On the Move

[theme music]

Host, Leah Palmer: Welcome to On the Move, a podcast mini-series about wild animals, their amazing migrations, and how people are finding ways to free them up from all the things standing in their way. I’m Leah Palmer, a storyteller at The Nature Conservancy.

[birdsong]

Host, Leah Palmer: On an early Spring morning in Ellsworth Creek, scientists at The Nature Conservancy captured a chorus of birdsong in the iconic, moss-draped rainforest. For six weeks, devices placed by scientists recorded the sounds of the forest and snapped photos of animals when triggered by motion. These sounds and photos helped them understand biodiversity and animal movement in the forest.

Speaker, Maia Murphy-Williams:  So, it’s like the dawn chorus. When the sun first comes up, birds just like go wild.” It's amazing. And they're just all singing at the same time. And people don't really know why, which I think is such a cool, I mean, there's all sorts of theories, but it's another one of those things that's just like intrinsic... animals loving life, you know, or like, like just existing in the world.

Host, Leah Palmer: That’s Maia Murphy-Williams, associate director of science at The Nature Conservancy in Washington, introducing me to the concept of life histories. Life histories is a scientist’s term, encompassing the strategy plants and animals use to survive on the planet—their behavior at different ages, reproductive patterns, seasonal movements, everything we expect to happen before they die.

In six weeks that Spring, Maia and her team captured over 91 distinct birdsongs in the forest, and they’re identifying more as the study continues. She cautions me about giving human qualities, motivations, or emotions to animals, but to me, their calls sound joyful, connected, content. Here’s the interesting thing: if Maia recorded birds singing in the same forest at a different time—say in Winter—the sounds would be entirely different. That’s because, like many creatures on the planet, birds... are on the move.

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Host, Leah Palmer: Migrations have always inspired us. But our planet is changing. What does that mean for the way animals come and go with the seasons? I decided to find out.” Over the next six episodes, I take you with me on my learning journey. More than a dozen top experts agreed to sit down and shed light on the way animals pursue historic migrations, playing out their life histories in our modern world. I’m Leah Palmer, a storyteller for The Nature Conservancy, and you’re listening to “On the Move.”

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Host, Leah Palmer: So, what is a migration anyway? A quick google search defines migrations as “seasonal movement of birds or animals from one region to another.

Speaker, Maia Murphy-Williams: “Birds, for example, migrate to seek food or get better temperatures to wait out the winter months. Whales migrate to warm waters to have their babies in a safe place and then they return to colder waters that have more food in different seasons. Smaller animals tend to move less. But, in the forest I study, the coastal temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, the larger the body of the animal typically the bigger home range they need so that means the more space they need to live out what we call their life history strategy.”

Host, Leah Palmer: Maia grew up in Washington and has spent her career studying wildlife across the West. At The Nature Conservancy, she focuses on how conservation interventions affect wildlife.

Speaker, Maia Murphy-Williams: “What else about me? My background's in wildlife science and I've always just had a real love for the creatures. But, when I was going through undergrad and grad school and my field work jobs, I kind of like had this nagging feeling of like I really care about wildlife and our wild spaces, but humans are in crisis too. The environmental template on which humans and animals depend is in crisis. And so, sometimes it felt kind of incomplete to just focus on wildlife in kind of the traditional academic setting. And, so that kind of led me away from academia, away from just studying one specific taxa or animal and towards looking at how climate change is affecting our landscapes and the wildlife that depend on it—just more broad conservation focused on people and nature. And that led me to The Nature Conservancy, where you do have the opportunity to look a little bit more “big picture” and how this all fits together. But I would say my first love is wildlife for sure and that continues to be a guiding force in the work that I do.

Host, Leah Palmer: My ears perked up listening to Maia talk about how both humans and nature are in crisis as the climate changes. Did you catch her mention of our environmental template and how it’s changing? Well, I did a little searching for a reliable definition and some context. First of all, our environmental template simply refers to the physical and chemical structure of a habitat. It includes temperature, light, soil, moisture, nutrient availability—basically all the characteristics of a place that allow life, yes even humans, to thrive. Maia says these key features of Earth are changing. But what’s causing this change? Well, I’m realizing that human actions—like our dependence on fossil fuels, our disruption of natural habitats and the pollution of our clean air and water—have rapidly reshaped this environmental template, pushing the needle on climate change further and faster than ever before. The impact of that change is hard to fathom. More and more, people are experiencing climate disasters, dealing with the impacts of a warming climate, sea level rise and severe wildfire events. But, there are places in the Western U.S. where the impacts are hardly noticed, where the potatoes still grow and cities still bustle. Yet, underneath the veneer of normalcy, farmers are planting climate resilient crops outside the traditional growing season, and sportsmen can’t seem to harvest deer, elk or fish in the places they once always were. And if humans are changing the way we relate to our environments, I can assume animals are experiencing these changes too. Somewhere in our relentless pursuit of growth and development, humans modified habitats, initiated severe declines in biodiversity, and changed the planet forever.

Maia tells me a diverse ecosystem is essential to ecosystem health. The more diverse an ecosystem is the more resilient it is to disturbance and disruption. She tells me that monitoring biodiversity is a primary method for researchers to determine overall health of an ecosystem. Diversity is key for human and animal systems.

Speaker, Maia Murphy-Williams: That's why it's really important that we're monitoring biodiversity on the landscape. And especially with climate change and changing land use practices. So with logging, with flooding, as the climate is changing and as humans increase their impact on the landscape. That changes where wildlife go, right? Where they shift, where they move. By monitoring wildlife biodiversity, we can get a sense of what's happening on the landscape, what areas might need our attention.

Host, Leah Palmer: There's a lot of listeners out there like me who maybe don't use the word biodiversity in their everyday conversations. And so I thought it'd be interesting to ask you, what does that even mean?

Speaker, Maia Murphy-Williams: Yeah, that's a great question. And maybe I'll start with a general definition of biodiversity. In general, it's a measurement of the number of species within a set geographic area. So say in your local park, there might be squirrels, there might be deer, there might be various types of birds. So it's counting the number of species. And then often there’s some um estimation of the amount of each of those species.

Host, Leah Palmer: Maia and I spent some time looking at photos she’s captured on motion-activated wildlife cameras.

Speaker, Maia Murphy-Williams: Here it is. Look at that.

Host, Leah Palmer: Oh my goodness! Is this in Ellsworth?

Speaker, Maia Murphy-Williams: This is Ellsworth. Yeah.

Host, Leah Palmer: It’s this beautiful, sun-dappled forest with a lot more mature trees and then, kind of following behind its mother, is this baby bear. Beautiful.

Speaker, Maia Murphy-Williams: And it’s June first, is the date on the camera and the baby bear is teeny tiny. And so this guy was probably very fresh.

Host, Leah Palmer: Wow, well thanks for showing me. That’s a very special thing to see.

I still get giddy at the opportunity to talk with experts like her who have a pulse on animals, big and small, that move through TNC preserves in Washington. She showed me migrating songbirds in trees, cougars hunting a snack, baby black bears tumbling behind their mamas and becoming acquainted with their legs. I’m beginning to get a sense of what biodiversity really looks like. I can see just how important a healthy habitat is for living things to thrive.

This makes me think about ancestors in my family who live through dramatic migrations—some moves they chose, and others were imposed. When I think about wildlife migrations, I can’t help but see echoes of human movements too. I asked Maia if there was anything humans can learn from animal migrations.

Speaker, Maia Murphy-Williams: I keep coming back to this, the concept of connectivity, and how important that is for animals and especially as the physical landscape is changing. And that's kind of a parallel I see with human populations, right? Is like the climate, both the physical climate and the political climate is constantly changing. You know, an Elk or a grizzly bear has no idea if it's in Canada or the US, right? They’re also like going back and forth between borders.

I think what we can learn from animals is the arbitrary nature of modern borders. Because how an animal exists in space is looking for food, for community—if its an animal that is not solitary—for shelter, for all these things that both humans an animals need to exist. And that is what defines their geographical area, right? It’s not arbitrary borders that humans have imposed on the landscape. I mean, especially, you look at a lot of our states. I mean, some of them are squares. I lived in Colorado; it is a perfect square. And that is not something you see in nature ever. You see boundaries along mountain ranges, or along rivers, or along forests. So you think about.. back to our squirrel, or our elk, like what they need to survive...

I think that's something we can really learn from animals is that movement across borders to seek safety to seek shelter, seek a good life that we all deserve is just the most natural thing and it's been happening for millennia.

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Support comes from The Nature Conservancy. In the Emerald Edge, we support Indigenous and community leadership to restore coastal rainforests, protect wildlife and strengthen communities across Southeast Alaska, British Columbia, Oregon and Washington. Learn more at nature dot org slash Emerald Edge.

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Host, Leah Palmer: Experts have been studying wildlife migrations across borders, this “most natural thing” for a while now. But in the last few decades, their questions have changed in response to accelerated change in the climate. I sat down with Josh Lawler to discuss how new questions have informed what we know about animals on the move.

Host, Leah Palmer: Hi Josh. How are you?

Speaker, Josh Lawler: Good. How are you?

Host, Leah Palmer: I’m doing pretty well. Thanks for joining me and talking about wildlife migrations today.

Speaker, Josh Lawler: Yeah, I’m happy to. Thanks for having me.

Host, Leah Palmer: Of course. Well, Josh, before we jump in, I was hoping you might introduce yourself a little, maybe tell us your name and your title and what that means.

Speaker, Josh Lawler: Sure. So my name is Josh Lawler and I'm a professor at the University of Washington. I'm also the faculty director of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens and I'm the co-director of something called Nature and Health. And all that means, I'm professor, I teach classes, I do research and then I help direct the academic activity that happens at our Botanic Gardens. And I help direct a group of researchers and practitioners who are interested in the connection between time spent in nature and our health.

Host, Leah Palmer: Wow, that sounds like really fascinating work and it must be something that's driven by passion. How did you get here?

Speaker, Josh Lawler: It is. So I've been interested in conservation, oh, probably since I was little. My parents used to take me on nature walks and hikes and every summer our summer vacation was camping on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Even though I grew up in the suburbs, I grew up spending a lot of time outside and had an appreciation for natural world since I was a kid.

Host, Leah Palmer: I came across Josh Lawler’s work through a collaborative mapping project he worked on with The Nature Conservancy, called Migrations in Motion. It’s a model that helped me visualize how historic migration pathways for birds, mammals, and amphibians may change as climate change accelerates and alters their usual habitats.

Now this isn’t your typical map—static, familiar, green, brown and blue. Instead, this map comes to life in streaks of magenta, cyan, and yellow. Visually, it’s nothing short of stunning. If you’d like to check it out, search Migrations in Motion map and it’ll come right up. Underneath this gorgeous science communication tool, there’s a message. Here’s Josh again.

Speaker, Josh Lawler: So many years ago, over 20 years ago, I was doing some research with the EPA and we were looking at where to protect biodiversity. And so we were trying to plan out where one might put parks and preserves and protected areas. And as I was doing that, I realized about the same time all the researchers working on those kinds of questions realized that climate change was going to move species around and that planning for where species are today might not be as effective as planning for where they might need to be in the future. And so I said, okay, instead of just using maps of where all these animals on plants are now, we should be using maps of where they're likely to be in the future.

Host, Leah Palmer: Hmm.

Speaker, Josh Lawler: And so that got me interested in that question. And I started doing the modeling that would project where species might need to go in the future. And so that map of all the streaks of color is an animation of lots of individual potential movements that species might need to make in any given place to get from where it's suitable climate-wise today to where it's going to be suitable climate-wise in the future.

Host, Leah Palmer: Okay, let’s pause here for a quick definition. Did you hear Josh say he “started doing the modeling?” Modelling allows scientists to create simplified representations of a complex world system. They help us visualize information that may be difficult to observe with the naked eye. Now you know! Let’s get back to my conversation with Josh. He’s about to really break it down for us.

Speaker, Josh Lawler: So what we started with was we started with roughly 3,000 species of vertebrates in North and South America. And for each one, we wrote an algorithm, a bit of computer code that asked what are the climatic conditions that that species exists in today? So, if we look at where the species is on the landscape—where is it warm enough, cool enough, wet enough, dry enough, as they have long enough summers, where are those conditions on the landscape? And that gave us an equation of those climate variables or environmental variables that would determine where the species is likely to be. And then we plugged into that equation, projected future climate data coming out of global climate models, general circulation models.

And that told us where on the landscape the species was likely to be in the future. So that's the sort of the basis for the modeling. And then on top of that, we said, OK, now we know where they are and we know where they're likely to need to be in the future. How do they get there? And that was a separate set of modeling where we modeled these little pathways from where they are today to where they're likely to be in the future. And that involved modeling how they might avoid things that most animals are probably not going to easily move through. And that's human parts of the landscape, such as big agricultural fields or highways or other built infrastructure. So then we modeled all these little potential movements across the landscape that avoided those things for each of those different species.

Host, Leah Palmer: It's fascinating. I imagine along the way you were surprised by some of the things you ended up modeling in this final result. Can you talk to me about what you learned and describe an aha moment that you had as you doing this research?

Speaker, Josh Lawler: Sure. Yeah, there are maybe two things that stood out to me. One is that if you look at that map, there are some clear pathways that emerge, and I don’t think we really expected that. In retrospect, we probably should have expected that because there are portions of the continent that are going to facilitate movement and those that aren’t. But there were very clear pathways that showed up: one in Western North America that went from Mexico all the way up into Canada, following the Rockies and up through the Canadian Rockies. It was sort of a Yellowstone to Yukon pathway that went all the way down to the Yucatan. So, that was impressive to us—it was this long pathway that we didn't quite expect to be so prominent. And then in the Eastern US, the Appalachian Mountains stand out as a potential route for species moving north.

So, how clear those pathways appeared was impressive to us. The other thing that was sort of an aha was at the same time we were doing this work, I had a student that was using those same models that tell us where the species might need to go. And she was looking at whether mammals in particular would be able to keep up, whether they'd be able to go as fast as they needed to go to get to the climates they needed to get to. So we had one group of people who was looking at how are they gonna move across the landscape, what routes, and then she was really interested in, well, can they even make it there in time? And so an aha that came out of that was that there would be a good percentage of mammals across North and South America that in any given place might not be able to move fast enough to get to those climates they need to get to.

