Wild With Nature

Western Montana's Swan Valley is wild and forested. It's also the location of one of over 2600 Christmas Bird Counts that take place across Canada, the United States, and Latin America each winter. This is the story of this wintry, forested Christmas Bird Count. It's a story of chickadees, golden-crowned kinglets, and red-breasted nuthatches: common winter birds in the conifer forest. But it's als...

Once the site of a gravel quarry, Missoula, Montana's Fort Missoula Ponds have become a magnet for ducks, shorebirds, and many other creatures. In fact, birders have recorded a whopping 231 species of birds here over the past few years. In December, the bird activity is much quieter than it would be during the warm season. Nevertheless, it's a chance to see what’s out here in the cold and to remem...

Even as the Hellgate wind blasts Missoula, MT with its icy breath, we spot goldeneyes & mergansers along the river on this winter walk with Five Valleys Audubon Society. This is part of the "town-bound birding series" - a set of short monthly walks aiming to make the wonder of our local birds accessible to all.

It turns out that a stream doesn't just end at its banks. It continues underground: a slow-moving world of water, percolating through the sands and gravels under our feet. This story is about groundwater and its intimate relationship with Rattlesnake Creek, an important stream near Missoula, MT. But these basic concepts about groundwater and its connection to streams apply just about anywhere.

The ponds and marshes at Lee Metcalf NWR, in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, were mostly frozen on this frigid day in late November. But nevertheless, we found a variety of waterfowl, raptors, and smaller birds around this extensive wetland complex. This is the story of another day in the field with the Montana Natural History Center. It's a story about habitat and the resilience of our winter birds.

Missoula, Montana's Greenough Park is an urban natural space near the edge of the city: an interesting mix of wild and domesticated, native plants and garden escapes. In mid-November, I joined a group of naturalists, led by Ser Anderson of the Montana Natural History Center, in a wintry "naturalist saunter" through the park. We found a variety of fall and winter fruits, checked out a rock outcrop...

The diversity and complexity of the life in a stream is mind-boggling. But it's also something all of us can see and learn about, kids or adults, whatever our level of knowledge. This story is all about the little creatures of Missoula's Rattlesnake Creek - from stoneflies and mayflies to riffle beetles and midges. This was all from just one wintry day in the field with the Watershed Education Net...

For thousands of years, Missoula's Rattlesnake Creek supported important spawning populations of bull trout, which would move upstream from the Clark Fork River each fall. But in 1901, the Rattlesnake Creek Dam blocked the spawning fish. Over a century later, in 2020, the City of Missoula removed the now-obsolete dam. This story is about a stream coming back to life, its fish, and the Watershed Ed...

It's common to see mixed-species flocks in the fall and winter in the ponderosa pine forest. Nuthatches, chickadees and woodpeckers travel together, helping each other watch for predators as they forage. But this was something different. On this late October day, we watched the pygmy nuthatches attacking a hairy woodpecker, driving him off. Why were they attacking their supposed flock collaborator...

Una interacción sorprendente dentro de una bandada mixta de aves—un grupo de bajopalos enanos atacando a un carpintero albinegro mayor—resalta las interacciones complejas e interesantes dentro de las parvadas mixtas, un fenómeno que se ve comúnmente en el bosque conífero. Esta historia, originalmente publicada en inglés en noviembre de 2022, tiene que ver con las fascinantes dinámicas de las banda...

Kochia (Kochia scoparia): it's a horrible weed for North American farmers. But for fall sparrows, it's a source of food and cover. This is a the story of a Montana kochia patch on a late October day. We found dozens of sparrows in it: four native species, each with their own stories of migration, brought together to gather seeds from this patch of maligned weeds. And where there are so many sparro...

"Helena is very ducky," says Mark Mariano. The Butte-based ecologist has been watching fall duck migration on Lake Helena for two years now. In early October, I went along with Mark on one of his duck surveys. From Mark, I learned about Lake Helena and its importance to tens of thousands of coots, ducks, and snow geese. We talked about the problems common carp pose for duck habitat - and what we c...

