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printcontentsfull screenprintYOUTUBER I 48
ote’s love of wildlife began at birth
when he was, literally, born on
a horse farm where his mother
raised horses. Coyote explained,
“the first animal encounter I ever
had was with a basic American
toad when I was four years old.
I caught my first toad [and] my
mom let me keep it in a shoebox
for a couple of days...I admired it
and loved that little toad for the
couple days it was with me [before
letting] it go back in the wild.
“Really, it just started from
there. Snapping turtles were a big
part of my childhood because my
summers were spent hiking in the
woods and exploring ponds trying
to catch big turtles...If Steve Irwin
had crocodiles, Coyote Peterson
had the common snapping turtle!
It’s one of the most ferocious, ag-
gressive and predatory reptiles on
the planet...and the environment
you have to go in to find and catch
these turtles is brutal.”
This childhood fascination with
animals is also where his nickname
originates. Not merely a moni-
ker crafted for the show, it stems
from catching lizards as a kid, “My
Mom used to take my sister and I
traveling across the country every
summer. We had an old Chevy
Suburban and she would pull a
tiny trailer behind it and we would
camp across the United States.
“We’d always end up in Arizona
and there’s a lizard species called
the regal horned lizard, which was
my favorite lizard to catch. They’re
incredibly well camouflaged and
really hard to find, but roadrun-ners are excellent at finding, and eating, them. So I
would follow roadrunners around hoping they’d lead
me to the horned lizards. My Mom started calling me
Coyote...like the old Warner Bros. cartoon, because I
was always chasing roadrunners around!”THE JOURNEY TO YOUTUBE
Even with this love of wildlife, Coyote didn’t think
it’d turn into a career. Having graduated with a film
degree from Ohio State University in 2004, Coyote
seemed on track for a more traditional filmmaking
route, rather than as a YouTube sensation.
It was a long and winding road to where he is now,
but he walked me through the abridged version: “Right
out of college I went down the road of trying to get
funding for an independent film...The deal fell apart
in contractual stages, which was pretty heartbreaking
[since] I nearly secured $5 million for an independent
picture. Being a kid from Columbus, Ohio when you’re
that close to making your first big picture...It’s tough!”
Recovering from the fallout of that deal was rough
and he struggled to get “back on the horse” creatively.
Purely by chance, however, his childhood passion
provided the answer going forward:
“I just so happened to have caught this really large,
common snapping turtle ... I showed pictures of this
turtle to [the] producers I was working with and their
first reaction was, ‘Whoa, wait a minute! We didn’t
know these things were in Ohio and what the heckCOYOTE PETERSON
STAYING WILD
COYOTE PETERSON
STAYING WILD
010 Coyote Peterson.indd 48 2/19/19 2:59 PMYOUTUBER I 49
COYOTE PETERSON
STAYING WILD
are you doing catching whatever
this is?!’
Coyote told them more about
his self-taught knowledge and his
childhood spent catching those
turtles, and the producers saw po-
tential. Initially, they were hoping
to produce a series for television.
“You know,” Coyote explained,
“Steve Irwin had passed away and
[most] of the animal content out
there was ‘Planet Earth.’ There was
nobody doing content where they
would actually host in front of
the camera and give you animals.
‘Man vs. Wild’ was very popular at
the time on Discovery [Channel].
We looked at that and thought:
how do we create a version of
that where we’re not...eating the
animals to survive, but promoting
conservation and education?”
Getting off the ground proved
rocky. After being turned awayfrom nearly every TV network and
production house they met with,
Coyote and his team found them-
selves teaming with Discovery
Communications to flesh out their
digital space, but they still had a lot
of work ahead of them, “Before we
launched the YouTube channel, we
had an angel investment of around
$35,000...We were producing it for
Discovery Digital network, but they
didn’t have a budget for us...They
said we’ll help you guys distribute
and help you create a YouTube chan-
nel. We produced 52 episodes with
that [initial] funding and from there
the YouTube channel kept growing.
Despite being one of YouTube’s
fastest-growing channels, with
nearly 13 million subscribers in only
four years, Brave Wilderness wasn’t
an overnight success. Coyote faced
plenty of challenges to make the
channel what it is today, “MarkMario Aldecoa, Coyote and Mark Vins work together in the field to capture Coyote’s
wildlife encounters. They then send the footage back to a team of editors, who assemble a
story based on Coyote’s script.[Vins] and I actually had day jobs
for the first two years of our You-
Tube channel. We were working
two jobs, using all of our vacation
time, and all of our own personal
money to fund these trips to keep
it going until the point where the
YouTube channel started generat-
ing revenue itself.”
Coyote had never expected to see
such success with YouTube, and
admitted his early inexperience
with the platform. Among the major
differences between the traditional
filmmaking model he’d studied, he
was surprised most by one thing:
“The audience reach...When we
released that episode about the cow
killer — the Velvet Ant — one of our
first Sting videos, we had something
like 362,000 new subscribers in a
single day! That’s more [people]
than fit in a football stadium...Being
able to reach that many people with010 Coyote Peterson.indd 49 2/19/19 2:59 PM