Host, Leah Palmer: And what happens to an animal that maybe can't make it to more habitable conditions?

Speaker, Josh Lawler: Well, there several things. One is we might be able to make it easier for animals to move across the landscape. And so we could restore habitat. We can create corridors for them to move through. Because, you remember, some of the modeling involved landscape factors that they can and can't move through. So, removing some of those human barriers, bridges over highways or passageways through agricultural fields. Those kinds of things might help. We may need to pick some species up and move them. And that has in the past been a fairly controversial idea. In the past, it's been called assisted colonization or assisted migration. It's often now called managed relocation. And it all means picking up a species and moving it from where it is now to where it will need to be in the future so that it can survive.

And that's probably gonna be something we reserve for cases where there really is no other way to allow the plant or animal to move. But those are some things we can do. And , even though we found that there were a lot of places where species couldn't keep up, there were other places in the species range where they might be able to keep up. And so it may mean prioritizing protection or management for certain parts of the landscape where certain species have a better chance of keeping up.

Host, Leah Palmer: Now, if you’re like me, you might have some alarm bells going off. It’s troubling to think that the 3,000 species Josh studied may be motivated by climate change to pick up and leave their current home ranges to find more suitable habitat. This situation seems urgent. The good news is Josh thinks there’s a lot of things humans can do to support plants, marine animals, birds, and mammals that are already relocating in surprising directions. Scientists and conservationists are working overtime to do their part. They’re reducing our carbon footprint by siting renewable energy sources, advocating for policy that protects nature, and working with Earth’s natural ability to store carbon and other harmful emissions before they degrade our atmosphere; this is sometimes called Natural Climate Solutions, by the way.

But, have you ever wondered what you can do to make an impact? While I had Josh's attention, you know I had to ask.

Host, Leah Palmer: I wanted to just kind of get into your thinking about how we mitigate climate change. And, I think I'm a lot like most of our listeners, where we hear that this is happening and it feels daunting and maybe induces like grief even at a really extreme level—or maybe that's not the most extreme response; maybe that's a very healthy response. But it sort of feels like something that's out of my hands. And I was just curious, you know, you talked about what some of our experts are doing, but what could just everyday people like me be doing?

Speaker, Josh Lawler: Our personal choices throughout the day can help too. And how we choose to get from place to place. Not everybody can bike or walk to work or places, but some of us can take buses and public transportation. And, uh, and even the type of fuel we put in our car, whether we have electric vehicles or we ride electric buses or those things all help. Um, even things like diet. So, meat tends to contribute more to emissions and carbon in the atmosphere than does a plant-based diet. And so the more we shift from a meat-based diet to a plant-based diet, the better it is for climate. So there are things like that. There are things like the light bulbs that we have, whether they're more efficient than the other devices in our home, how efficient they are. And so there are definitely things we can do on a personal level that reduce our own footprint. And one of the things, particularly for scientists, one of the things that increases our footprint is flying. So, travel—we all love to travel when we can—but that's one of the things that has a big impact on carbon in the atmosphere is flight because it uses so much fuel.

Host, Leah Palmer: That's a really good and helpful list. I think a lot of what you just mentioned is so actionable right away.

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Support comes from The Nature Conservancy. We’re working with communities toward clean energy solutions that protect wildlife and Western landscapes. Learn more at nature dot org slash care.

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Host, Leah Palmer: I'm curious if there's any one or two species that really just have a soft place in your heart. Or maybe a better way to frame that question is one or two species that are worth watching.

Speaker, Josh Lawler: Yeah. So I'm going to talk about one species here in the Pacific Northwest that I think everybody at least know its name if they haven't... they probably have not seen one in person   because they’re very elusive but the wolverine is a species that just comes down into Washington a bit. But we have them in Washington. They depend on snowpack in the winter and they depend on a fair amount of snowpack and they don't like people. So they're elusive they like to be farther from people and they need a fair amount of snowpack. And those are things that aren't good in today's world to need. It's dangerous to need those things. And so the projections of, we've done several different kinds of models for wolverine and they all show that things don't look good for wolverine. And that's what you see across the literature too. And so that's a species that I think we should watch out for and that we'll have to be very careful about if we want to keep them on the landscape.

Host, Leah Palmer: This may be a dumb question, but what's the importance of keeping a wolverine around?

Speaker, Josh Lawler: Yeah. So it's not a dumb question. And I mean, there's the question of like, why do we care about any one species? So I'll answer the Wolverine question. We've lost over time a lot of our carnivores, a lot of our, particularly our higher-level carnivores that are higher on the trophic scale. And those carnivores have an effect on everything else in the system.

So they affect the populations of ungulates or other herbivores. And those herbivores, when their population numbers grow, because they're not being preyed on as often by the missing predators, they can affect the landscape and affect the vegetation. And that, in turn, affects habitat for other species. And so even though it's one species, they play a role in a larger system.

And so losing those top predators, or losing any species that's playing its role in the system, can have an effect that's larger than just losing a species.

Host, Leah Palmer: Now, imagine just for a moment you’re in Josh’s position, knowing what he knows. How would you share your findings with the world? Well, he and his co-authors published a paper called “Projected Climate-Driven Faunal Movement Routes” in 2013. It served as source material for the map. I know from my work as a science communicator that for critical information to reach everyday people, sometimes you have to break the mold. That’s just what the Migrations in Motion map did.

My colleague Dan Majka is a developer for The Nature Conservancy, and he’s one of the masterminds behind the map. I emailed him to ask why he chose to share Josh’s data in such a unique way. Let me share a bit of his response:

Dan says he and his colleagues were influenced by an interactive wind map they loved and felt it was the first time they saw a map that made data come to life. They had the idea for the data visualization when Josh's paper first came out in 2013, it took a year or two to get funded, and then it sat on his computer for a year after he finished it because no one knew what to do with it.

Dan writes, quote “I think the remaining aesthetic choices I made—the layout and bold cyan, magenta, yellow, and black process colors used for the printing process—came from an interest in modernist and post-punk design aesthetics and feeling bored with naturalistic cartography. Most of the time, when I make maps I strive to make them align naturally with the world around us—blue water, green forests, etc. But most of my cultural interests align more with experimental art and music, and the Migrations map felt like a good opportunity to try something fun.”

Dan's innovative choices on this map earned him some distinction. In 2018, it was featured in a small exhibition in Paris. In 2022, it went on to be featured as a performance art piece at one of the world's most prestigious art and architecture exhibitions in Venice. Dan says he’s, quote, “The only scientist within TNC who had to sign a contract in French where I was where I was referred to as “L’Artiste," which is endlessly funny to me.”

[outro music]

I’m Leah Palmer and this On the Move: a podcast mini series about wild animals, their amazing migrations, and how people are finding ways to free them up from all the things standing in their way.

In the next episode of On the Move, we’ll explore seasonal salmon migrations, from the streams where they spawn, to the ocean where they feed, and their harrowing journey back home. Join me as I talk with experts who say human cultures are at risk when salmon migrations are threatened.

Special thanks to Maia Murphy-Williams, Josh Lawler, and Dan Majka for sharing their expertise. And thanks to my Storytelling team, the brilliant creatives behind On the Move. This episode was written and produced by Leah Palmer with support from Kate O’Neill and Dustin Solberg. Custom artwork was created by Erica Simek Sloniker with support from Mitch Maxson. Web and social production come from Danielle Kagan and Traci Swift. And more from this series at nature.org/onthemove.

Speaker, Sammy Matsaw Jr.: Ne naniha, “my name is,” they call me Sammy Matsaw Jr. I'm an enrolled member of the Shoshone Bannock tribes. I say tsaan davai. So I don't know where anybody is in their day right now. So, I'll just say, “good day,” not good morning or good evening. I was raised in a salmon-based culture. And throughout my life, I've been challenged in this story of sort of my origins, at least with that, and seeing my father catch a salmon.

Host, Leah Palmer: Welcome back to On the Move, a podcast mini series about wild animals, their amazing migrations, and how people are finding ways to free them up from all the things standing in their way.  I’m Leah Palmer, a storyteller at The Nature Conservancy. You’ve been listening to Sammy Matsaw Jr., Director of the Columbia Basin Salmon Program at TNC. In this episode, you’ll hear from Sammy and other experts whose work supports the complex migrations salmon make, and who are helping to ensure these incredible species persist for generations to come.

Speaker, Sammy Matsaw Jr. My first experience was seeing a salmon caught in a small stream in central Idaho and just not believing that story. So for me to witness that, and see a large fish—like a massive fish—coming out of these small streams, where I knew you could catch cutthroat trout, but to see that big fish come out was really the origins of me understanding what that means for us as a people as we take that food and we celebrate it and we eat it. And there’s a lot of storytelling that’s around that for us, as a people. In my own personal experience, is how does that expand out to larger into my academic pursuits in college and also my pursuits as a profession as a salmon ecologist and now as an Indigenous leader within The Nature Conservancy leading the Columbia Basin Salmon Program.

Salmon was scarce. They were really at a downfall. There was a deficit of salmon, and there has been since then, it’s just we've had some good years but mostly bad years and that was a bad year. We would go out with our spear poles. We have these long spear poles that we hunt salmon with. And the back ends of them, you’ll use to push  them under the banks to see if there’s a fish hiding under there. Because during the day they hide under the banks or they’ll hide in log jams. And we got to a hole and there was a salmon in there that my uncle found. And he calls my dad over to get it. And my dad spears it and pulls it out. But after walking in the stream all day in July, it seemed like a lot of work to get one fish. And so to see my dad pull that one fish out after we spent all that work through the day looking for a fish. It meant a lot. I could feel that. I felt that amongst our relatives that were there and our family, my dad was to feel really proud of himself that we finally got a fish. And it ended. That was it. We knew we had enough. There was fish in there. We could have found more. We could have kept going. It was just the one fish that we carried to our camp and we enjoyed that fish. So to me, it felt like the resource was being held in a way that as I understood later was that we take what we need and no more. And so that one fish—being able to share that ith everybody and make sure everybody had some to eate was.. It felt very special. It felt really.. The idea of like sacred. It felt like something sacred, like we were honoring this animal by making sure we remember our culture and our way of life through our mouth and the ways that we bring food into our ceremonies and our life and our bodies. But also just to carry that on to know that there's more fish out there. We could go get them, but we're not going to do that. We just want this one fish just to make sure the culture continues on. That was important to me.

Host, Leah Palmer: How old were you then?

Speaker, Sammy Matsaw Jr.: I was about nine, ten years old then. Fourth or fifth grade. It was in that range, yeah.

Host, Leah Palmer: Sammy holds a PhD in Water Resource Science & Management from the University of Idaho in Moscow. He is a combat veteran, who saw deployments in Iraq as an Infantry team leader and sergeant. Throughout his career, he served as a research scientist for the Shoshone-Bannock Fish and Wildlife Department and also as a Tribal leader on the Fort Hall Business Council.

His work at TNC comes at a critical time for salmon in the Columbia River Basin, which are now on the verge of extinction. This Basin spans over 250,000 square miles in British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. Historically, the Basin was known for its abundant salmon runs, reaching an estimated 16 million fish in the rivers and streams annually. In this region, salmon are inextricably linked to economic wellbeing, healthy forests, rivers, and ocean ecosystems. Their migrations have sustained industry, recreation, rural communities and thriving Indigenous cultures for millennia, so much so that many Indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest consider themselves “Salmon People.”

But in the early 1900s we see a rise in human impact on the land and waters where salmon migrate. Humans built affordable and low-emission hydropower, new transportation infrastructure and irrigation technology for agriculture. This innovation came at a significant cost to salmon. Today salmon habitats are degraded and disconnected, with studies confirming we’re running out of time to save the species in the Columbia Basin.

I sat down with Sammy, to find out what it means to be part of a salmon-based culture and to explore his strategy to salmon recovery. I found his approach isn’t only about removing physical barriers to their migration. It’s about removing relational barriers that divide recreational river users, rural communities, industries and Salmon People. These groups haven’t always agreed on a best path forward for salmon. The good news is despite sometimes clashing worldviews, these parties have one thing in common: this is a species none of us can afford to lose.

Before we explore these clashing worldviews, I think it’s important for listeners to know what a healthy salmon migration looks like and how these fish became a cultural icon. Here’s more from our conversation.

[river sounds and music]

Speaker, Sammy Matsaw Jr.: So the salmon is born in a small stream, high in the mountains usually, cold clean water. The mother buries the eggs in gravel, like a nest to protect it. Inside of that gravel bed, it's taking the yolk sac and it's eating that. Once that yolk sac disappears, it starts eating on its own. It emerges from that gravel and starts gathering its own food. It stays in the stream for a year to two years, as it’s starting to move out to the ocean. It goes through a smolting, what they call it. And that high amount of hormones going through its body helps it imprint wherever it turns back to.

So it stresses every time it goes into a new water system that it doesn't recognize through its nose and its eyes and its ears and its sensories, it spikes in hormones that then imprints on it where it was from. And so when it goes out to the ocean, gathers all of this food, gets really big, comes back as an adult, it goes back to the imprinting as a map and has its own way of unfolding the story of how it was born and brought into the world goes back to usually within that same stream it was born in and reproduces itself and starts the process all over again.

Host, Leah Palmer: How does this process and its repetition over time form culture?

Speaker, Sammy Matsaw Jr.: For Indigenous peoples, if you look at the stability of their knowledge systems and how much they grew. So our knowledge system has all of these teachings in them, and governance, and science and the things that we hold dear in any society. And that gets reflected in art and regalia and customs, protocols, traditions. And so all of that stability and how those societies are structured really comes from that salmon-based culture, from this very special animal and its behavior. We explain it in biology or in the sciences that... the life history. SO that knowledge system comes from observing behavior becomes really seminal to the complexity of the governance and all the things that I mentioned earlier.

Host, Leah Palmer: So, what world view clashes with the Indigenous knowledge system Sammy is describing, and how has this clash impacted salmon? Well, according to Sammy, this is best understood when you look at language structures.

Speaker, Sammy Matsaw Jr.: Most Indigenous languages are based in verbs, so thousands of verbs and less than thousand nouns, whereas the English language that we currently speak through is thousands of nouns and less than a thousand verbs.

