to know the land

Certified wildlife tracker Sage Raymond, is completing her Masters of Science studying Urban-adapted Coyote ecologies in Edmonton. She has been working with colleagues on the Edmonton Urban Coyote Project studying the patterns and behaviours of these urbanized Coyotes in hopes to be better able to predict, and reduce some of the possible problems or conflicts which could occur between these wilder...

Wildlife biologist, Hannah Barron and lawyer Kaitlyn Mitchell have been working to defend Wolves, Coyotes, Bears, and Skunks, among many other animals from being poisoned indiscriminately. Why are they poisoned? The governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan say they are attempting to reduce the chances of livestock predation, and to supposedly protect endangered Caribou from population declines caus...

I await the arrival of the Wood Thrush ( Hylocichla mustelina ) with a little bit more anticipation than most other birds. As I wander through the woods looking for tracks of animals or signs of Spring’s return, my ears are always tuned in to the possibility of the high liquid sound of a Wood Thrush’s song, perhaps the most beautiful song in the Spring forest around here. Recognizing that I am in...

Can we imagine a living piece of trash? Can we remember that magic exists and flows through all things, including that trash, the sidewalk, the tires sunk in the bottom of the river? Maybe respect and honour are not just for the pretty things, the magical things like a candle, or a plant, or the multitude of stars. Sabrina Scott asks us to take all beings into account, allowing for their identitie...

The Virginia Opossum is of the most amazing mammals on the continent. These marsupials are slowly but surely expanding their range northwards, despite winters which can be so hard on the Opossum that they can freeze, or starve to death. Why are they expanding their range? Are they adapting beyond their traditional climate niche? For this show we talk to Dr. Lisa Walsh , a mammalogist and biology e...

Time is cyclic, as caused and demonstrated by orbits, seasons, and migrations. To honour those elliptical events I get to practice rituals with the land based on what is occurring in reaction to the always ongoing changes. One such ritual is observing the Spring Migration of songbirds. Every year around this time I get to practice listening to the birds. I go and do my sit spot, or go for a walk a...

Doug Tallamy ’s new book “ The Nature of Oaks : The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees ” is a month-by-month study of the ecology of Oaks. A perennial dive into the cycling inhabitants and visitors to Oaks throughout the year. While not quite a field guide, the book does offer detailed explanations, accompanied by large colour photographs, on a multitude of various insect and bird spe...

Doug Elliott is a pretty cool guy. Well, to be honest he’s what I want to be when I grow up. A story telling, plant loving, naturalist whose passion for nature and love for the land inspire all sorts of folks across the continent. I first heard about Doug from one of his books many years ago, “Wild Roots”, but recently have been coming across his name more and more, whether it was through storytel...

Dr. Kim Anderson , Dr. Sheri Longboat and Dr. Brittany Luby are the driving force behind Nokom’s House, a new lab in development at the University of Guelph. Together with a community of elders they are establishing an indigenous learning, sharing, teaching space which will be using relational pedagogies, community research, and land-based learning to make home for cultural recovery, inter-generat...

Wellington Water Watchers (WWW) is a grassroots organization working towards protecting their local water from those who would take it, pollute it, and render it a commodity. They have been working on the ground and in the streams since 2007. Through centering indigenous and marginalized struggles as a lighthouse to current and future WWW campaigns,  and through developing partnerships with o...

About 30 km from Lake Huron, there is a proposal to dig a 500m mine (“ deep geological repository ” or DGR) on 1500 acres along the Teeswater River. Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) wants to fill the mine with radioactive waste with a halflife of up to 1,000,000 years. They intend to monitor the dumpsite for a few years and then seal it and forget about it. Thankfully there are folks r...

Eastern Loggerhead Shrikes ( Lanius ludovicianus migrans ) have been listed on the COSEWIC as an endangered species since 1991, and more recent population analysis indicates that there may be only 50 breeding pairs remaining in Ontario. With uncertainty around what has been and is continually causing the decline in populations, along ongoing habitat fragmentation, growing impacts of climate change...

