to know the land

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.

Hopefully you live in a place where you can hear these beautiful songs, but if not, listen up and you just might fall in love as well.

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 identities to remind us that the world is a breathing, heaving, mass of being -  from our own bodies we hold so high, down to the vaccines and microbes which populate all things.

Sabrina identifies as a witch. No no, not the tall black hat, broom and cat… (well, maybe a cat), but instead as someone who engages with the material and immaterial consciously and with care and consideration reaching for a broad understanding and engagement that recognizes the beingness of all objects and forms of life.

We discuss their book “Witchbody”,  magic in the anthropogenic space,  gender essentialism in witchy cosmologies, and a bunch more. It was a lot of fun.

Sabrina Scott’s website

Sabrina Scott’s presentation at CRASSH

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 educator about the wonderful natural history of the Virginia Opossum, how anthropogenic changes to the landscape are influencing their behaviours, and of her research about the processes of their ongoing range expansion.  

More info:

Contemporary range expansion of the Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana) impacted by humans and snow cover.

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 and listen intently to try and notice who has returned to my part of the world from away, or who has been here all winter, but is now singing out.

I listen for territorial and mating calls/songs, companion calls, as well as for alarms, intraspecies aggression, and eventually juvenile begging calls. These are just some of the varied reasons why a bird may create some sort of cue, but definitely the easier ones for me to pick-up on. There is so much more which I don’t know.

This tradition is about relationship building through active listening and paying attention. We can’t know someone without listening to them, without giving them attention and acknowledging them. By listening to the birds and working towards understanding them we start to identify their needs, “desires” and habits. By listening to a human friend we do the same. Through this identification we might also develop empathy and care, compassion and love. Seems worth the listen to me.

Why not ritualize this interspecies relationship building and also honour it through highlighting and uplifting on this podcast platform as I might a researcher, author, or knowledge holder? Once we’ve listened where do we go from there? How do we deepen the bonds that listening creates? Can we know the land better through listening to the more-than-human world? I think so. Let’s give it a shot.

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 species who are interacting with the Oak.

This book, and interview, are full of natural history of the Oaks, as well as a call to action for those who have the means to plant an Oak.

Doug’s other books, “Bringing Nature Home”, “Natures Best Hope” have been informative in helping folks change the way they conceptualize their lawns. “The Nature of Oaks” will help us deepen our understanding of the ecologies of one of the mightiest cornerstones in our ecosystems across the continent.

As a note, sadly my microphone was not selected properly and my audio isn’t as good as it could be. Luckily Doug’s audio comes in loud and clear.

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 storytellers, or virtual singalongs, people are sharing his words.

We got on a quick zoom call to chat about a possible upcoming interview and then the interview sort of just happened then. I didn’t have all the questions prepared, and Doug didn’t know what I wanted to talk about really, but he was game and it was fun. I may have ended up telling more stories than he did.

Learn more:

https://dougelliott.com/ - Doug’s Homepage

https://dougelliott.bandcamp.com - Listen to, and purchase Doug’s albums of stories and songs

Buy Doug’s books

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-generational training, and the creation of indigenous futurities.

On the show we hear why there is a need for Nokom’s House within the academic setting, what the cultural architecture of safety can look like for marginalized students, the roles of women, especially older women, have within indigineous communities, and also why there needs to be spaces specifically for indigineous people on the University of Guelph campus, within the city of Guelph, and further afield.

Again spaces like this are truly inspiring for me. I end up with so many questions and hopes. What can settler folks learn from spaces like this, and how can we take the lessons and direction from indigenous folks and bring some cultural change to the spaces we create now and into the future? How do we decompose the structures we’ve created that actively separate folks from the land and from our more-than-human relationships? More questions than answers, of course.

Learn more about how you can support what they are doing here.

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 other seemingly disparate local organizations, they have been working to challenge the destructive machinations of bottled water corporations (Nestle specifically), developers, and provincial and federal governments who have been neglecting or outright attacking safe clean drinking water and the natural habitats where that water comes from.

Arlene Slowcombe, executive director of Wellington Water Watchers, talks on the show about how they and their allies are working to protect water and oppose those who would endanger not only the most precious and vital of “resources”, but the key to all life on earth.

Learn more:

https://www.wellingtonwaterwatchers.ca/

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 resisting the proposed nuclear waste dump. Today’s show I talk to Michelle Stein and Bill Noll from “Protect Our Waterways - No Nuclear Waste” to find out what the proposed project is all about, and how they are working with their neighbours, both near and far, indigenous and settlers, from both sides of Lake Huron, to challenge the NMWO and the proposed DGR.

Sure, this show mostly covers natural history, wildlife, book reviews and such, but there are other things happening out on the land which must highlighted and explored, and resistance to huge industrial radioactive mining projects with possible catastrophic consequences which could still be playing out a million years from now are also worth taking a deeper look at.

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, the future of the Loggerhead Shrike in Ontario is unknown.

But there is work being done to help populations recover. Hazel Wheeler, lead biologist on the Eastern Loggerhead Shrike Recovery Program with Wildlife Preservation Canada has been helping to coordinate captive breeding programs to support the rearing, and release of thousands of Loggerhead Shrikes since 2003.

Hazel joins the show to talk about some of the natural history of the Eastern Loggerhead, along with detailing the recovery project and how they are working hard understand what impacts are affecting the populations, and what they are doing in the breeding programs to assist these amazing and endangered birds.

Want to learn more?

Wildlife Preservation Canada

images credits, clockwise from top :  S Matheson, G Pitman, A Samuelson,