Host, Leah Palmer: Sammy explains that noun-based language systems, like modern English, value what a thing is, in contrast to another thing. Verb-based languages, like what's spoken by Salmon People, tend to value a thing, not for what it is but for what it does—its unique relationship to the people and world around it.

Speaker, Sammy Matsaw Jr.: The real focus is on behaviors of things. How do these things move? How are they connected? That's why relationality and relationships becomes the basis of our knowledge systems. Like how does relationality really start to shape the way that we're networking within that seasonal round throughout time?

Host, Leah Palmer: Sammy says that when noun-based knowledge systems first settled in the Americas, the course of salmon migrations along the Columbia River Basin was fundamentally changed. Dams and other infrastructure became new barriers to successful salmon runs.

Speaker, Sammy Matsaw Jr.: So we're in this point, right? We've had colonialism for the last 500 years. Since then, there's been this impact between a noun and a verb thought world. Specifically, under that larger umbrella, as we see barriers to movement for big animals like salmon or bison being able to move across large landscapes. So salmon that are now born in those small streams here in central Idaho have to go through eight dams to go out to the ocean and then return to those eight dams back as adults. So 16 dams that they have to go through. Each time they come to a dam, their mortality reduces. So a female will have up to 4,500 eggs, but the survivability is lower than replacement. Because of those dams,  very very very low numbers. Actually, we're trending towards extinction.

Host, Leah Palmer: So, if part of Sammy’s work is to advocate for removing these barriers to salmon migration, his conversations begin with understanding the deeper reasons behind their presence on the landscape.

Speaker, Sammy Matsaw Jr.:  It feels like where we’re at now in the 21^st century is we’re starting to understand these two different thought worlds and how they touch. And we can actually review some of these barriers and say, are they really delivering the things that are desired? Does it really help with flood control? Does it help with energy production? Does it help with agriculture? And if it doesn’t, and we can reduce some of these barriers and also have salmon, it seems to make sense that some of these barriers should be considered for removal. Because it was at a time of great American idealistic expansion, these artifacts and histories of moving manifest destiny forward. So you have these monuments to that. But, I realized that there's a cultural connection from, you know, white settlers as they view those, there's a cultural connection to those. It's a reflection of their grandfathers and the people before them. And to remove them is like, it's the same impacts we felt once they, as those dams went in, we seen our cultural artifacts go underneath the water of those dams. So we're now at a place where we're trying to understand like, how do we recognize and honor both cultures?

I think we can talk about all the desired sort of outcomes from what a dam does. But I think it's the history that underlies that, that makes people feel nostalgia, sentiment. And those are big human issues about what I talk about is what are real barriers and sort of joke around about which day you wear your sweats on.

We joke around, me and my wife. Like, there’s that scene in Mean Girls when they’re at lunch, and Regina’s wearing her sweats. And it’s like you’re not supposed to be wearing sweats today. And she’s like I just made that rule up.

Host, Leah Palmer: Yeah! It’s Wednesday! [laughter]

Speaker, Sammy Matsaw Jr.: Yeah. [laughter]

Host, Leah Palmer: That’s funny. It’s arbitrary.

Speaker, Sammy Matsaw Jr.: Some of it can be arbitrary.

The nitty gritty is that we have centuries of sidestepping the sovereignty of Tribes, more importantly, the Supreme law of the land treaty rights. And that kind of governance being sidestepped is just that. It's a disconnect from nature because that connection to nature is a governance of nature. It's a governance that holds hands with nature. And so trying to undo some of those systemic issues that come up that are rooted in really difficult topics to deal with that are triggers for people. We understand that there are triggers and we need to continue to engage in them and be comfortable in the discomfort so that we can get to point points of equity rather than resolution. Having those stories over and over and actually working through them and getting us to a place where people aren't afraid or fearful of nature or even having a relationship with Indigenous peoples really gets us into a place where we can reshape policy because that's the permeable part where things become really real and dams get put in place. But it's also the place where things can happen, where dams can get removed. But there's a culture that undergirds that policy for us to understand and start to negotiate with that really puts us in a place where we talk about equity in real meaningful ways that not only benefits Tribes, but their neighboring communities. And so I would hope that as we think about doing that kind of work together and having those uncomfortable conversations that there's a goal in mind. It’s not that I’m just in here to be beat on or hear triggering language or feel like, you know, I’m the bad guy. I don’t think it’s about bad guys or even good guys. It's about the human experience and where we are in our history and how we understand that now. And what does it mean for future generations and our children? If we say those things are important, those two things—our young people, which give us hope, and the lands that we live upon, that we see beauty in.

As neighbors we need to really think realistically about what do we want for the places that we call home? And really importantly thinking about the places that we call home, the places where we step out the door and we feel a sense of belonging. We feel a sense of holding a salmon on a stream bank and bringing that home to our dinner tables and sharing that with our families. I think that commonality in that thread about belonging through that kind of animal connection and connection to nature and a connection to a place when you step out the door you say this place is so beautiful.

Why would I want to ruin this?

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Support comes from The Nature Conservancy. In the Columbia River Basin of the Pacific Northwest, we’re supporting Indigenous leadership to restore and  ensure healthy salmon migrations for generations to come. Learn more at nature dot org slash Columbia Basin.

Host, Leah Palmer: To learn more about salmon recovery on the Columbia Basin, I reached out to Sammy’s colleague, Jason Nuckols to explore a landscape that’s critical to salmon habitat.

Speaker, Jason Nuckols: Yeah, it's been a long journey of a lot with The Nature Conservancy over a few decades. My background is a terrestrial ecologist. I was trained in plant ecology and fire ecology and I started out of graduate school working in prairies and savannas and doing that type of restoration really, you know, upland based work, you know, and over time, I think in the Pacific Northwest, you just get sucked into water pretty easily if you're not watching out. And I'm a water person. I love being in rivers and creeks and lakes and ponds and everything. And so when the opportunity came around to work on freshwater restoration, I just jumped right in.

Host, Leah Palmer: Jason is the Estuaries and Fresh Water Project Manager at TNC in Oregon. Estuaries are liminal spaces, where fresh water and seawaters meet. As water levels rise and fall with the tides, deep channels cut through grasslands and mudflats, delivering a perfect mix of nutrients for juvenile salmon. I like to call estuaries “the marshy middle.”

Speaker, Jason Nuckols: You hit the nail on the head. Marshy middle and places that are transitional and land and water at the same time. That's so true and I think that's what drives me there because you get a little bit of everything. I’ve always loved the saying that you can never step into the same river twice, and I think that same holds true for estuaries, maybe even more so. There's that daily tidal exchange where you have two highs and two lows that makes the environment so dynamic and so extremely different. I don't think I'll ever get used to water flowing in two directions twice a day. It's just, I'll never use that. Yeah, like you said, the salt water goes in, fresh water comes off our coast range, it mixes with the salt water, it all heads back out to sea. The depths, the water depths in our estuaries are changing so fast within minutes. So then that translates to habitats changing as well. You can witness something like a mud flat being created almost instantly. And then within hours, it disappears to open water again, just as you were saying. So this environment, it can also be hostile at times, at that huge water exchange and the wind and the waves. But if you're out there long enough and you're watching like some of our wildlife, marine mammals like harbor seals or our shorebirds, they take it all in stride. It's like they're just going up to a buffet, you know, with not a care in the world. And I think there's this historical, I don't want to miss this point, historical and cultural piece to estuaries as well, because estuaries were the settling grounds for people throughout history. This is where we went because they provided abundant food and transportation. So there's some of the oldest cultural places on earth too.

Host, Leah Palmer: You know, there's this term that comes up when you get into talking about estuaries, especially in relationship to how they can facilitate salmon migrations. And it is this term “salmon meta-nursery.” And for anybody like me who doesn't normally speak like that, I just have to pause and ask you, what does that mean?

Speaker, Jason Nuckols: [laughter] Yeah, well that's a good question. I don’t think the majority of people know, and it’s a fairly new term too, so don’t count that against yourself.  Well, you know, our estuaries are truly the nurseries. They're nurseries for our oceans and where our rivers come together. That mixing of the fresh and the saltwater, it creates that nutrient-rich environment, and it supports so much plant and animal life. It's in our estuaries that these juvenile salmon can slow down, rest, feed and grow larger before going out to the ocean. And the reason that's important is that we know that we lose the majority of our young salmon in those first few weeks when they go out to the ocean. And so you think about it, juvenile fish leaves our rivers and our estuaries and they're larger and healthier. They have a higher chance of surviving and then returning as adults. And then that term meta-nurseries is a really recent term. It's being used to describe how juvenile salmon are using multiple nurseries, not just their natal stream, that stream that they were born into. So this is a great, I guess, example of how we're still learning about salmon migrations. I don't know if you remember this or maybe you were taught that simple salmon circle of life diagram. It's, you know, the circle, the salmon are born into the headwaters of the streams, they migrate out to sea, they spend a few years in the ocean, and then they come back as adults.

Real simple. It's too simple. In reality, some of these salmon are exhibiting life histories and migratory patterns that are much, much more complex. They're going in and out, they're coming back, they're popping into different nurseries, different freshwater habitats, so that they can grow and rest and things like that. So we're kind of blowing that salmon circle of life apart right now. And this matters because these meta nurseries are providing more places for salmon to utilize and more life histories for these species. That bolsters the populations and it makes them more resilient to changing conditions. So it's a new concept and it's changing the way we think.

Host, Leah Palmer: Wow, so the idea sounds like in these meta –nurseries, we’ve kind of expanded the way we think about where salmon go in order to thrive and survive and complete their life history. And so what I'm hearing from you is that estuaries are becoming integrated into that conversation. Is that right?

Speaker, Jason Nuckols: That's correct. Yeah, a lot of people will say that, that juvenile stage and that rearing and our estuaries and that habitat type, the, the tidal wetlands of our estuaries are the limiting bottleneck for our salmon in many places. So the more work we do, the more effort we put into connecting those places and making for healthy estuaries, the better we're going to do for juvenile fish. And therefore, like I said, returning adults. Yeah.

Host, Leah Palmer: Well, I'm really interested in this part you were talking about where estuaries are sometimes the bottleneck to a healthy life history. So can you break that down for me?

Speaker, Jason Nuckols: Yeah. Well, I guess, going back to that point that I was mentioning about this estuaries are where people settled throughout time along our coasts because of access to food, access to water, access to transportation. They're also some of our most endangered systems now or the systems that have been manipulated the most. So in those tidal wetlands, to make them even better for people, working landscapes and towns and railroads and... We did a lot of draining and a lot of transitioning from a healthy tidal system to a levied or diked and a drained system. So the majority of our estuaries are not only privately held by people, but they're also being used for a lot of different purposes right now. So there's a lot of competing interests. And when we dike and we drain and we levy the estuaries, we're just cutting off that access to juvenile fish. And so what we're trying to do is to open up some of those areas, reconnect the tidal floodplain and the tidal wetlands back to the rivers so that have, so that fish have access. So we spent a lot of time on fish passage, connectivity, and adding that complexity back into the estuaries and the fish respond really well when it happens.

Host, Leah Palmer: Jason tells me his work to restore coastal wetlands has paid off. Just this year, juvenile salmon, born in their natal streams in southern Oregon, were tagged. He and his team found these fish accessed recently restored coastal estuaries as they migrated to and from the ocean. Without these restoration efforts, the water in the estuaries would not have been available previously.

Speaker, Jason Nuckols: So it's just amazing that the impact of the work in an estuary on the southern Oregon coast benefits fish inland and up the Columbia basin hundreds and hundreds of miles away. That was really game-changing. It tells me that our work conserving and restoring estuaries is larger than we realized. And it makes you feel really, really good that the impact is not only local, but it's benefiting those fishes and wildlifes that are in places we have yet to identify.

[transition music]

Host, Leah Palmer: Now, my exploration of salmon migrations leads me to a place where salmon populations are unlike anywhere else in the world. In Bristol Bay, Alaska, summer salmon runs see tens of millions of fish returning to the rivers and streams where they were born. The Bay’s certified-sustainable commercial fishery boasts a 2.2-billion-dollar industry, where half the world’s wild salmon are harvested, feeding people around the globe. I reached out to my friend Katie Moore, Bristol Bay conservation coordinator for TNC in Alaska, to learn more.

Katie grew up in the Bay, steeped in her family’s Yup’ik fishing and harvesting traditions. She earned a degree in Environmental Studies from Fort Lewis College and has worked at the intersection of land-care and community-care throughout her career. At TNC, she facilitates the exchange of traditional ecological knowledge between local Indigenous communities and conservationists, always rooted in kindness and reciprocity.

Speaker, Katie Moore: So in 2025, this past summer, we had almost 50 to a little over 51 million salmon returned to the watershed. I am from the Nushagak River and in the Nushagak River, we saw about 15 million salmon return to that watershed. Now the Nushagak River is home to a lot of communities. It's about 280 miles long. But that run is... The whole town, the whole region comes alive in the summertime. You know, we get, seems a little quiet in the winter and everyone's kind of tucked in because it's really cold. But in the summertime, that whole place just comes alive and you can feel the energy. Like it's the town is buzzing and you get off the plane and people are just excited. And we see an influx of thousands of people in the summer, I think in Dillingham specifically during the winter we have about 2,500 people there, but in the summertime it jumps to like seven to nine thousand. That's just from yeah that's just from fishermen and people that are working in the canneries and on tenders. 

I can't describe the feeling of  seeing your net be full other than just like satisfaction. You know you're gonna make some money to take home for the winter, or you know that your freezer is gonna be full you get it's a it's a really beautiful sight to see and to know that this salmon run is still thriving and still producing sockeye salmon numbers in the same way that it has for thousands of years.

Host, Leah Palmer: I know that you work in an area called Bristol Bay, and I don't know much about that place at all. Would you take a moment and just describe what it is and what it represents to you?

Speaker, Katie Moore: Yes, absolutely. Bristol Bay is in Alaska and it's a really large geographical region. I think people say it's relative to the size of the state of Ohio. We have 31 federally recognized Tribes who call this place home, and I think there are around 30 communities here with over 7,000 year-round residents. And that's a very large area with a relatively few number of people. Despite that, the Indigenous cultures that have lived on this land have stewarded this place for, since time immemorial.

And Bristol Bay to me is just home. It's just that.

