The three most common wildlife mistakes visitors make in national parks are feeding, rescuing, and getting too close. Most people who make them think they're doing something harmless. Some think they're helping.

In this episode, Ranger PamPaw draws on nearly four decades of National Park Service experience to explain what actually happens when wildlife gets conditioned to human food, when a well-meaning visitor picks up a fawn, and when a visitor closes the distance for a selfie with a bison.

You'll hear about bear school at Katmai, the remarkable return of black bears to Big Bend National Park, the baby squirrel call at San Antonio Missions, and a close encounter with a mother bear and her cubs on the Basin Loop Trail — an encounter that worked because a ranger knew when to step aside.

This episode is about the chain of good decisions that makes wild places stay wild — and your role in it.

CHAPTERS:

0:00 — Cold Open: The Kid at the Wall — Rainbow Curve

02:04 — Segment 1: Feeding Wildlife — Why It Matters

08:20 — Segment 2: The "Rescue" Instinct

13:06 — Segment 3: Proximity, Phones, and the Selfie Problem

16:37 — Segment 4: What Respectful Wildlife Observation Looks Like

20:57 — Closing: The Chain of Good Decisions

Ranger PamPaw Podcast is hosted by Mark Tezel — known to his grandkids as Ranger PamPaw — after nearly four decades with the National Park Service. New episodes drop every other Wednesday. Part of the Tezels on the Road family.

Support the show

Thanks for joining me on the trail today.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves our national parks as much as you do.

If you have a question, a story, or a park memory you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you.

Visit www.tezelsontheroad.com/rangerpampaw or email me at rangerpampaw@tezelsontheroad.com.

Thanks for walking the trail with me.

I’ll see you in the park.

What does a park on fire look like? Or a river reclaiming its floodplain after a century of dams? Or a glacier you could touch in 2010 that's now out of sight up the mountain? In this episode of the Ranger PamPaw Podcast, host Mark Tezel talks about fire, flood, and ecological change the way a ranger who lived it would — through direct field experience, specific stories, and the long view that only a career in the parks can give you. You'll hear the story of a sand hill in Boquillas Canyon that was there in 2005 and mostly gone twenty years later, why Smokey Bear's motto overachieved and what it cost the science, how the Elwha River reclaimed its floodplain after two dams came out, what a ranger notices about cherry blossoms over a decade of trips to Washington, and why "unimpaired for future generations" doesn't mean what most people think it means. This isn't a doom episode. It's not cheerful denial either. It's the informed calm of someone who has watched these places change — and still believes they're worth protecting. Ranger PamPaw Podcast is hosted by Mark Tezel — known to his grandkids as Ranger PamPaw — after nearly four decades with the National Park Service. New episodes drop every other Wednesday. Part of the Tezels on the Road family.

Thanks for joining me on the trail today.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves our national parks as much as you do.

If you have a question, a story, or a park memory you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you.

Visit www.tezelsontheroad.com/rangerpampaw or email me at rangerpampaw@tezelsontheroad.com.

Thanks for walking the trail with me.

I’ll see you in the park.

Every national park has an official story — the one on the signs, the plaques, the brochures.

This episode tells the other stories.

After five episodes building context and credibility, Ranger PamPaw steps back from explaining how parks work and does something different: he sits down and tells stories. The funny ones — including the number one question asked at every park in America, a visitor who needed directions to El Paso and didn’t quite grasp the size of Texas, and a patch of prickly pear cactus that grew on a ranger office roof and became an impromptu natural history lesson. The quiet ones — including 1,700-year-old Bristlecone pines at Cedar Breaks National Monument and a story that didn’t finish until thirteen years after the hike that started it. The meaningful ones — a perfect interpretive moment on the San Antonio River with a school group, and the release of Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle hatchlings at Padre Island, one of conservation’s quiet success stories.

And the one that stays: a story about former students spread across the National Park System — from Alaska to Indiana, from the National Mall to the canyon country of Utah — and what their work says about the future of the NPS.

It all starts with a grandmother, a backpack, and a kid who wanted to be a ranger.

Ranger PamPaw Podcast is hosted by Mark Tezel — known to his grandkids as Ranger PamPaw — after nearly four decades with the National Park Service. New episodes drop every other Wednesday.

Part of the Tezels on the Road family. www.tezelsontheroad.com

Support the show

Thanks for joining me on the trail today.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves our national parks as much as you do.

If you have a question, a story, or a park memory you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you.

Visit www.tezelsontheroad.com/rangerpampaw or email me at rangerpampaw@tezelsontheroad.com.

Thanks for walking the trail with me.

I’ll see you in the park.