For this interview I get to talk with Jeremy Pustilnik and Paul Curtis about a recently published paper from the journal “Urban Ecosystems” on the interactions of Eastern Cottontail Rabbits ( Syvilagus floridanus) and Red Foxes ( Vulpes vulpes ) around the use of Groundhog ( Marmota monax ) burrows and if the scent of Red Fox urine would dissuade the Cottontails from using the burrows. Not only do...

The first show of 2021 is a great one. My guest is Sophie Mazowita, naturalist, educator, wildlife guide, tracker and much more. We talk about her journey as a naturalist and a tracker, how she gets off the trail and gets into the wilder world around her. When I talk to folks about creating cultures of connection with the land, putting in the time, effort and passion into the work of learning ours...

This is an older interview with cybersquirrel1.com creator SpaceRogue on why we need not worry about the threats of nationalistic warlike cyber attacks on the power grid on the continent, but instead we must be more concerned about THE SQUIRRELS!!! (sort of..) Squirrels, Birds, Snakes, Raccoons have caused 2,123 power outages around the world since 1987, and possibly more. SpaceRogue has been coll...

Cycles of the year are very important to me. Spring Equinox is always quickening as you smell the winter dripping away. Summer solstice for dancing with friends throughout the shortest nights. Autumn Equinox is a celebration of the bounty the summer has brought, and a reminder of the coming winter. But none really carry the weight for me as much as the Winter Solstice. The returning of the Sun fil...

The work of Forest schools is becoming a bustling landscape of small organizations and business' trying their best to teach and share alongside the land in the best ways they can. But how do we transplant a European sourced model onto colonized indigenous lands without repeating the same racist patterns of harm? How do we not only stop harm, but work towards healing, reparations, and good relation...

Coyotes have expanded their range in the last century more so than any other mammal on the continent, and is still going. Highly adaptive, intelligent, “wily”, and resilient, Coyote is not going to stop just because our human made landscapes get in the way. In fact, Coyotes make the way for themselves within our constructed spaces, finding edges and cracks and turning them into home. But how do we...

Today I air a fanboyish interview with author, educator, terrestrial ecologist and inspiration, Tom Wessels. Tom has written extensively on “forest forensics” and what I call “landscape tracking”, learning to read the signs of the forest to identify the ecological history and disturbance events which have affected that landscape. He looks to topographical features such as hills or the lack there o...

I get excited by finding dead animals on the land. There is so much we can learn by looking at these animals when they are in front of us. We can really examine their physical characteristics which isn't always that easy when the animals are alive, going about their own business, and generally trying to avoid interactions with humans. When examining a dead bird there is a lot we can observe, such...

The show is a conversation with Jam Doughty, discussing the facets of their career as an artist creating beautiful works interpreting a diversity of lush flora, strange crustaceans, migrating autumn waterfowl and songbirds. We go over some of the complexities of being a white nature educator in the predominantly black community of Garfield Park neighbourhood on the west side of Chicago, working to...

Rhamnus cathartica , or Common Buckthorn , is a non-native opportunistic species of shrub that many love to hate, myself included most of the time. It seems to crowd out local species and possibly even poisons the soil beneath to make it even harder for other plants to take hold. Birds act as vectors for the seed dispersal and soon enough, another forest has a Buckthorn problem. But what if we try...

From Wikipedia : In mythology, medieval literature and occultism, the language of the birds is postulated as a mystical, perfect divine language, … angelic language or a mythical or magical language used by birds to communicate with the initiated. A look into some of the varied ideas of what the Language of the Birds might mean. Less of the tracking and scientific approach to bird language, but in...

Going to Hawk Cliff to go watch migrating Raptors is becoming a bit of a pilgrimage for me. It’s only the second time I’ve gone there, but the quality of the experience is profound. To get to see these Birds whom, when you see individually during your everyday, it is always a highlight of the day. But to go see hundreds of these amazing predatory birds is just astounding. What a gift. Hawk Cliff i...

Danielle and I speak with Pinar and So of Queer Nature about how it might look feel and be to queer and decolonize our understandings of who we are in connection with the places we live. How can we interrupt the dominant narrative of ecologies viewed through the lenses of heterocentric, capitalist, white supremacis colonial narratives? Does the land make space for divergent identities, life ways a...