When you’re choosing someone to bear witness to the poaching of endangered rhinos in Burma, your first selection may not be the host of “Access Hollywood.”
But that’s who Nat Geo Wild enlisted to be embedded with World Wildlife Fund fighters of poaching greater one-horned rhinos.
Chatting at a screening of “Chasing Rhinos with Billy Bush” Monday at National Geographic’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, Bush said he was talked into the adventure by his friend Howard Owens, president of the National Geographic Channels.
“Glamping is what he thought it would be,” Owens said at the screening.
There was something in his family history that urged him to go, Bush says. Not his uncle, the former President George W. Bush, but his mother, who had been on the board of the Nature Conservancy. “I thought: I can do something.”
So during the two-week annual break he gets from “Access Hollywood” he flew to Nepal where he met WWF reps on the ground and locals who battle poaching that has decimated the population of the greater one-horned rhino from 1,000 a half century ago to less than half that. They sell powder from the horn on the black market, where it is thought to have medicinal and magical power (it doesn’t).
To get to the forest where poachers have been invading, they all had to ride elephants in. It’s a surreal scene from another eon to see them all riding into the high grasses atop elephants, looking for the 12-foot-long, three ton rhinos.
“At the beginning, it was overwhelming,” Bush says. “And it took a toll on me. Not just the time change, but seeing what I saw.” That included warehouses of seized rhino horns and tiger meat. “It’s awful to see,” he said. “And people in our group were in tears.”
Was it tough going back to the frivolous world of celebrity gossip once it was all over?
“At times,” he said. Just that day, he had to do his “Access” reporting from the National Geographic courtyard. “I mean, we’re still talking about a Miley Cyrus performance a month later. I’m over it.”
“Chasing Rhinos with Billy Bush” premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on Nat Geo Wild.