Host, Leah Palmer: I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about what it's like to come from a place that really orients itself around seasons and specifically those moments where salmon are doing different things in the waterways.

Speaker, Katie Moore: Yeah. So salmon in Alaska, especially in Bristol Bay, are a keystone species. In the summertime, when they return to our rivers from the ocean, they bring a lot of nutrients with them. And when they pass on, they give those nutrients to the places that they pass on in. And you know, you can find salmon DNA in trees, they support entire food webs and cultures and communities. You can find salmon DNA in like the tiniest microorganisms—to a 900-pound grizzly bear. And my people, Yupik people, we're here because of that relationship to the salmon. They not only feed us, but they teach us respect and about not over-harvesting, the value of sharing and about reciprocity. Beyond harvesting, salmon are also the lifeblood of the communities in Bristol Bay. Our local economies are extremely dependent on them and would not be there without the commercial fishing industry. Beyond that though, they do help to strengthen our community bonds from sharing your catch, your subsistence catch with elders who maybe aren't able to fish anymore themselves or just to spend time with family and process fish together.

One of my favorite things to do in the summertime is hang out with my mom and I think I was 18 and I hung her a net, so I put all the cork line and the lead line together. I made her this net, which she doesn't use anymore because she's an elder herself now. And she would say that, so that's why I'm calling her an elder. But yeah, now we just process fish together. And my dad will bring her, you know, like 100 sockeye. And we put on some music, and we just have a good time.

I think that time spent doing physical labor for food that is going to last her throughout the winter really connects us, but it also connects us to these beings that gave their life to feed us. When you feed your family that way, and when you feed yourself that way, there's this respect  that you can't help but to feel because when you buy meat from a grocery store it's easy to feel very disconnected from the animal that gave its life, but when you're going from either receiving fish that someone caught or you're going out and catching the fish yourself and then you're transporting it home and you're processing it and putting it away and taking time to do that, you really get a sense of all the work that goes into feeding yourself and feeding your community.

Host, Leah Palmer: Katie tells me abundant salmon runs in Bristol Bay bring a lot of attention. Environmental nonprofits, researchers and the mining industry look to the area’s abundant natural resources with intention to extract—siphoning stories, co-opting traditional ecological knowledge, transferring fishing permits held by families for generations and seeking profit for outside-interests. Beneath Bristol Bay’s winding rivers lies one of the world’s richest deposits of copper, gold and molybdenum, with an estimated value of nearly half a trillion dollars. Katie says extractive and transactional relationships with outside organizations have resulted in broken trust.

Speaker, Katie Moore: Historically, when an environmental nonprofit or organization or just a research entity comes into Bristol Bay, but Alaska Native communities, they come in with a goal in mind with no care for what the community would like to see and often no care for the community period. There have been research entities that come into place and have absolutely no interaction with the Tribes and peoples of the lands that they are on and who own those lands, they come in, take some data, take whatever they need, and then leave without any recognition of those that live there. And sometimes they're even crossing like legal boundaries of people's own property.

Host, Leah Palmer: The Nature Conservancy is committed to taking a different approach by incorporating Indigenous knowledge into its conservation priorities, while considering the long-term impact on the local community.

Speaker, Katie Moore: So something that I think TNC has been very mindful of is wanting to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into their work. And I think that they've made steps in the right direction to ensure that that not only happens, but that it's done in a good way. We're either compensating our knowledge holders fairly or we're seating them at the table to drive the changes that they would like to see.

I feel that is the only way to do that work in a good way.

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Support comes from The Nature Conservancy. In Alaska’s Bristol Bay, we’re working with local and Indigenous communities to protect the world’s most important wild salmon nursery. Learn more at nature dot org slash Bristol Bay.

Host, Leah Palmer: You know, I think it'd be lost on me if I didn't ask you, what is it that these outside people or organizations are flocking to Bristol Bay or other communities in Alaska to see or witness or learn?

Speaker, Katie Moore: I mean, a lot of times it is salmon. And I guess maybe for outside of Bristol Bay, it's just to see this environment that is pristine. I won't say untouched because the Indigenous stewards of that land have cared for it and that's why it is the way that it is, but these places that are largely pristine and extremely healthy. And I think that for Bristol Bay, a large part of that is, I know, is the salmon run that happens every year. And we felt the effects of that.

Host, Leah Palmer: Katie’s work in the Bay focuses on rebuilding broken trust after this history of extractive research and conservation. She helps local communities plan for a sustainable future that benefits the local economy. Under her facilitation, the community works through a strategy called “lateral kindness,” a trauma-informed response to lateral violence.

Lateral violence is a specific type of conflict experienced between community members and is sometimes referred to as “violence against your own.” To understand this term, I sought information from the National Indigenous Women’s Resource center. They define lateral violence as, “aggressive or damaging actions” between individuals within oppressed societies. It's often a sure sign of intergenerational trauma and a competition for resources that can impact mental, emotional and physical health and destroy the important process of transferring traditional knowledge and culture within an Indigenous community. On the flip side, lateral kindness work strengthens kinship by acknowledging the true sources of a community’s issues. And it works to break down internalized oppression while restoring traditional practice as a means to heal.

Katie tells me her primary aspiration at TNC is to work with Indigenous partners in the Bay, advocating for their basic needs to met and their community bonds to remain intact. She believes conservation can’t only be about protecting the world's last healthy salmon runs or preserving tundra ecosystems. Conservation must also take a local community’s wellbeing into account.

Speaker, Katie Moore: They know that there is change happening and that there is a need for either current systems to change or policy to change. I'm Yupik myself, I have some of this that I need to work through and it becomes very personal at that point. And it means like, it means that if I want my communities to share these conversations, it means I need to be a part of these conversations as well and I need to be self-aware. And I need to do my own healing work to be able to say, like, hey guys, it gets better, you know. It's really hard at first and it's really hard to be open and kind of get raw and vulnerable but I think the more that we can share that with our communities and say like it's okay to feel angry, it's okay to feel sad. I think that that is what will begin to heal those conversations and having a safe sleep place to have those conversations with our community without outside eyes prying in, even if it may be facilitated or supported by an outside organization.

You know, organizations like TNC, they can't do this work alone. The help of the local stewards of these places that we're working in. And the relationships with those people are essential in making sure this shared vision is a success. And to advocate for our lands and waters, the stewards of that land, the community members, they need to come together with a unified voice.

In Alaska, in our rural communities, we need access to mental health resources, food security, housing, jobs and economic safety net. When you're working in these places, you can't look very far into an issue without realizing how interwoven it is into web of other inequities, you know, climate change is changing our landscape. It's making hunting harder. That leads to food insecurity, which leads to people buying processed foods that are extremely highly priced grocery stores, and that people end up buying the cheapest foods they can because healthy foods are too expensive. And that leads to a rise in health issues, which leads to a rise in mental health issues. You know, if your physical being isn't well, your mental state is going to follow—or can. And it leads to a host of other things that our communities are facing every single day.

Yet, still we're asked to come to the table and share our knowledge about stewarding a place. And we do, we still do. And I think...when we start to look at these things in conservation, specifically more holistically, and when we heal wounds that divide us and we invest in relationships, we can find a shared purpose. And when we invest in our lands and waters, we are also investing in ourselves. Because they're inseparable from our identity as Indigenous people. And conservation in Indigenous communities is not just ecological, it's cultural, it is spiritual, it is communal. And that is why I fully believe that healing work is a strategy in conservation and it's not just an outcome. I think it is a driver and it's foundational for long-term stewardship.

Host, Leah Palmer: Thanks for listening to On the Move: A podcast mini-series about wild animals, their amazing migrations, and how people are finding ways to free them up from all the things standing in their way. In the next episode, we take flight, following long distance flyers from Alaska to Chile on the Pacific Flyway.

I want to extend my deepest gratitude to Sammy Matsaw Jr., Jason Nuckols and Katie Moore for sharing their knowledge and passion for salmon migrations and the communities that support them. And thanks to my Storytelling team, the brilliant minds behind every episode of On the Move. This episode was written and produced by Leah Palmer with support from Kate O’Neill and Dustin Solberg. Custom artwork was created by Erica Simek Sloniker with support from Mitch Maxson. Web and social production come from Danielle Kagan and Traci Swift. Find more from this series at nature.org/onthemove.

Host, Leah Palmer:  Out over the Pacific—fifty miles from the nearest shore—a flock of Whimbrels hang in a storm. Their wings shudder as winds push them inland, just as the suns slips below the horizon. For three days, they have flown without stopping. Forceful wind and blinding rain make it hard to go any further. They must find a rest stop tonight—somewhere safe to refuel. When they land, they’ll use their long, crescent-shaped beaks to pick out small insects and invertebrates beneath the sand and dirt, a fortunate feast on the ever-changing coast of the Pacific Flyway.

Welcome back to On the Move, a podcast mini-series about wild animals, their amazing migrations and how people are finding ways to free them up from the obstacles in their path.  I’m Leah Palmer, a storyteller at The Nature Conservancy. Migrating birds rely on places to rest and refuel, but what happens when a rest stop disappears or is degraded? In this episode of On the Move, I talk with Juan Jose Donoso, director of TNC Chile about Whimbrel migrations and the work he’s doing on the Valdivian Coast to ensure these long-distance flyers have a reliable winter stopover. Then, I learn how one place in Arizona serves as a haven for migrating birds in U.S. interior.

Just days ago, one of the usual stopovers was... different. Maybe their timing was off. Or, maybe the intense storms this spring are signs of change. Either way, the feast was sparse.

A Whimbrel, about twelve ounces of brown spotted feathers and bone, crosses oceans many of us will never see... because somewhere, thousands of miles to the North, beyond the ocean’s void, there’s a safe patchwork of shallow lowlands in subarctic Alaska or the tundra regions of Canada. These spring breeding grounds are rich with nutrients and largely untouched by humans, the perfect place to raise chicks. The hens scrape shallow nests—lined with lichen, grass and moss—into the ground of complex tidal estuaries. And the warmth of spring brings out a chorus of buzzing insects. Overhead the hens’ mates perform a swirling display above the nesting territory. They glide up and down as they whistle their calls.

And suddenly the magic of new life on Earth happens.

With a swift crackle, in a field teeming with flies, thousands of Whimbrel chicks are born. They begin foraging almost immediately, spending their summer growing wings large enough for flight and learning to fend for themselves. When the time is right, they will follow the migratory patterns encoded in their DNA. They’ll make the same journey back to their wintering grounds at the southern tip of Chile, in Patagonia, at the Valdivian Coastal Reserve.

Speaker, Juan Jose Donoso: Well, thank you, Leah, for the invitation. And as you said, my name is Juan Jose Donoso. I am the Chile Country Director for TNC. I just completed my third year at the conservancy, so it's great to have this opportunity to talk about birds.

Host, Leah Palmer: I'm excited to talk with you! I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about what brings you to this work.

Speaker, Juan Jose Donoso: Well first of all, I will take the opportunity to say hello to all our friends from North America. And thank you again for having this opportunity to share my experience working in nature conservation in Chile.

Host, Leah Palmer: So, Juan tells me Chile is...

Juan Jose Donoso: ...a huge planet biodiversity hotspot, not only in land [but] also in the ocean.

Host, Leah Palmer: And because of this biodiversity on land on and in the ocean, Juan is...

Speaker, Juan Jose Donoso: ...leading now our effort to scale our impact, especially in particular in places, amazing places like Patagonia and the Humboldt Current.

Host, Leah Palmer: ... this amazing current in the Pacific Ocean that moves water from north to south along the Patagonian coast—passing Chile, Peru and Ecuador. This powerful continuous movement of the Pacific Ocean acts as a river, stirring up nutrients from the cold depths of the ocean. It offers a rich place for marine life to feed. The region is home to more than four million birds, all sustained by a biodiverse food chain. It is one of the world's most productive marine ecosystems and is critical to migrating Whimbrel. It’s the kind of place that proves the value of conservationists working across borders, continents even, to protect wildlife.

Speaker, Juan Jose Donoso: So how do we translate conservation science into action? And I will add that for me, it's key here at TNC, a simple but very powerful idea that is a radical collaboration, emphasizing cooperation, rather than competition, to combine effort to leverage synergies. I was working before coming to TNC at the public sector in Chile in the Ministry of Environment in Chile. So, I really see at the first place how collaborations drive us to have more goals and accomplishments. So that's my priority here in Chile and working with different partnerships, not only communities and Indigenous people, but also the government and the private sectors.

Host, Leah Palmer: Before we get into those connections and collaborations that you’ve been building, I heard through the grape vine that you really love birds and that you're a bit of a birder yourself. So, I wanted to ask you when you first noticed your love for birds and birding.

Speaker, Juan Jose Donoso: Well, I will say that this is very important for my personal history. I fell in love with birds as a very little kid. I usually went camping with my family in different places in Chile. And I always remember one bird that I really love that is... The first time that I saw a Magellanic woodpecker, that is a huge woodpecker here in all the Southern Hemisphere, the biggest one, almost 45 centimeters, a huge woodpecker, and it was hammering a big trunk very high in the canopy of the forest. And I hear it from a very long distance. And I keep that moment very close to my heart. So that was really important because in particular, I study economy, so this fascination, this love with the birds, eventually guided my decision to move my career to work in conservation and to bring my skills and my background as an economist to kind of connecting worlds on the economy and nature. And I wrote two books on birds for kids many years ago from now. I really think that this kind of connection that birds teach us are really key. So how do we depend on these connections, these different habitats, and especially when we talk about migratory birds, how connected we are across different regions, countries. So, that's, I think, a very important lesson that we can have from birds.

Host, Leah Palmer: That's wonderful. I can see the joy light up on your face as you talk about that memory with the woodpecker.

Host, Leah Palmer: Before they launch themselves into their 6,000 mile journey, many migrating birds rely on the shorelines and estuaries of the Emerald Edge—the rich coastal temperate forests and tidal lowlands spanning Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. From here, they trace an invisible thread across the hemisphere, connected the Emerald Edge to their wintering grounds in Chile. With so many birds making this journey across diverse landscapes, I ask Juan to tell me more about how the Whimbrel shows us the value of connection across habitats? And, what makes their journey unique?

