Finding Wild

In 2011, flooding devastated a close-knit mobile home community built decades earlier on a Williamstown, Massachusetts floodplain. I walk the land today with Anne O'Connor, co-chair of Bee Friendly Williamstown. Since then, it's become a park, with street paths still running through it and most of the land simply left to grow wild, maintained by the town — but tucked inside it is a pollinator garden planted and tended by volunteers from Bee Friendly Williamstown. Their original vision was an ambitious, town-wide pollinator corridor — one that turned out to be a lot harder to build than anyone expected. What they built instead is smaller, but real: a garden full of wildflowers, bees, and butterflies.

BeeFriendly Williamstown https://www.beefriendlywilliamstown.org

Toxic Use Reduction Institute (TURI) University of Massachusetts Lowell https://www.turi.org

Homegrown National Park https://homegrownnationalpark.org

Wing And A Prayer Nursery https://www.wingandaprayernursery.com

Massachusetts Pollinator Network https://masspollinatornetwork.org

Grow Native Massachusetts https://grownativemass.org

Wild Lobsters — with Dan Rodgers, Bottom Line Fisheries

Dan Rodgers has been lobstering out of Corea, Maine since 1988 — a first-generation fisherman who grew up on the water and never left it. In 2017, he opened his boat to visitors, and Catch Your Dinner was born: guests watch as Dan and his daughter bring the traps full of lobster onto the boat, band lobster claws, and learn about the conservation practices lobstermen have used since the beginning — then eat what they caught.

In this episode, Dan walks us through what a day of lobstering off the coast of Maine actually looks like, how a hand-painted sign by the side of the road turned into a full-blown tour business almost overnight, and why the fishery's most important conservation tool — the v-notch — was invented by fishermen, not regulators. It's a story about a hundred-year-old fishery that polices itself, a family business built one word-of-mouth voicemail at a time, and what it means to understand where your food comes from.

In this episode:

• What a typical day of commercial lobstering looks like, from 2:30 a.m. on
• How Catch Your Dinner Tours started with a hand-painted sign and grew from there
• The V-notch, and the billion-notch challenge reshaping lobster conservation statewide
• How invasive green crabs are changing life along the Maine coast
• What Dan hopes every guest understands about where their food comes from

Guest: Captain Dan Rodgers, Commercial Lobsterman & Founder, Catch Your Dinner Tours

• [email protected]
• Facebook: catchyourdinnerlobstertour
• Instagram: @catchyourdinnerlobstertour

Finding Wild

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• Spotify
• Amazon/Audible
• Instagram/YouTube: @findingwildstudios
• Facebook: FindingWild

#WhatIsWildToYou #FindingWild

For over 20 years, Mackie Greene has been pulling entangled whales back from the brink. As co-founder and director of whale rescue for the Canadian Whale Institute, he and his team cover nearly the entire east coast of Canada — one of just a handful of trained response teams in the country, alongside a longstanding team in Newfoundland and Labrador. It's a job that means racing to the water within the hour, tracking whales hundreds of miles offshore, and cutting rope by hand from animals that can weigh anywhere from 5 to 150 tons (roughly 4.5 to 136 metric tonnes).

In this episode, Mackie walks us through what a rescue actually looks like, how the work has evolved since he and co-founder Joe Howlett started with little more than knives taped to poles in 2002, and how a warming ocean is reshaping where — and how often — these rescues happen. It's a story about fishermen turned first responders, and what it takes to keep showing up for an animal that might fight you the whole way.

In this episode:

• What a whale disentanglement actually involves, start to finish
• How the Canadian Whale Institute's rescue team began — and how tragedy reshaped it
• Why right whales have shifted from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of St. Lawrence
• The shipping lane and fishing closure changes designed to protect them
• What keeps Mackie going back out, even after a rescue doesn't succeed

Guest: Mackie Greene Co-founder and Director of Whale Rescue, Canadian Whale Institute 📧 [email protected] 📘 Facebook: /CanadianWhaleInstitute 📸 Instagram: @canadianwhaleinstitue 🐦 Twitter/X: @CanWhaleInst

Finding Wild 🎧 Apple Podcasts: link 🎧 Spotify: link 🎧 Amazon/Audible: link 📸 Instagram/YouTube: @findingwildstudios 📘 Facebook: FindingWild

#WhatIsWildToYou #FindingWild

In part two of my conversation with Meg Puckett, director of herd management for the Corolla Wild Horse Fund, we get into the personal stories — the horses that changed everything for her, and the question at the heart of this series: what is wild?

Meg shares the moments that have stayed with her across nearly ten years of managing this herd, the philosophy she’s developed about when to intervene and when to walk away, and the legacy she hopes to leave behind.

Learn more about the Corolla Wild Horse Fund: Website: corollawildhorses.com Instagram: @corollawildhorsefundinc Facebook: Corolla Wild Horse Fund YouTube: @corollawildhorsefund1356

Follow Finding Wild: Instagram: @findingwildstudios Facebook: Finding Wild

Along the Graveyard of the Atlantic, on the northernmost beaches of the Outer Banks, lives the last genetically isolated herd of Colonial Spanish Mustangs in the world. Nobody knows exactly how they got here. But they've been here for five hundred years.

In this episode, I join Meg Puckett, director of herd management for the Corolla Wild Horse Fund, on a morning ride-along on the 4x4 beach in Corolla, North Carolina. Meg takes us inside the work of managing a wild herd — the genetics, the breed conservation, the population management, and the growing challenge of coexistence between wild horses and the people who share their beach.

Part 2 drops next Wednesday.

Learn more about the Corolla Wild Horse Fund: Website: corollawildhorses.com Instagram: @corollawildhorsefundinc Facebook: Corolla Wild Horse Fund YouTube: @corollawildhorsefund1356

Follow Finding Wild: Instagram: @findingwildstudios Facebook: Finding Wild

Finding Wild begins with a question: What is wild to you? In this first episode, wildlife and conservation photographer Heather Moran shares how a short film turned into a podcast, why “wild” doesn’t mean what it used to, and why she’s spending this whole series finding out what it means now. What is wild to you?