I was funded to go down and study the harpy eagle by a wonderful woman who had a lot of resources. They had a plantation at Albany, Georgia, and I was dating their daughter. And the idea is she put up $3,000 for me to go to the Amazon and… Read More
So I came back to Albany, Georgia, and it was a time when it was either put up or shut up. So I remember (chuckles) going over there and we actually, her name was Tuli. I can use that name and we broke up ’cause she never thought I’d ever… Read More
So your first experience with Marlin was when he came down to Florida?… Read More
That was the first experience. That was your first meeting with you. Like two or three years later he called me after I came back from The Today Show, he had seen me on The Today Show ’cause he and Sir Edmund Hillary were in Chicago and I was in… Read More
And I got a call from Marlin and said, would I come to Chicago and do the pilot film for a Mutual Omaha?… Read More
What’s the next step for Marlin Perkins?… Read More
Well, the first thing he did was to, he tried to go to the Amazon and do a live show in the Amazon with Ross Allen. In those days, the equipment was so big and so heavy. They had to have like seven or eight porters to carry the camera… Read More
So they came back and they found out that, (chuckles) the real truth about the Yeti was there was no such thing. There was a skullcap they thought it was from, it was rumored that it was from the Yeti. It turned out to be the skull of a goat-antelope… Read More
So Marlin came back, it’s him and Hilary. And they talked about the fact that there was no such thing there. And of course, their book didn’t sell very well. There was a Englishman named Lord Hunt that knew a little bit more about marketing. So he came back, wrote… Read More
They’re not necessarily a soaring eagles, so the wings are fairly short and very broad like a goshawk or a Cooper’s hawk, one of those. And it flies and attacks animals within the upper canopies of the forest. So it’s a very unique eagle. And the ones that I trapped… Read More
So the local Indians who were quite Aboriginal they thought I was crazy, totally crazy. They said I’d never climbed the trees, but I did that with spurs and then I brought those eagles back to America and I was on The Today Show with Dave Galloway. And it so… Read More
And so Marlin, they were trying to figure out what to do?… Read More
And he said that he was getting an ulcer. So he wanted to go back to Africa. He had been there before, and he had been a hunting lions in Africa before. So he hired me to, he knew I knew a lot about trapping ’cause he had come to… Read More
So he said, would I go to Africa with him?… Read More
And on the freighter halfway to Cape town, he said, “By the way, Jim, “I want you to live trap a lion “so that we can release it in a big compound. “And I wanna be the first white hunter to shoot a lion “in a full charge on camera.”… Read More
And I had all kinds of animals with me there. But anyway, then I decided to do the first studies on the harpy eagle in the Amazon. And when I came back, this all frankly, this has a lot to do with how I met Marlin. It may not sound… Read More
Can you tell us about your first meeting with Marlin Perkins?… Read More
How did that occur?… Read More
Well, that’s… I can tell you about that because that’s indelibly marked in my mind for a lot of reasons. I used to watch Zoo Parade. I had been to Africa. I had had a lot of experiences with Aboriginal people. I lived with some Kalahari Bushmen for quite a… Read More
Well, males I learned later on in life are full of baloney. They posture a lot and they try to, you can bluff a male, for example, an elephant, but you can’t bluff a female. So bulls are especially, the big males, a bull elephant. Later on in Africa from… Read More