By Taylor Neumann
With over 15 million subscribers, the YouTube channel Brave Wilderness follows Coyote Peterson as he goes on adventures around the world and encounters all manner of animals, from creepy and crawly to furry and fierce. Now Peterson has a new show on Animal Planet, Coyote Peterson: Brave the Wild (Tuesdays), bringing his expeditions to television. “The real thematic that runs through every episode is to introduce people to the weird, bizarre creatures that they possibly didn’t know exist,” said Peterson.
Peterson shares that his interest in animals started at a young age.”My mom is super into the outdoors. She would actually travel my sister and I across the United States every summer. … That really opened my eyes to the different creatures, from mammals to reptiles, amphibians, insects, arachnids — everything that was out there, I was getting up close with at a very early age. [From] that stemmed my love for adventure.”
That interest in animals included some unusual housepets. “We had a dog growing up, and we had what I would call temporary pets. My mom would oftentimes let me catch and keep turtles or snakes or frogs for a couple of days, and then I’d admire them in a small little aquarium, and then we would release them back off into the wild. My mom did have a tarantula — that was her one consistent pet. Growing up, it was just always this famous thing, that my mom had a tarantula. So [that] probably explains a lot about me.”
That exposure to all kinds of animals served Peterson well in filming Brave the Wild. “We did an episode in South America on green anacondas — anacondas are one of the largest snake species on the planet. In one of the scenes, I had to enter into the den of what was rumored to be the largest anaconda in the world, quite possibly world record. Her name is Big Mama. … I had to slink through this muddy portal and up into this sawgrass field. So I was completely swallowed by the environment, completely alone, holding the camera myself, to find out if that snake was, in fact, in her den.”