Speaker, Juan Jose Donoso: Whimbrel, but also the Hudsonian Godwit or the red knot are kind of living proof of this connection we are already talking [about]. They are long distance migratory birds, some of them traveling very far from Alaska to all the way down to Patagonia, crossing the whole globe. And to survive, they depend on this chain of coastal stopovers, these pit stops, estuaries, wetlands, mudflats, where they rest, they refuel, they spend very key time all across the traveling. Here, the importance is these are places that are under a lot of threats, I will say.

So these stopover habitats are key for us to work on disturbances, threats or pollution or other shifts that are facing these places. So I will say, connectivity for us is key, to understand this connectivity and how do we work not only in one place, but all across these flyways. How do we connect together all the people that are working on conservation? How do we connect systems? 

Host, Leah Palmer: I’d love to dive in a little bit deeper with you this. So, what is TNC working on that will ensure the Whimbrel’s needs are met? 

Speaker, Juan Jose Donoso: We have been working for almost 22 years on the conservation of this Valdivian coastal reserve, safeguarding this threatened temperate rainforest—rivers, dunes, estuaries that provides especially food for these birds and places for rest, et cetera. And now this is part of what we call one of our main priorities, not also in Chile, but also in the Latin America region, that is the Humboldt Current strategy, where we work together, not only Chile as a country, but also Peru and Ecuador, all in one strategy. We are working together with communities and fishers to create a network of protected areas of coastal food webs so birds can refuel on all this flight.

Host, Leah Palmer: Those efforts mirror work happening thousands of miles to the north in the Emerald Edge—that coastal temperate rainforest in the US Pacific Northwest that I mentioned earlier.  The Emerald Edge and the Valdivian Coastal Reserve have a lot in common. In both regions, Indigenous Nations, communities and conservation partners are restoring and protecting shorelines and estuaries vital to these same migrating Whimbrel. Together, these places form a cross-hemispheric chain of stopovers that keep the species alive. And the Whimbrel’s migration between the Valdivian coast and the Emerald Edge highlights that even regions 6000 miles away, on opposite ends of the Americas, are parts of one living organism—this hyperconnected planet Earth. Though I’m most interested in learning about Whimbrel’s travelling along the Pacific Flyway, they can be found at stopovers on every continent of the world except for Antarctica, including TNC preserves in Virginia, where communities gather for an annual Whimbrel Watch event. What began as a monitoring effort has since grown into an annual community outreach program that engages citizens in science and conservation.

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Support comes from The Nature Conservancy. In Chile’s Valdivian Coastal Reserve, we’re working with partners to protect and restore this ancient temperate rainforest. Learn more at nature.org/chile.dot org slash Chile.

Host, Leah Palmer: After every flight, birds need a safe place to land. And their stopovers may surprise you. In fact, the next migratory stopover I learned about blew my mind. Every Spring, migrating birds rest and refuel at an oasis in the desert. I talked with Aaron Mrotek, resourceful preserve manager at the Patagonia-Sonoita Creek Preserve in Arizona—yes, an entirely different Patagonia—to learn more. Aaron lives and works on the preserve, and he's somewhat of a renaissance man—doing a lot to keep the preserve running. One day, he could be organizing a survey for fish in the Sonoita Creek, and the next, he might be monitoring water quality across the preserve. And sometimes he’s maintaining the fenceline there. He manages a plethora of restoration projects and somedays welcomes volunteers or AmeriCorps members, who do all kinds of things, like manage the visitor center or tidy an extensive network of trails. This is a busy guy with a varied set of skills.

Speaker, Aaron Mrotek: It's one of the most pleasurable parts of the job is having this preserve kind of function almost as an extended backyard for me. This preserve, the Patagonia-Sonoita Creek Preserve, is almost directly adjacent to the town of Patagonia, which is a little cute town of about 800 people here. But I always say it's 800 really, really cool people. Before I was at Patagonia-Sonoita Creek Preserve, I did live and work on another TNC preserve called the Aravaipa Canyon Preserve, which was about an hour and a half away from the nearest gas station and grocery store and about 40 miles of dirt road. And that place was very remote. And I'll tell you what, there's something really beautiful about living in that remoteness. You get really close to these landscapes that you work on, and you learn them really well. I found that with a lot of my free time, I’d be out just kind of exploring, checking out this side canyon or this valley that I’ve seen on a topographical map. And I just want to see what’s going on out there. So, you get really in touch with these landscapes, and what’s really unique about our position as land managers is, you know, it starts off as a job, but you really fall in love with these landscapes. They become a part of you, you know? That’s true if you work in a remote location like Aravaipa Canyon. And it’s true of this place, Patagonia-Sonoita Creek Preserve. These landscapes are incredible, and the more you get in touch with them, the more you learn about them, the more you get to know them, the more they become a part of you.

Yeah, my life down here is amazing. I get to work and protect one of the most beautiful places in the world. I mean, I wish we could all be so lucky to have a vocational experience like I do. And a fun fact about myself, I am originally from Wisconsin. I'm a cheesehead, but I've lived in Arizona now for about 11 years and really consider myself a Sonoran desert rat these days.

Host, Leah Palmer: As a self-identified “desert rat” Aaron says his favorite migrating species on the preserve is a grey hawk, a bird from Mexico whose northern-most home rage is in Southern Arizona. Aaron says the Patagonia-Sonoita Creek Preserve is one of the pest places in the United States to reliably see the bird that’s captured his full attention. But what Aaron got most excited about wasn’t the hawk at all. It was an ancient streamside cottonwood forest that makes this stopover possible. Without it, Aaron says the grey hawk and other birds wouldn’t stop at the preserve. So, now, I bring you: An Ode to Cottonwoods, by Aaron Mrotek.

Speaker: Aaron Mrotek:  I mean, cottonwoods are one of my favorite trees. They’re some of our tallest trees here on the preserve. You know, as I look out the window here, we're sitting in our fall season and they're kind of yellowed out and starting to drop their leaves. But what's really cool about them is we'll go through winter, they'll have lost their leaves. They are a deciduous tree, meaning they drop their leaves seasonally and will regain them in the spring. The way that this tree got its name is they, they have these, their seeds are wind dispersed. And so they have this cottony like substance that's attached to the seed. Okay. So come, come spring around April, May, all of the sudden this tree will start seeding and drop this cottony like, uh, the seed all over the place and it gets so thick with seeds, it almost looks like it had just snowed here. There's so much of it.

So, but cottonwoods, so like, what are some of their habitat requirements? Well, cottonwoods love to have their toes wet, I like to say. They love to have their root systems touching moist soil at all times. So you really only find cottonwoods, at least in the desert here, along riparian corridors and that's just kind of a fancy way of saying stream or river type ecosystems where we do have perennial water moving through a given system. So they only exist along these along these wetted areas where there's going to be wetted soil at all times of year. And cottonwoods are really interesting species. You know, one of the things that I find most intriguing about the cottonwoods here on this preserve is when you walk through our trail systems and you're looking at them, you are going to see a ton of those old ancient trees. So we actually cored one of our oldest trees here, I think about a year ago, and it was aged to be about 240 years old. Now, according to the literature, Fremont cottonwoods, which is the specific type of cottonwood that we have here on this preserve, their general lifespan only goes to about 170 years old. And we have a 240-year-old one, and we have a number of other trees that look to be about that same age class, right? So there's something about our climate, the way that the creek is that is really helping these trees go past their expected lifespan, right? Decades, right? By decades, it's really, really incredible.

Host, Leah Palmer: How sweet. The ancient cottonwoods on the Patagonia-Sonoita Creek Preserve are so important to Aaron that he’s strategizing ways to keep this keystone species around for a long time. His goal is to encourage natural recruitment, a term that refers to the successful, self-sustained process of adding to a species’ population—Nature’s reproduction strategy, if you will. In this case, Aaron wants to see more cottonwood saplings added to the habitat.

Speaker, Aaron Mrotek: That is really, really important that we do have that natural cottonwood recruitment. We have new age classes following up these kind of old ancients that we have across this preserve. And yes, we can go across and we can plant cottonwoods. We can go to a greenhouse, we can order 300 cottonwood saplings and bring them out to the preserve and plant them, right? And that's a great strategy, but at the end of the day, that is but a band-aid for a much larger systematic problem. Why do we not have natural cottonwood recruitment along Sonoita Creek as we once had decades in the past? And what's really interesting is that cottonwood recruitment is really tied to something called stream geomorphology. Geomorphology is just a fancy way of talking about the physical characteristics of the stream channel. So what we found, so TNC about a year and a half ago, we went and we worked with an environmental consultant to do an assessment of the stream geomorphology of Sonoita Creek with an eye toward cottonwood recruitment. And what we found was that Sonoita Creek because of previous land use, because of climate change, because of some encroachments into our traditional floodplain, that the creek has been straightened and it has become incised, meaning that it has dug down, the elevation is lower than what it has been historically. And what we're not seeing is when we get our very, very natural flooding moving through our system, either during our summer monsoons, or during winter rains, when those floods come out of the mountains, they're not over banking the creek and getting onto their historic floodplain, okay? And it turns out that that physical process is crucially important for cottonwood recruitment. And so what we've done at the Patagonia-Sonoita Creek Preserve is identified a number of restoration projects that are largely that process-based restoration to be able to restore, to reconnect the creek channel to its floodplain for the benefit of cottonwoods.

Host, Leah Palmer: Did you catch Aaron talking about restoring the incised creek bed with something called low-tech, process-based restoration? Well, it’s a mouthful, but it’s also one of the critical ways conservationists at The Nature Conservancy are working to heal waterways across the West. This doesn’t take a lot of tech or machinery or even know-how, just some sweat equity and a get-er-done spirit. Field crews pack in post drivers, hand saws and shovels, mimicking what beavers do best. They build and install structures out of logs, branches and stones to slow the flow of water in a basin, allowing the ground to store more freshwater for longer.

Speaker, Aaron Mrotek: That focuses on reestablishing the natural physical and biological processes that shape ecosystems over time. Rather than simply repairing the damage or installing static structures this method aims to restore the dynamic interactions, such as water flow, sediment movement, vegetative growth, that allow ecosystems to function and evolve naturally.

Host, Leah Palmer: This simple solution allows the ground to get a good drink. Where water once moved through the land as if flowing through a straw, it now permeates. And the ground is like a sponge. Adding natural curves and complexity back to a water system is just one way conservationists help the earth along to do what it does naturally. In no time, these restored streams help bring vegetation back to riparian habitat.

Speaker, Aaron Mrotek: But what's really cool about this is when we pursue these projects, when we restore those natural processes, yes, our kind of number one kind of target goal is cottonwood recruitment, but that process is going to benefit a number of species. It's going to benefit a number of hydrologic processes. It's going to create better fish habitat, more varied fish habitat through our stream ecosystem. It's going to help attenuate floods. The most damaging floods that we have through here, it's going to allow those floods to gently move out across these vast floodplains instead of being confined to a really tight channel where it ends up being very high powered. And that not only helps our ecosystems, but it also helps the communities around the Sonoita Creek area too. We're reducing flood risk for people as well. And so, while cottonwoods have been the focal point of that project, this is a project that we think about as very holistic. Again, process-based restoration—to restore those dynamic interactions that allow ecosystems to function and evolve naturally. So I'm really glad that you brought up cottonwoods. I mean, they're such a cool species.

Host, Leah Palmer: You know, we’re talking today about migration and I’ve talked to some other experts on this topic and learned that different animals are compelled to migrate for a lot of different reasons. And most commonly, it’s to either find fertile habitats where they can fatten up and sustain themselves or their babies, or even to escape extreme weather conditions. So honestly, it’s surprising to me that we would talk to an expert like you sitting in a place where there are extreme weather conditions like in Arizona. Can you tell me about the kinds of migrating birds that do stop along the San Pedro River and maybe gather strength before continuing their migration journey?

Speaker, Aaron Mrotek: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when it comes to birds in this region migrating, the diversity is incredible. People come from all over the world to come to this region of the world—the San Pedro River, this Patagonia-Sonoita area that that my preserve is located in. But at this preserve over 270 species of birds have been sighted, and it makes it one of global birding hotspots of the world. You know, examples of those species could be yellow-billed cuckoos, which are a federally endangered species, call this preserve home during the summer. You know, when I've talked to some of the researchers that focus on yellow-billed cuckoos, when they do surveys through this preserve, if you only were to survey this preserve and nowhere else in the world, you wouldn't know that that species is endangered because their numbers are so abundant here. They really enjoy the very intact ecosystem and the protected lands here. So that's a really cool species. You can find Western and summer tanagers here—really cool species that migrate up from the South. They're very brilliantly colored. A number of warbler species migrate to this area, including the Wilson's warbler, yellow warbler, really neat species. There's also the lazuli bunting. Well, some birders would call it the lazuli bunting. Some call it the lazuli bunting. It's tomato, tomato sort of thing. I don't want to get into that argument, but that's a really beautiful blue colored bird that really likes field edge habitats, which we have here at the preserve. And then finally, I think one of the other big highlights here is the migratory hummingbirds that come through this area. So we have like Rufus hummingbirds and violet crown hummingbirds that, you know, if you're here at the right time of the year during their migration through this area, you're going to see a ton of them. It's a really, really special place.

But I think what's really cool about the migratory patterns of various bird species is we're getting not only birds that you would classically think about existing down through Mexico, Central and South America migrating to this northernmost point in their species range, but we're also getting a lot of our northern birds like things that you might find in British Columbia or the Yukon or Alaska traveling south for the winter and finding their southern ranges right here in southern Arizona. So we're kind of sitting in this really cool overlap of two different kind of systems of migratory birds, the ones that kind of come up from our tropical regions from the south, but also from our more temperate forests to the north. So really, really cool how those layers interact right in this geographic area.

Host, Leah Palmer: Yeah, that is so cool! You know, it seems like maybe this area has created a bit of an oasis in the desert for, you know, supporting that migration and so many bird species. So, what is it that that really draws them to this area? And what are some of the things that you do in your work to help preserve this good habitat for a migration stopover?

