Yeah, and researchers can learn so much from the shows if they would just watch and listen to him. AP carried one of his old shows just before the first new show of the season came on. Had not seen that old show. I learned that MM himself was the first person to discover BF uses tree knocks to communicate with each other. Wow; that was news to me and a LOT of other folks! And he discounted the testimony of a witness who gave a pretty good, close-up description of a very large BF that had thrown (or pushed over) a big tree behind him. MM's reason for discounting the report? The witness said it didn't have a black nose. MM KNOWS all BF have black noses. Holy cow; I didn't know that either!
His true worth as the director of activities for that show is pretty well displayed when a BF answers one of their calls, and he sends two or three team members plus a cameraman running through the woods toward the location of the response to catch the BF by surprise and photograph it. If they every catch up to one like that, that will surely surprise a lot of folks too.
As made pretty clear in the new show, maybe all they have to do after getting a response is to sit down, turn off the lights, shut their mouths, and they might get some real interesting sounds on their recorders. I suspect most of the close-up BF sounds would be overridden by human language that would have to be bleeped out anyway. And I suppose the wait would be too boring for him and the viewer to do it that way. Folks have gotten kind of hooked on those excited, "DID YOU HEAR THAT???" teasers.
But MM gets paid well; that's the main thing. And it is an entertaining show, to say the least.