Los humedales son increíbles. Y los del Lago Helena, en el Estado de Montana, EE.UU., no son ninguna excepción. Desde las grullas grises, los gansos canadienses y muchísimas aves cantoras que escucharás en la grabación al comienzo del podcast, hasta los patos y las otras aves acuáticas del otoño que son el enfoque de esta historia, es una diversidad compleja y maravillosa. Así que, ¡tomemos un rat...

Fall can be a bittersweet season, with so many goodbyes as the summer birds leave Montana. But the frigid months ahead are far from sterile. From October golden eagle migration to the American tree sparrows and bohemian waxwings of the winter, this episode is about the birds of late fall and early winter around Helena, Montana.

Nature Park is one of Helena, Montana's "birding hotspots." Through the seasons, birders have found an incredible 147 species of birds in this small urban park. And besides the birds, this is a place for community, where it's common to run across other nature enthusiasts and hear the stories of their sightings through the seasons. This episode is an introduction to this place - and just a few of i...

On September 22, a low-pressure system that had been hovering over the Pacific Ocean off of the California coast swept inland. Days after the storm passed through Sandpoint, Idaho, River Corcoran found an extremely rare bird - an ancient murrelet - on a local lake. How did this oceanic bird appear so far inland? This is the story of the murrelet and the wetland where it landed.

Giant water bugs, striped meadowhawks, lyre-tipped spreadwings, green carabid beetles, mud-dauber wasps, velvet ants, assassin bugs... even the names of these creatures are amazing. The stories of their lives are equally mind-blowing - and to spend a day with other avid naturalists, learning about that, is just plain fun! This week's podcast is about just such a day, three weeks ago on Five Valley...

It's a small, ten-year-old native plant garden on the campus of Carroll College in Helena, Montana - and it's full of Montana wildlife. Nothing as obvious as elk and grizzly bears, though: these wildlife are tiny, and very diverse. In this episode, meet the most conspicuous garden plants and a handful of the September mini-wildlife in this spot.

It's the sort of fall day when Spokane Bay (near Helena, Montana) is covered with migrating birds and anything seems possible. A great blue heron is wading in the marsh - the magpies are bothering a peregrine falcon - and a literal flood of Wilson's warblers and white-crowned sparrows has stopped over to forage here.

This week's story from Spokane Bay is about bird migration and algae. The birds: yellow-rumped warblers in the willows, pelicans and mallards on the bay, American goldfinches in the marsh elder, and a merlin hunting overhead. The algae: it's a possible trap for a kayaker or an unwary duck, but it's also a habitat for damselflies and even-tinier insects. 

They ripple over the water in a shimmery silver school... BEETLES! They're whirligig beetles in the genus Gyrinus, and hundreds upon hundreds of them are swimming on Hauser Lake, near Helena, Montana, at this very moment. This week I learned a lot about these beetles and the interesting puzzles of their lives. 

The Great Basin crackler isn’t just any grasshopper: the males have an incredibly loud, aerial snapping song. Why do they make this noise - and how? In this episode, explore the puzzle of this grasshopper’s song and learn about the specialized habitats where it lives.

It’s a patch of pale purple among late summer’s dry crested wheatgrass. How can we recognize this native aster - and what pollinators does it support? This episode is about getting to know a plant through the identification process.

This episode is about the writing process: why I write, how I hope this writing will serve you, and what to do when that isn't working. In late August 2022, I made some major changes to my process. I started writing shorter blog posts and reconnecting more intentionally with one place on the landscape. This is also when I started the podcast to make these stories more accessible.

Kate Wilburn's urban Missoula, Montana yard is an oasis of native plants and fruit trees in the middle of the city. Is this yard providing habitat for a diversity of insects, as we would hope? In this episode, I focus on the insects visiting five late-summer flowers in this yard: purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), smooth blue aster (Symphyotrichum laeve), Rocky Mountain beeplant (Cleome serru...