One recent September I stopped at the side of highway 20 that crosses Washington state’s North Cascade Mountains. At the side of the road was a sign that grabbed my attention. About a storied fire lookout cabin on top of Desolation Peak in the distance, where author Jack Kerouac spent some time in the 50s. The irony was that I couldn’t see the peak because of the forest fire smoke in the air that day. But it fired my imagination….the mountain was calling me. This episode of THE WILD is the result.The American west is a fire landscape. Since 1983, there’s been an average of 70,000 wildfires every year in the United States. And the wildfire season is getting longer. Warmer springs and long dry summers are the cause.Things are changing fast in this ancient landscape…So how have wildfires and our philosophy of fighting them changed over the decades?To answer that, I’ve climbed to the top of this mountain, to the famed fire lookout at Desolation Peak, to speak to Jim Henterly. He is the fire watchman who’s stationed at the lookout. Desolation Peak has long been a place to look for answers. I’m hoping to find a new perspective through him.The job of a fire lookout is to be a step ahead, ever watchful - observe all around you - and warn of danger. But maybe also to remind us of our role in the ever evolving ecology of fire.The WILD is a joint production of myself and KUOW Public Radio. One way to support this vital work and become part of THE WILD community is through small monthly contributions to my wildlife organization, Chris Morgan Wildlife. You can find more information at Patreon. Thank you!Follow us on Instagram @thewildpod and @chrismorganwildlife See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join me as I squeeze on a dry suit, don a snorkel, and jump into an icy mountain river.“That's what I'm amazed by, that a little tiny stream, not even knee deep, is a whole world if you get under there with it.,” that’s what CWU professor Paul James told me as we snorkeled our way through the fast moving current.Dr. James is surveying the number of fish in the river after a recent restoration project. Gold Creek is an important tributary to the Yakima River and serves as a breeding ground for many fish that are important to the Yakama Nation.Joe Blodgett learned how to fish from his father. He mastered the technique of dipnetting a fish out of the Yakima River, the traditional kind of fishing for the Yakama Nation.“We were directed by our leadership to make it like it was before we started destroying their habitat and before we started destroying the flows,” Joe told me. “Make it like it was as a directive from our tribal council years ago.”Easier said than done when you are facing a generation of infrastructure changes to the landscape and waterways. But this story is about just that, the mission to restore a watershed -  starting with a single river - to truly ‘make it like it was.’The WILD is a joint production of myself and KUOW Public Radio. One way to support this vital work and become part of THE WILD community is through small monthly contributions to my wildlife organization, Chris Morgan Wildlife. You can find more information at Patreon. Thank you!Follow us on Instagram @thewildpod and @chrismorganwildlife See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I was trained as a traditional scientist, to look at the world through that perspective. Analytical, and clinical. In this “western science” you have to toe the line and keep personal experience and emotions out of it. Science is run as a pretty tight ship. There's a good reason for that, of course.But for indigenous people, there’s something that comes with spending time in nature that helps to understand it in a different way. Often it’s knowledge from generation after generation of experience. Knowledge of creatures and habitats.There’s a way to understand nature through both these perspectives alongside each other….indigenous knowledge, and western science. It’s a concept known as two eyed seeing.The WILD is a joint production of myself and KUOW Public Radio. One way to support this vital work and become part of THE WILD community is through small monthly contributions to my wildlife organization, Chris Morgan Wildlife. You can find more information at Patreon. Thank you!Follow us on Instagram @thewildpod and @chrismorganwildlifeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To most of us, coral reefs conjure up magical places full of colorful species and life. They are unknown and otherworldly. Their beauty is perhaps a reason why coral reefs have become one of the more famous victims of climate change, warming oceans. Most people have heard that the future for coral reefs is in total jeopardy. And this is a problem, because about 25% of the ocean’s fish depend on healthy coral reefs. Scientists are now warning that the Great Barrier Reef could be gone by the year 2050 if nothing is done to help it.And it turns out….. Reefs are noisy places. Fish, shrimp, all the little creatures that call a reef home add to the sonic palette of the place.But as reefs become more unhealthy…life on them is becoming harder for Tim to hear.The sounds of these watery ecosystems are becoming a very important tool for researchers like Tim. And he has an idea that might be key to helping these struggling coral reef ecosystems rebound. Armed with a microphone and an underwater speaker….can the power of audio help save coral reefs?Hiro’a is part of a multimedia art project called Small Island Big Song. It is a grassroots musical movement from 16 island nations across the Pacific and Indian Oceans focusing on environmental and climate awareness and cultural preservation. The WILD is a joint production of myself and KUOW Public Radio. One way to support this vital work and become part of THE WILD community is through small monthly contributions to my wildlife organization, Chris Morgan Wildlife. You can find more information at Patreon. Thank you!Follow us on Instagram @thewildpod and @chrismorganwildlifeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I’ve thought about this stuff a lot as I listen to the northern flicker woodpecker tapping noisily away on the rain gutter outside my bedroom window. And not just rain gutters of course. Woodpeckers will peck at a tree up to 12,000 times a day and just one woodpecker peck produces about 15 times the force needed to give a human a concussion. So, how do woodpeckers bang their heads so much, and so hard and not come away with brain damage? The WILD is a joint production of myself and KUOW Public Radio. One way to support this vital work and become part of THE WILD community is through small monthly contributions