Speaker, Aaron Mrotek: Yeah, no doubt. That’s a great question. You know, one of the things about this region of the world, southern Arizona, is we live in an area called the Sky Island ecosystem, the Madrean Sky Island ecosystem. And the concept is relatively simple. So again, we think about classically Arizona as being kind of low, hot, dry desert. But then in this desert, we have these mountain ranges—these small mountain ranges that pop up all over the place in a big, long series that stretches well far. The majority of this kind of continuum of mountains is actually down through Mexico, but the northern extent does exist up here in Arizona. And when you're down on these valley bottoms below the mountains, yes, it is very, very hot and dry. But as you go up one of these mountains, you're going up in elevation. And generally what happens when you go up in elevation, it gets cooler, and what that cooler air does in combination with gathering more moisture from storm systems moving across the landscape, is it's creating these kind of elevational bands of micro-climates that create micro-ecosystems. So at the bottom of these mountain ranges you have that very classic desert, but at the tops of some of these mountains, especially the ones that are hitting around 9,000 feet,  you're actually in conifer forest where you can find Douglas fir or ponderosa pine, southwestern white pine. And of course, that vegetative community up there is going to support different animals, birds, lizards, whatever. But there's a whole continuum between those conifer forests at the top all the way down to that desert, that low desert ecosystem, where you're gonna have oak woodlands or semi-arid grasslands, okay? And so within this kind of area that we consider the Sonoran Desert, which is generally hotter, drier, inhospitable, we have these little islands of really, really wonderful habitat and varied habitat. The biodiversity in this area is off the charts because of that sky island concept, okay?

And then on top of that, so again, we think about these oases in the desert, right? In the desert, water is life, right? And it's not only life just for humans, it's life for animals as well. So again, we do have a number of springs, ciénagas, small rivers and creeks, including the San Pedro and Sonoita Creek, which this preserve protects. And where we have those water areas, these are little... these are essentially for migrating animals, stopovers for them to, as you say, to fatten up, to sustain their babies or escape extreme weather. Those water resources here are really, important. And we at The Nature Conservancy recognize that—how important water is for these ecosystems and for larger animal migration, right? And so, The Nature Conservancy does a lot of work. We work with municipalities like cities, towns and stuff to find efficiencies in water use. You know, how is a city drawing its water and how is it utilizing quote unquote wastewater, stuff that would normally go down into sewer drains and get flushed out of the system? How can we reutilize that water to treat it and maybe create wetlands or use that water to restore our aquifers or create surface water for the use of animals or birds or whatever might be migrating through, right? 

Host, Leah Palmer: Water is life. In closing this episode, I’ll leave you with this: I asked Aaron if there was anything interesting that you've been observing while you've spent so much time on the preserve.

Speaker, Aaron Mrotek: Hmm. That is a good question. You know, we move through this preserve, we do a bunch of educational programming. And one of the kind of highlights of that educational program is we do weekly bird walks here. And I'm no bird expert. I couldn't ID every single bird across this preserve. It really takes a special talent to do that. But what I do is I bring in these volunteer bird guides, and we walk through the riparian gallery. And so often we are looking up into those tallest parts of the tree crown of the cottonwoods through there. And it's just a whole different ecosystem that you don't always notice, you know, because it's up there so high. You'll see those summer tanagers up high. You'll see the gray hawks. You'll see a number of other species. And really, I think going on those bird walks and especially focusing on the upper crown really makes you realize just how much diversity exists up in those trees. It's just kind of a special experience. We're so used to looking eye level, or it's easy. But if you just get a little strain in your neck, it'll be worth it.

Host, Leah Palmer: This was On the Move, a podcast exploring animal migrations and the people working to keep them wild and free. I’m Leah Palmer. In the next episode, I talk with folks who probably always have a wonderful strain in their necks—birders. Join me as I probe into the wonderful world of birding and some of the migrating species' bird watchers keep an eye out for. Then, we’ll learn about the relatively new tracking technology supporting research about migrating birds.

Special thanks to my guests, Juan Jose Donoso and Aaron Mrotek for sharing their passion for migratory stopovers. And cheers to my Storytelling team, the brilliant creatives behind On the Move. This episode was written and produced by Leah Palmer with support from Kate O’Neill and Dustin Solberg. Custom artwork was created by Erica Simek Sloniker, and support comes from Mitch Maxson. Web and social production come from Danielle Kagan and Traci Swift. You can find more from this series at nature.org/onthemove.

Speaker, Ted Floyd: I love the dance between science and wonder. And sometimes I kind of treat them as one of the same. And sometimes, well, you need to keep them separate. mean, to some extent, wonder and science are different human expressions. But I actually, I'm more struck by how much overlap there is between the two of them. In the same breath, in the same sentence, in the same thought you can, you have sort of a scientific thought about how on earth birds even do this. And at the same time, just be, you know, enthralled by the, just the marvel of it all.

Host, Leah Palmer: Welcome back to On the Move, a podcast about wild animals, their amazing migrations and the people working to free them up from anything standing in their way. Today, we play in the grey area where science and wonder mix, by turning our eyes to the sky. Stay tuned as I talk with top experts about birds—including the sandhill crane, the Greater Sage-Grouse and Wilson’s phalaropes. We learn about why they migrate, how researchers know where they’re going with such real-time precision and what obstacles they face along the way.

You were just listening to my first guest, Ted Floyd. Ted is editor of Birding magazine, an awarded publication of the American Birding Association. He's authored of more than 200 articles on birds and natural history. He’s written eight books, including the Smithsonian Field Guide to Birds in North America, National Geographic’s Field Guide to the Birds of the United States and Canada and one titled, How to Know the Birds. Ted is also a beloved friend of The Nature Conservancy in Colorado, often leading birding events at Zapata Ranch, where he goes to view Sandhill Crane. We’ll get to that in a moment, but for now, here’s more from Ted on the serendipity of birds.

Speaker, Ted Floyd: What is just so appealing to me about birdwatching—this may be the greatest appeal of all—is the serendipity in birdwatching. You might think, after you've been doing this for 45 years, like I have, that it would get kind of predictable and rote and maybe even stale. And I suppose it could become that way if you just always walk the same path and looked for the same bird and read the same books and talk to the same people. Perhaps it would become very rote and predictable, but I avoid that. And what's just so gratifying to me is that an encounter with the most ordinary of birds—I'll throw out some names here, American Robin, Blue Jay, European Starling, House Sparrow, Canada Goose. These are really, really, really, really familiar birds. And I've seen all of them thousands of times.... can also just yield some kind of like serendipitous insight or experience or just maybe like a new angle on the wonder of watching even the most common birds. By the way, part of serendipity of course is finding the rare bird, and birders love to find rare birds. And that's one of the most wonderful and kind of maybe one of the most obvious forms of serendipity, seeing a species of bird that you just aren’t expecting at all.

I love going out at night because birds don't go away at nighttime. And, there are owls and other night birds at night, but it's so neat to sometimes hear like migratory birds flying over at night. Our migrating birds, once we sort of think of during the daytime hours are flying over at night. And it's just so wonderful to hear their calls above the rooftops or above the treetops. I’ll say nighttime birding is an especially wonderful and serendipitous experience for me.

Host, Leah Palmer: Well, that sounds lovely. I personally consider myself an amateur birder. And I hear you reflecting back to me some of the things I love most about having my eyes in the sky, which is the sounds of birds and being able to identify what birds they belong to. And also just the common occurrence of like a wren at my window or a house finch. But you're so right. We were joining today to talk about migratory birds. And so thanks for that segue. I think it would be remiss if we didn't cover the patterns of birds that migrate today. So what have you learned from witnessing the migrations that some birds go through?

Speaker, Ted Floyd: Another big question. So, you said, what have I learned? I mean, that could be interpreted as me personally or also sort of like what have ornithologists and even humanity learned. I'm actually going to go a little bit in that direction, although I'll make this personal. So one of my very earliest experiences when I was still in high school was working, volunteering in a research lab at a university that was world renowned for studying migration. But their study system was unexpected. It was pigeons, you know, common city pigeons. So, pigeons don't migrate the way I think most of us think of migrations, but they certainly are superb navigators. They can fly hundreds of miles and they know exactly where they're going. It was so cool to me. And what I really started to pick up on, even as a high school student, was that by studying migration, we really kind of understand how the world works, how the universe around us operates. Birds are capable of perceiving the environment in ways that we can't at all. They can see polarized light. They can sense the Earth's magnetic field, they can see colors, like both in the infrared and the ultraviolet that we cannot see. So kind of like, I know we can't really, literally, physically, in a sensory way, see the world or hear the world the way that birds do, but understanding that birds have this sensory world that is in some ways much grander than ours is, I guess it's humbling, but also its inspiring to understand that there's so much out there.

The idea that these birds just get all over the planet with so little advanced training or anything like that is so amazing to me. We have a species of bird here in Colorado where I live, the Swainson's hawk, and it's maybe like my poster child for a bird that just never ceases to amaze me. So, the young Swainson's hawks fledge like July, even, yeah let's say July. And then the parents leave soon thereafter. The young birds...are left to their own devices and they're just a few weeks old. And by the time they're only like six or seven weeks old, they migrate all by themselves to Argentina. So, and I love to compare that with like a human being, well they can't even migrate across the room because they can't crawl or do anything at that point yet. And if you told you or me, you know, to, you know, hey, just find your way down to, to Argentina. You don't get an airplane. You don't get, you know, any technology. Just, just get down to Argentina. And they do that when they are literally two months old. So, that's just like... I mean, I do understand the science of how they're capable of doing that involves instinct. It also involves very, rapid learning. It involves paying attention to what other birds are doing—so they sort of go with the flow and follow other birds flying south. So that's the science. But it is just so amazing to me that this bird that was hatched just months earlier is on its way down to Argentina. I just find it so amazing.

Host, Leah Palmer: Okay, so I've heard that you're a big fan of the Sandhill Crane and enjoy spotting them in Colorado on the Zapata Ranch Preserve, which is one of The Nature Conservancy's preserves. Would you tell me a bit about a memorable time that you've had witnessing the Sandhill Crane?

Speaker, Ted Floyd: I'm very happy to do that. I also kind of want to help you go back to your question about the broader migratory strategies of the Sandhill Crane because they are very complex but also really intriguing and worth talking about. Yeah, so the Zapata Ranch is in South Central Colorado in the San Luis Valley. I like to think of it as the other Colorado. And what I mean by that is I think everybody sort of knows about the mountains, the ski resorts, the ski towns. And then the whole Denver metro region—Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins, et cetera, and then the plains farther east. But the San Luis Valley is this huge, high plateau in neither the Colorado River drainage to the west or the Platte and Arkansas River drainages to the east. It's in the Rio Grande drainage, actually. So it has a very, very different flavor, very, very different feel. It's sort of high and dry. The precipitation there is minimal. It's a high desert.

And Sandhill cranes find their way to the Zapata Ranch, again, which is in the San Luis Valley every year. The gathering in the early part of the year, so it's very early spring, it starts in February actually, and really peaks in March and is pretty much over by about mid-April, is the one that attracts so many people, myself included. So, what happens is that the cranes, and there actually are several populations of the Sandhill Crane, and the ones in the San Luis Valley are referred to as the Greater Sandhill Cranes. So they're the really big ones. So, they've been wintering in New Mexico and Arizona and also northern, Northwestern Mexico. And then they fly north into the San Luis Valley where the Zapata Ranch is. And, due to, I would say, aggressive and enlightened land management, the whole habitat there is made very suitable for them, and the birds fuel up there because they need to acquire additional energy to make the trip farther north in the year. So they're basically just sort of chilling. They're hanging out in the San Luis Valley.

And there are several refuges there that are open to the public and where the cranes gather in large numbers, high four digits, even low five digits, and anybody can go up to them and see them. The Zapata Ranch itself also has cranes moving through. Because there aren't really big wetlands on the Zapata Ranch proper, we usually only see like maybe a few hundred on the ground, but it's really stirring to see them moving over. You can see them just flying over. Their calls carry at tremendous distances, as large as a Sandhill Crane is—I mean, they're actually about as tall as a short statue adult human—they're so high up that we can't even see them, but we hear them. They have this shrill, wild... bugling sound. If I had to come up with a short list and I'm saying like three or four sounds that to me kind of capture the feeling of wilderness in North America. Okay, fine loons, wolves, and I'd put Sandhill Cranes right up there. It's just one of the most powerful and evocative sounds I can think of. So I'll go with the experience of just hearing them and squinting to barely see them as they fly over the Zapata Ranch and of course for the photographers, myself included, it's always so fun when a little flock lands on one of the ponds out there and we can get pretty close and photograph them. You know, sometimes they're just lounging around, not doing much of anything, but they also have these elaborate courtship dances. And the pairs are already coupled by the time that they're staging at the Zapata Ranch, so you can see them engaging in these incredibly elaborate dances. They're often likened to ballet. And my only response to that is they have moves that are... more impressive than any human dancer! And it's really stirring to see that as well.

Host, Leah Palmer: Wow, that's incredible. I heard that those calls are—someone put it to me as being haunting and that the dances were silly. But I love the way that you've painted that picture for me because I myself have never seen this. I think I'm going to have to get out there one day.

Speaker, Ted Floyd: So, I'm with you on the haunting. Yeah, the silly, I guess silliness is in the eye of the beholder, but they're very elaborately choreographed. Yes, it involves birds bowing and sort of weaving and spreading their wings and hopping up, just the athleticism that's involved in them is amazing. So maybe human dance is silly looking as well, but I'd say that the birds, I guess I bristle a little bit at silly. I’m really kind of amazed by the athleticism and the choreography of it all. And it's really stirring to watch that. And they do that for minutes at a time and then they'll sort of calm down. The dance isn't just a short duration caper. It can go on for quite a while... oh, and at the same time that they dance, they typically will call as well. You get the best of both worlds. You get their evocative, haunting calls and their, let's say, athletic dancing at the same time.

Host, Leah Palmer: Beautiful. I love the way you've put it. I wanted to dig in a little bit more on something you mentioned earlier about their migration strategy. You used that word. And I'm curious what drives and motivates these birds to migrate over such a long distance.

Speaker, Ted Floyd: Yeah, so that's complicated. I actually teach an entire course on why birds migrate and we spend pretty much the whole semester looking at that. So the sort of easy answer and it's a little bit circular because you might wonder, how did this arise in the first place is that they're going to and coming from places where resources are favorable. So, you mentioned Sandhill cranes breeding in the Northern United States and Canada and Alaska. 

