If you attended Marty Essen’s high-energy slide show presentation on exotic wildlife from across all seven continents Thursday in Lee Hall’s Bettersworth Auditorium, you may be surprised to learn that he does not have a formal education in zoology, but is self-taught.
“The book took thousands of hours of research – reading college papers and books,” he said. “I feel like I’ve earned my doctor’s degree in zoology without having to do the dissection.”
Essen’s passion for travel and wildlife was ignited after he and his wife booked a three-week trip to Belize after working 10 years without a vacation.
After his trip to Belize, he returned to Montana to celebrate his company’s 10th anniversary. When he mentioned his next adventure, a trip to the Amazon, to a reporter interviewing him about his company, she suggested he write a story for the local paper.
“People loved the story,” he said. “I would get stopped at restaurants and on the street and people would say, ‘I loved that story. Are you going to write another one?'”
Essen continued writing articles and eventually penned a book entitled “Cool Creatures, Hot Planet.” His show began when the time came to tour for his book and he was left uninspired by the way other authors conducted their tours.
“You go and watch them read and to me, it always seemed so boring,” he said.
He decided to market his book with a digital slide show of the wildlife he had spent so much time searching for and writing about. The show was a hit. Soon Essen began taking his show on the road, debunking animal myths and sharing exciting adventures to colleges across the United States.
One animal Essen said has an undeserved bad reputation is the vampire bat. He said the bat has the most effective anticoagulant known to man in their saliva. Scientists are now using it in a heart drug appropriately named Dracula and giving it to people who have suffered from heart attacks or strokes.
“So here we have a little creature that humans want to wipe off the face of the map, and yet [it] is saving the lives of humans,” he said.
He also tells about his experience rafting with humpback whales in the Antarctic.
“The whales would surface several hundred feet away and come at us at a fast pace,” he said. “Right when it looked like they were going to knock us into the water, they would dive underneath and surface with a great big blow. The control these whales had over their 30-foot long bodies was absolutely amazing.”
Essen’s travels have not been resort-hopping, luxurious trips.
“When most people do Africa, they watch it from the back of a truck,” he said. “We were down on the ground getting a feel for what it was like not to be No. 1 on the food chain anymore.”
And when he says he experienced what it’s like not to be No. 1 on the food chain, he means it. Essen recalled one especially memorable trip to Zimbabwe.
“We looked up Zimbabwe on the United States Department of State Web site,” he said. “It said two things: if you are in Zimbabwe, get out; if you are going to Zimbabwe, don’t go. We went anyway.”
In Zimbabwe, Essen had an encounter with a hippo that could have ended not only his African adventure, but also he and his wife’s, Deb, lives.
“All of a sudden Deb and I feel this bump, and we are both thinking we must have hit a rock. The next thing you know, we are six feet up in the air; the hippo had come underneath us,” he said. “Its lower tusk went right through the bottom of the canoe, its top jaw came over and snapped the gunwale, and if you can imagine a front end loader lifting gravel and then dumping it on shore – that’s what the hippo did to us.”
The animation and passion with which he tells his stories and shares his knowledge on wildlife are one reason Samantha Musil, assistant director for Colvard Student Union, said he was invited to present at MSU.
“The photos that he shows are so amazing that you can see the detail on the smallest of animals,” she said. “It’s really amazing to be able to see those and kind of live vicariously through him.”
Elementary education major Alex Gibson came to the show for extra credit in a world geography class, but left wanting to go exploring unknown places himself.
“I have an adventurous soul, and this was really interesting to me,” he said. “My favorite part was just seeing all of the different pictures and learning about some of the different areas he’s visited that I didn’t know about.”
What is Essen’s advice for students who want to explore and write like he does?
“Don’t be afraid to make the jump,” he said. “I went to school for a business degree, and it’s amazing how you can end up doing something totally different then what you go to school for.”
For more information on Essen, order his book and view his photos, visit coolcreatureshotplanet.com.