, pee in my pants by some miracle,

but it felt like my heart absolutely stopped.

She's Dr. Ray Wynne Grant in Kenya and Tanzania, in Maas Island.

What ended up happening over and over is that I would experience these kind of life lessons,

these very personal, deep, emotional, human society lessons, kind of guided by a wild animal.

Dr. Ray is co-host of NBC's Wild Kingdom, host of the podcast Going Wild.

And she's just come out with a book, Wildlife, Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World.

I'm Dr. Ray Wyn Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show, a podcast all about the

human drama of saving animals.

This season, we're going to take a journey

through the ecological web. You got on this path to becoming a wildlife ecologist, which sounds

incredibly exciting. Can you define it? I am a wildlife ecologist. Ecology is a study of living things and how they interact with their environment.

I don't study chickens and goats and cows, but rather I study bears and lions and primates that live in the wilderness and how they interact with their environment.

...