Actually, I just want to point out they get a lot farther than that. So many of the lesser Sandhill cranes, that's not the population in Colorado, that's the population that famously stages on the Platte River in Nebraska, they actually cross the Bering Strait and get several thousand miles way into Russia. And I'm not talking about like the Russian Far East, I'm talking like over near Finland. And that's how far, how far they keep going. Sandhill cranes, especially the lesser population, the one that occurs generally east of the San Luis Valley is just a staggering migrant. But when you think about it, so we're talking right now during the winter months, that habitat would be completely inaccessible to a crane right now. It's frozen solid. There's nothing out there. You know, they eat live animal matter, which is buried under snow and ice right now. So they can't spend the winter up there. So they go much, much farther south and at least to like Texas and Mexico and places like that. But during the summer months, the resources aren't really good for the cranes to stick around there. So they go all the way back to Siberia and even points west of Siberia. Again, it's a little bit of a circular answer, but the birds go to where the food is.

And I also love to point out that it's not because they get cold. Like we get cold, humans get cold. We evolved in equatorial East Africa. We're not adapted truly for cold weather. Birds are like totally capable of handling the cold. So if there were food in Russia in the winter—also and in Alaska and Canada, I should be fair, they're also in North America—they'd stay there. But because there's not, they go farther south. The cranes don't get cold, they get hungry. And I think that resource availability and particular food availability is maybe what drives bird migration more than anything else. That applies to all birds, but in the case of the cranes, it applies especially to the cranes.

I have to finally, because teased this several times now, I just want to point out that Sandhill cranes are extremely complicated at the population structure level. So, we have two main groups and then four or five sort of subgroups of Sandhill Cranes. And the ones in Colorado, where I realize we're sort of focusing here, are the greater Sandhill Cranes. And despite their name greater, they're actually the ones that migrate the shortest. It's the lesser Sandhill cranes that migrate the particularly long distances. So, the greater Sandhill Cranes are basically animals of Western North America. They're going to be breeding in western Canada and the northwestern U.S. and then wintering in the western U.S., southwestern U.S. really and northwestern Mexico. It's the lesser Sandhill Cranes that are just these incredible long distance, world champion migrants, and that's a different population of Sandhill Cranes.

Host, Leah Palmer: These long-distance champions are fascinating, but along their amazing journey, they’re faced with obstacles. So, I asked Ted to tell me more about this.

Speaker, Ted Floyd: Possibly. So, let's talk about barriers. So, birds have gone past a barrier that's a barrier to almost every other organism except for flying insects, which is the ability to disperse tremendous distances. So, they have wings. They use them. Their wings carry them fast and far. So, it's just easier for a bird to literally get across the globe than it would be for a turtle or a land-based organism. So, they're capable of traversing tremendous distances and most of them do some variation on that. I also want to point out that there's some sort of good old-fashioned hazards as well. So collisions with buildings and other structures with energy infrastructure, for example, loss of habitat. So in the case of the cranes, it's not just about where they nest and where they winter, it's also about where they stop to refuel. So, let's just imagine that the Zapata Ranch weren't there and bigger picture that the San Luis Valley weren't there. Well, where would these poor cranes go? They can't make the journey uninterrupted. They have to stop and fuel. So that's really more of a habitat story than anything else. However, something's going on with cranes. It's not bad for the cranes per se, but it really does get at a problem with many, many other birds, and it's that the timing of their migration is rapidly responding to climate change. So, we're seeing cranes earlier and earlier in the spring in Colorado. In fact, they're starting to show up in winter, in February, and then they're coming back later and later in the late summer and fall and even sort of almost into early winter. So, their migration is being prolonged at both ends. The cranes are adapting fine to that, actually. But many other birds face a really, really worrisome problem, which is that the timing of the resources that they critically depend on is becoming asynchronous with, or decoupled from, the timing of their migration. So I think of the example of migrating songbirds, especially in the Eastern U.S. and Eastern Canada. They're getting back earlier and earlier in the spring, but not early enough. So the plants, like the trees, are budding earlier and earlier, and the caterpillars are not really adjusting to this earlier phenology, we say that that's basically the timing of when the leaves start coming out on the plants. So everything's out of whack. So the birds show up, but the caterpillars aren't there, but the leaves are already on the tree. Any particular organism by itself is kind of doing OK. The birds can still fly. The caterpillars can still eat. The trees still have leaves, but they've been very, very, very sort of perfectly fine tuned through the ages. And now everything's out of sync and the birds show up and they don't have food, or the caterpillars come out and the leaves aren't the right shade of green and that actually makes a big difference for the caterpillars. So that's a big problem with a lot of birds. Cranes are adaptable. And here in the United States our common widespread wild crane, which is the Sandhill Crane, I'll be cautiously optimistic here. It's doing well. It's not hunted the way that it used to be. There's widespread public interest in the welfare of the birds. Everybody from like landowners to state and federal conservation agencies are getting together to help the cranes out.

I should say that crane populations elsewhere, for example, in East Asia and parts of Africa are imperiled, but we're doing a good job in the United States and Canada our Sandhill Cranes. We do have another crane, the whooping crane, that does not occur in Colorado, which is much, much, much rarer. It was almost extinguished in the 20th century. It's slowly recovering. The whooping crane has a ways to go. I'd say, again, cautiously, optimistically, that things are looking okay for the whooping crane and are looking good actually for the Sandhill Crane.

Host, Leah Palmer: Wow. Well, you know, I imagine that there might be some listeners who are flirting with the idea of becoming a birder, or at least just like opening their eyes or looking up sort of like we discussed earlier in our conversation and noticing birds or noticing bird calls. And I was just curious if you might have some words of wisdom for people who are hoping to become involved in birding.

Speaker, Ted Floyd: Sure, wow I could... that's my whole career's about... I could spend a lot of time with you on this one. But let me try to distill it to a few essential points here. So, the great thing about birds, maybe more than any other class of animal on Earth, is that they're everywhere. Whether you are in the biggest of cities or the most wild of wilderness areas, whether you're in a ship at sea, whether you're in Antarctica, there are birds everywhere to be seen. So never mind being a birder or whatever that means, but just like being a bird enjoyer or a bird lover, it's as simple as going outside. By the way, you don't even have to go outside. You can open up your window and look at it and listen to birds. They are absolutely everywhere. And I find that almost immediately we're struck by how many kinds there are. Let's just picture like a walk in a big city. Let's go for like a really big city like New York or Philadelphia or somewhere like that. You will see a whole lot of birds just walking a mile in the city and not just all the same pigeons and sparrows and starlings, you'll see gulls and geese and robins and other songbirds. And so there's just a diversity of birds everywhere you go.

I find that birdwatchers almost always, I won't say always, but almost always want to know the names of what the birds are. So we certainly have traditional resources like some excellent field guides that are just, I'm amazed at how good some of our really, really, really good field guides are. So they're books that are just intended for quick reference and easy identification of the common birds in your area. Certainly, at the present age, digital resources, apps, but also online resources—Birds of the World, eBird, iNaturalist—are increasingly an incredibly good way to learn about birds.

But I will also go in the opposite direction and say that as amazing as these books are, as amazing as these digital resources are, nothing beats human companionship. And I don't just mean for the value and virtue of being around people, that's a cool thing, but just for knowledge. We can.. when we're just reading books, when we're just downloading apps, we're online all the time, we can miss some pretty obvious stuff. And I find that just hanging out with another birder is probably the best thing of all. Well, okay, other than watching the birds themselves, probably the second-best thing you do is find other birdwatchers. And what's so wonderful about birding, really everywhere, I mean, I'm thinking of the United States, but...certainly Canada, Mexico, all over the Americas right now, is there are so many bird clubs, birding organizations, bird societies, and some of them are kind of formal and they've been around for a long time, but many are just these sort of casual meetup groups. And in general, if you see a birdwatcher out there, just stop them and tell them, hey, I'm curious, what bird are you looking at? And you may find yourself sucked into a conversation that takes up the whole day. Birdwatchers love to share about the birds that they're seeing.

So I'd say... Go outside, or if you can't get outside, open up the window, look around, be aware of the really good books and digital resources are out there, and try to find other people, like real people in real life, like to hang out with outdoors and look at birds together with, and I think you'll find that the rabbit hole that you've gone down is one that will consume you for the rest of your life. Bird watching really can become all consuming. And for all of us who have gone down that rabbit hole, it's a...a wonderful rabbit hole to have gone down indeed.

Hey, I also just want to mention that another question arises a lot is, okay, so now you're into birds. Is it good for you? Is it good for the environment? Is it good for the birds? And the answer is sort of yes, yes and yes. I think that people who are aware of birds become aware of the environment and are inevitably led toward stewardship of the environment. That's sort of an easy thing to say. I find that many people become quite powerfully attracted to sort of the scientific aspect of birdwatching. But what we've really, really, really come to appreciate, especially since the pandemic, is the credible value of birdwatching for wellness. And this is not just sort of like some la, la, hoo, hoo, woo, woo, know, go watch the birds and you'll feel better, although that's true. The science behind this is extraordinary. There's some really, really cool papers, and this is based on serious university research with brain imaging and brain scans of... like the value of experiencing wonder. And it doesn't have to be birds. It could be the night sky. It could be, you know, an incredible sunset or scenery or, you know, the mountains here in Colorado. But watching birds is really, really good for you as well. And I mean, it's like physically and mentally good for you, in addition to, in my mind, being just an intellectually and artistically very stimulating thing to do as well.

Host, Leah Palmer: That's great. Well, I have you here. And so, I'm going to ask some questions I'm curious about. What's your favorite bird?

Speaker, Ted Floyd: Oh my goodness, my favorite bird. So I'm an equal opportunity bird lover. It's a little bit of a cliche, but sort of whatever bird is in front of me is probably the one that is my favorite. But let me actually answer that question with, well, I want to go in two directions. I'm going to first say the American Robin. It's maybe the most cliched bird in the United States and Canada. They're absolutely everywhere, but they're big and bold and brilliant and sassy and tame and incredibly easy to observe. And I actually wrote a little essay once called, “30 Seconds with a Robin.” It was literally a 30 second video and how like if we parse that video apart, like there's an entire book of natural history that you can learn from watching a robin for 30 seconds. So I'll go with the Robin just because it's such an easy to find bird. Almost everybody in the U.S. and Canada except for Hawaii, although there's some cool birds in Hawaii too, has access to robins at some time of the year. And even though I've been watching robins for my whole life, I still learn from robins every time I see them. So, I'll go with the robin.

But I have another answer. It's a bird that probably most people haven't heard of. It's a very, very common bird in the Western United States. It's called the bush tit. And it's this tiny wee little brown and gray bird. It's almost colorless. It's drab. The eyes of the female are yellow. That's like the only way you can tell her from the male. But everything about the bush tit is just marvelous. Their social behaviors, the way they disperse, their breeding behavior is extremely complicated. Their vocalizations are strange. And they're just sort of out there doing their own thing. And you could go through life and never know that you probably see and hear—again, if you're in the Western United States, they're not East—you might hear like, a hundred every day and not know about it. And that to me is this sort of this wonderful idea like that there's this this wonderful secret world out there that doesn't have to be a secret at all. And I just love the idea that these little bush tits are going about their business doing all the cool things that bush tits do. And that once we sort of caught the birding bug, we realized that these amazing little resourceful birds are actually smaller than some hummingbirds. They're the smallest songbird in the United States, Canada. They do their thing. They don't look like much, they don't sound like much, but once you sort of dig in and get into their behaviors, their lifestyles, their story, oh, by the way, their resourcefulness and adaptability, this is a bird that's actually doing quite well, believe it or not, in the face of climate change, because they have figured out how to exploit new environments that are becoming available as a result of climate change. Now, I don't want to say that that's always the case. With most birds, it's the other way around, but the resourcefulness of the bush tit is another. So two answers, the robin, because Anybody can go out and see a robin and instantly just like get into robins and learn so much about them. And if you want to take it to the next level, the bush tit, which is just this little bird that's all over the West. Nobody seems to know about it. And they do such cool things.

Host, Leah Palmer: Thank you for indulging me. I  cannot wait to go find your essay with about 30 Seconds with a Robin.

I went searching and found Ted’s essay published by the American Birding Association, titled “How to Know the Birds: No. 33, Thirty Intense Seconds with an Extreme Robin,” and you can find a link in the show notes if you’d like to read it. Ted tells me he wrote this essay...

Speaker, Ted Floyd: ... during like the worst days of the pandemic because, like everybody else, you know, I couldn't really get outside the neighborhood. We weren't able to, you know, to travel for the most part at all. And although I certainly loved Robins going into that experience. I probably spent more quality time with Robins during the pandemic than any other time in my life.

Host, Leah Palmer: Toward the end of our conversation, Ted left me with what I think is an important note for all of us.

Speaker, Ted Floyd: Given where we are in human history right now, it feels that birding is having a moment, as they say. I think more people are getting in to bird watching than ever before. We're still sort of feeling this like echo effect from the pandemic with a lot of people being attracted to bird watching for the wellness component of it. Also very gratifying is that birding until fairly recently was...little bit of an, and I want to be careful so how I word this here, but a little bit like a East Coast elite sort of older, more affluent hobby and that's really changing now we're finding just that very predictably anybody here can see a bird or hear a bird if you can't see you know detect a bird in some way or another. There's this very very gratifying sort of broadening of the base of birdwatchers to include almost everybody, so I love that people are being attracted to birds for wellness reasons. And even more so, I love the fact that bird watching seems to be more appreciated and better engaged by a broader swath of our society than ever before.

I actually might address the maybe establishment birdwatching community out there. I think it's really valuable that persons in that community, to some extent, learn to let go a little bit. Birdwatching is for everyone, and I think that there's no correct way to go birdwatching. If it involves enjoyment, if it involves getting outside and feeling the sunshine on your skin and breathing fresh air and listening to bird song and looking at the colors of birds, there's no community, no group has exclusive proprietorship to that blessing, to that wonder. And I think that just recognizing and accepting that people will enjoy birds for that very sort of basic reason, and then maybe go off in directions that we who have been doing this for a long time might not have conceived of, is something that I think in some ways I think we're responsible for doing. But on the other hand, I think we actually might benefit from that—we might ourselves learn an awful lot from there are many, many different ways of engaging, not just birds, but wildlife and really the entire material universe around us.