to my wildlife organization, Chris Morgan Wildlife. You can find more information at Patreon. Thank you!Follow us on Instagram @thewildpod and @chrismorganwildlife See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join me among the crashing waves of the Pacific Northwest coast in Washington State.This unique wildlife story starts, not there, but with a nuclear explosion, literally. During the late 60s and early 70s, three atomic weapons were tested on Amchitka Island in a remote part of Alaska. The blast registered a 7.0 on the Richter scale. over 10,000 fish were killed in the island’s lakes, streams and ponds.But thanks to a little imagination, right before the nuclear test, a last minute program was deployed to capture and save some of the sea otters. Several hundred of the sea otters were quickly relocated out of harm’s way to the north pacific coast of Washington State and Oregon.Now, over 50 years later, biologists are trying to figure out what is the fallout from this storied otter translocation . Has the nuclear otter evacuation from 50 years ago been a success? And what are the ecological ripple effects?This is a story of second chances for an impossibly adorable sea creature, and how their mere presence can support countless other species, and even help save us from climate change. Links to films I’ve hosted if you’d like to learn more:The Kelp HighwayThe Blue ForestThe WILD is a joint production of myself and KUOW Public Radio. One way to support this vital work and become part of THE WILD community is through small monthly contributions to my wildlife organization, Chris Morgan Wildlife. You can find more information at Patreon. Thank you!Follow us on Instagram @thewildpod and @chrismorganwildlife See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Happy Earth Day to you all. For a while now I've wanted to share a short piece like this, and Earth Day seems like the right time! I hope you can kick back and listen to a relaxing 10 minute journey all about our precious home. If you enjoy it, please share it with others. After all, we're all in this together.Thank you for the inspiration to:Conservationists everywhere. Everyone working on ‘30x30’ - protecting 30% of the planet by the year 2030. The team at ‘Earth Emergency’ - check out their fascinating documentary.Greenpeace, for the poster I saw all those years ago.Thanks to the wild team Tatiana Latreille, Matt Martin, Jim gates, and Brendan Sweeney. And thank you Gordon Hempton and Quiet Parks International for the beautiful audioSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One thing that I love about my work is that I get the opportunity to talk to so many interesting people working with wildlife around the world. For today’s episode I wanted to share with you one of those conversations.Some of you might remember our episodes on “how to catch a cougar” back in season 2. If you do, the name Dr. Mark Elbroch will probably sound familiar. Mark is a good friend of mine and a cougar biologist with Panthera - he took us out into the forests of WA State to radio collar and track a cougar for those episodes. It was an incredible experience.Well, I also had the honor of interviewing him on stage at Town Hall in Seattle recently - about the fascinating lives of cougars - mountain lions - he’s on the cutting edge of some leading research about their behavior, their ecology, and how we can protect and appreciate these beautiful big cats. Mark’s just written a book called The Cougar Conundrum: Sharing the World with a Successful Predator and we’ll talk about that too.I hope you enjoy our conversationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode you may notice a lot of heavy breathing - because I’m on the trail of a wolverine high up in the mountains. Here’s the story….In the summer of 2020, there was some big news for wildlife in the pacific northwest. In the wild spaces of Mount Rainier National Park, a female wolverine was discovered along with two babies. The wolverines were back. It is believed that these tenacious predators haven't been in the park for over a century.Dr. Jocelyn Akins is a wolverine biologist and founder of the Cascade Carnivore Project. She has slogged and toiled through some of the most rugged terrain on earth, setting up wildlife cameras all over the high country in the hopes of proving that wolverines had returned. Eventually, after years of searching, Jocelyn was rewarded with the first images of a mother and her young inside the park.For 15 years now, Jocelyn has been on a quest to witness and document the return of wolverines to the mountains of the south cascades after a long absence. But the fact a female with youngsters is expanding into new territory could be a sign that the population is making a comeback. And it seems like there’s no creature more determined.This is a story about toughness, tenacity, and resilience, not just of the wolverines, but of the woman determined to study them.The WILD is a joint production of myself and KUOW Public Radio. One way to support this vital work and become part of THE WILD community is through small monthly contributions to my wildlife organization, Chris Morgan Wildlife. You can find more information at Patreon. Thank you!Follow us on Instagram @thewildpod and @chrismorganwildlifeCorrection, 9:36 a.m., 3/31/2022: An earlier version of this story misspelled the last name of Dr. Jocelyn Akins. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Like so many carnivores around the world, through history the Iberian lynx was persecuted as a menace or a threat to livestock and lifestyle: they were shot, poisoned, trapped, hunted. And misunderstood.The cats have those really characteristic long tufted ears, black spots dappled across their tawny coat and an old fashioned beard that can stretch down in two long triangles each side of their chin.But despite it’s regal flare, it’s still endangered, and a real focus of attention. But things are turning around, there used to be only around 100 lynx in Spain but now there are nearly 1000.That’s why I’ve come to Spain - to figure out what is behind that success story - just how did what used to be the rarest cat on earth leap a staggering 1000% in number in just 20 years?Learn more about efforts to save the Iberian Lynx with CBD Habitat.The WILD is a joint production of myself and KUOW Public Radio. One way to support this vital work and become part of THE WILD community is through small monthly contributions to my wildlife organization, Chris Morgan Wildlife. You can find more information at Patreon. Thank you!Follow us on Instagram @thewildpod and @chrismorganwildlifeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.