Host, Leah Palmer: Yeah, yeah, it's nature is for us all. And what a gift we all have. Well, thank you so much, Ted. I deeply appreciate your time and all the energy and insight you brought to this conversation about birds and especially the Sandhill Crane in Colorado. I thank you for coming and joining me.

Speaker, Ted Floyd: Yeah. Yep, for sure. Well, thanks very much for having me. I had a great time talking to you. Thanks.

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Host, Leah Palmer: Next up, I got curious about the Greater Sage-Grouse. I reached out to Kelsey Molloy, the Northern Great Plains Director for The Nature Conservancy in Montana, to learn about a bird that’s on my bucket list to spot one day. I know already that they have a distinctive call and iconic appearance. This bird flaunts a spikey fan of tail feathers and an inflatable yellow sac on its chest.

I wonder if one reason I’ve yet to see a grouse is because they are one of 340 imperiled species native to the sagebrush sea. The Sagebrush Sea is the largest terrestrial ecosystem in the lower 48. It spans 150 million acres across 14 states in the western U.S. and three Canadian provinces. It plays a vital role in the region's ecology, economy and cultural identity. The sagebrush sea’s beauty is unparalleled—vast plains carpeted with blue-green sage, wildflowers and bunchgrass, all capped by majestic and dynamic skies. But invasive grasses and a changing climate are quickly causing the iconic landscape to vanish. And with it, keystone species like the Greater Sage-Grouse, are under threat.

In recent years, grouse have faced a decline in numbers that correlates with loss of their habitat. They once totaled as many as 16 million birds found throughout the United States, but today, their numbers have dwindled to less than 200,000. So, I sat down with Kelsey to learn more about the bird and how people across the West are working together to protect this migrating species. Here’s Kelsey.

Speaker, Kelsey Molloy: So sage-grouse are chicken-sized, I would say, although sometimes you see them and they look like a pretty big chicken. They're pretty cool because they're so highly tied to the sagebrush ecosystem. And so even though there's some variability in their habitat, there always has to be sagebrush. They're just super adapted to their environment. I've seen them sometimes in the winter where there's just a little bit of snow in the landscape and they're in amongst the sagebrush and their camouflage is so good. You can barely see them. And basically all they eat in the winter is sagebrush. One other adaptation they have is that most animals do not eat sagebrush because it's full of chemicals that they can't process. Sosage-grouse actually like secrete something called cecal tar.It's this black stuff that comes out of that comes out of them in addition to their poop. And that's like all the chemicals that were in the sagebrush leaves that they excrete separately and are able to process. So it's like just kind of this cool evolutionary trait. And another thing that a lot of people know sage-grouse for is their mating display. Grouse have something called a lek, or a dancing ground, where they go and do this kind of funky display. The males will puff up their chests and then they have these air sacs that make this booming sound. And so it's like you can hear them from, you know, a half mile away. And it's really cool to watch in the spring—see their display. And, they're very site-faithful. So like, sage-grouse go back to the same lek every year. If I go out and look at a sage-grouse like this April, that bird's ancestors were probably at that same exact location 300 years ago or 2000 years ago, so it's pretty cool that they have these like pretty set, like they're really tied to their homes. 

Host, Leah Palmer: I know they're unique in the way that they migrate. Can you tell me a little about how their movements work?

Speaker, Kelsey Molloy: Yeah. So sage-grouse are super cool because here in Montana, we often think of them as being resident birds because they are here all year, even in the winter, but they actually have smaller seasonal migrations. I'll talk mostly about what's happening here in Eastern Montana, but they actually have different migration patterns depending on where they are. And so a population in Utah might have a different migration pattern than one in Idaho. And it's all about moving seasonally to access the resources they need. A lot of sage grass populations will have a small migration in the summer. So, in the spring, right, they're on the leks, which are their dancing grounds, the males dance and breed with females. They have nests. They have chicks. Once the chicks are able to move, the females will move them to a wetland area, an area that's fairly green. Sometimes those are like hay meadows or just naturally occurring wetlands to access food, fresh green material and insects. Depending on where you are, that could be a fairly long migration, like maybe 10 miles, or it could just be they're moving, you know, a mile away to the next wetland. So maybe that's not a migration per se, but they have these like seasonal movements. In Phillips County, Montana, oursage-grouse are having like a small seasonal movement where they're moving to thicker sagebrush in the winter. But then we also have birds from Canada and Northern Phillips and Valley County that are using a different sagebrush type. So, it's this silver sagebrush habitat. It has a lot less sagebrush, and when it gets covered in snow, there's not really shelter or food for them. And so they'll actually migrate up to a hundred miles from Canada into the U.S. to access our Wyoming big sagebrush habitat, which are these bigger sagebrush plants that provide more cover. And in the winter, a hundred percent of their diet is sagebrush. That's all they're eating. I think it's the longest documented sage-grouse migration that's actually coming across the border. Sage-grouse are listed as endangered in Canada, so it's extra important that we keep our habitat good here so that they have a place to go in the winter and can survive and go back in the spring because we're kind of helping support the population on both sides of border.

Host, Leah Palmer: As we talked, I learned the Greater Sage-Grouse is truly threatened, so I asked Kelsey what humans can be doing to give this amazing species a chance.

Speaker, Kelsey Molloy: Yeah, I would say, I mean, truly the biggest thing is just keeping that sagebrush habitat intact. You know, because they're so site faithful, that can also be their downfall in that it's hard for them to adapt. We've seen leks kind of blink out where there is increased crop development or oil and gas development or, you know, anything that's enough development to kind of push them away. They can't just go somewhere else. They can't be like, this isn't really suitable anymore. We're going to go elsewhere. They're kind of tied to that location. So if that location is no longer a good habitat, they're more prone to predation and eventually they die out and we lose them entirely. So that's the biggest thing is just like these large intact ecosystems, which can make it kind of daunting when you're just like a ordinary person, because you're kind of disconnected from that. You know, we need policy that encourages thoughtful development, tools like conservation easements, federal agencies that are considering these species when they're doing work. So it's kind of like big picture solutions to keep them going.

Host, Leah Palmer: Growing up in the plains of Oklahoma and spending summers in the southwest, I have always embraced the beauty of tallgrass, prairies and sagebrush. These places reveal subtle wonder. They can make you feel breathtakingly small amidst vast landscape. They are truly the heartland—sustaining birds, mammals, reptiles, and pollinators who, in turn, keep a balanced ecosystem for communities who live and work on the land. Still, they are often overlooked and are considered among the least protected and most at-risk ecosystems on the planet. Kelsey and I talked about how this habitat is broadly under-appreciated, while remaining critical to so many species and local communities.

Speaker, Kelsey Molloy: So, I think part of what I find really appealing about the grasslands is that all the species that live here are so resilient and uniquely adapted to their environment because it is a pretty harsh environment. You know, we're just a couple inches of rain away from it being a desert. Everything that lives here has to able to survive negative 40 degrees and also 100 degrees and be able to survive this terrible wind that never stops and you know like the droughts. I kind of have a deep respect for all the wildlife and plants that live here because they've spent eons adapting to be able to keep living here just I'm really impressed by all of them.

Native prairie grasses are basically the base of this whole grassland and sagebrush ecosystem here. So actually where I live, we've been talking about sage-grouse and sage brush, but we have this, it's more of a mixed ecosystem where we also have the strong grass component. Grass is basically what's keeping soil on the ground and not blowing in the air. It is a very windy landscape and a lot of, we would have a lot more wind erosion if we didn't have grass. So, a lot of the grasses we have are deep rooted. They can be you know, in some of the other prairie states, they've dug them down to six feet—the roots, it's incredible. And so actually two thirds of the grasses production is underground. In addition to holding the soil in place, they're also providing the forage base for cattle, but also all the other wildlife that live here. Also grass in these ecosystems is storing carbon in the soil. So, as the grasses roots die underground, that's capturing carbon and storing it there. And so, we basically have like ancient carbon stored in our prairie soils that is not released unless you plow it or disturb the soil in some way. Unlike in a forest, where if you have a wildfire that carbon goes back into the atmosphere, if a prairie fire rolls through it just takes off this year's crop of grass but all the carbon that's been stored in the soil is still there undisturbed. So, they're really important places for carbon sequestration. And a lot of the ranchers we work with talk about grass is basically like converting solar energy into something that we can use. Grass is all these little solar panels out there, all these leaves collecting the sunlight and using its chlorophyll to turn it into plant matter that then cattle are able to eat and then we can eat them. Whereas, we humans can't really eat grass. And so it's also kind of this food source that then feeds us.

You know, coming from the East coast, I looked at habitat at this very small scale. And so coming here, it's like, a lot of these species that live here for some part of the year need hundreds and hundreds of acres of intact grassland for them to use that landscape. And so all of the species here are pretty sensitive to fragmentation, development, habitat loss. You know, with sage-grouse, if there's more than 10 % cropland on the landscape, their populations will disappear entirely. And so I would say it's the same for migrating birds is that they're looking for, you know, intact landscapes.

Host, Leah Palmer: In Montana, part of The Nature Conservancy’s protection strategy for these places includes partnerships that ensure everything living here thrives—people and creatures alike. Montana’s Northern Great Plains encompasses some of the largest and most significant native grasslands remaining in the US. Despite this, grassland birds have been declining by more than 50% since the 1970s. The grasslands host all kinds of migrating species—which include pronghorn, elk, and our grouse.

A lot of these lands are privately owned and worked by ranching and farming communities, but animals and ecosystems don’t really care about ownership lines, so conservation is now working to span these boundaries. I asked Kelsey about the partnerships she and others at TNC have formed to benefit this mosaic of grass and sage steppe.

Speaker, Kelsey Molloy:  Everything that The Nature Conservancy does in Montana involves partnerships. We work with private landowners quite a bit, local ranchers. There's a lot of misconceptions out there about cattle grazing and sage-grouse. Cattle grazing can be a really important tool to manage grassland and sagebrush habitats. And at least in this landscape, this ecosystem has a long ecological history of grazing, currently by cattle, but also by bison, antelope, elk, rabbits, grasshoppers. So, our sagebrush and grassland plants are pretty adapted to that disturbance. And so, ranchers being here is actually really important because the alternative land use here is basically crop ground, and sage-grouse don't really use that as habitat. So, we work with lot of ranchers on conservation easements, which basically protects their property in perpetuity. They're able to continue grazing and using it for agriculture but not plow it and so we don't have that habitat loss.

Host, Leah Palmer: What would cause a rancher to work for the benefit of asage-grouse, for instance? Like, are there co-benefits to the ranching community?

Speaker, Kelsey Molloy:  Mmhmm. Yeah, so I feel like here... one of the reasons I like my work and I feel very lucky here is that there's a lot of like win-win-win situations, where if we have intact grasslands those can support ranchers and a working lands economy. And also, it can provide habitat for grassland birds, for sage-grouse, for antelope. And so a lot of times, it's fairly easy to work with ranchers because it's like, we want the same thing, which is healthy grass on the landscape. And as a byproduct of that, you know, we as the conservation groups also get to see wildlife. You know, I think a lot of ranchers are interested and care about wildlife, but sometimes it does feel like a stretch as a conservation group to be like, hey, there's this, there's this other tiny brown bird we need you to care about. But it's like, you know, we can say, hey, we want to see your ranch be successful into the future, let's work together on a grazing project, or an easement or a wetland restoration project. There's a lot of potential for overlap.

This landscape that I live in is very special and there's been a lot of conservation attention on it for many years. There is actually a local group here called Rancher Stewardship Alliance that has emerged as a group that's able to be at the table with conservation groups and provide like a voice for ranchers. And they've actually helped bring together some of the conservation groups to work together. So we've been working with them for a number of years on their conservation committee, doing a variety of projects. So they've gotten grant funding to do things like grassland restoration, improving fences to make them wildlife friendly—grazing management projects. And so they kind of are like this hub of partnerships where other conservation groups are working with them. They're working with landowners and we're kind of all working together towards this big picture goal of having a healthy human community and healthy wildlife community.

Host, Leah Palmer: That's really beautiful. was going to ask you next, like, if you were looking back on your work, let's say 30, 40 years from now, what do you hope that you will look back on and celebrate?

Speaker, Kelsey Molloy: That's a great question. I think two things. The first is I hope, you know, 30 years from now, we look back and say that we were successful in keeping this landscape here. Because it feels like if we don't want this landscape to change, if we want there still to be wildlife and habitat and we want people to be able to make a living kind of in harmony with their surroundings, that won't just happen on its own. We need to take action for that change to not happen. So that's one thing: we want to see what we have here that's amazing continue.

We also... this is like a project that I'm really excited about right now and I hope that it kind of grows The Nature Conservancy owns a ranch here called the Matador Ranch. It's a 60,000 acre property. It's half public half private, and we run it as a grass bank, which is kind of this idea of having multiple ranchers bring cattle, run their cattle together, which is not like common practice here. And then they can get discounts based on conservation practices they do on their home place. And so that's something we've been doing here for about 20 years. Now, we're working with Ranchers Stewardship Alliance to start a second grass bank. We purchased a property; we will be transferring it to them in the next year or so; we're working with them to develop a management plan. It's aimed at helping beginning ranchers get a start, in the area. So, I'm really excited about that and about that model of like, instead of TNC owning it, it will be the local community having input in it. That's been one of the coolest things at the Matador is like people who maybe wouldn't have worked together ended up working together, and learning from each other, and sharing information and learning from us and vice versa. It’s just really cool to see this collaborative approach at solving problems.

And camaraderie too because we live in a very rural and honestly pretty isolated area. I mean, I know people who live over an hour from town, on all gravel roads. I think that there is this hidden benefit of collaborating just in terms of helping people feel less alone. We're always talking about Montana basically as a mental health crisis in rural areas, and so the more we can build community, I think the better that is for people.

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Support comes from The Nature Conservancy. We’re working with partners across seven Western states to keep the Sagebrush Sea connected, protected and resilient for wildlife and communities.  Learn more at nature.org/sagebrushsea.

Host, Leah Palmer: If you’ve listened to earlier episodes of this podcast you may begin picking up on a theme: conservation works best in collaboration. When scientists, local communities, governments, landowners and traditional knowledge keepers combine their efforts, we see greater progress in protecting Earth than if these entities worked all alone. As I’ve explored bird migrations, experts I’ve spoken to have reminded me of this powerful truth. And one new technology is a great example of these collaborations. I sat down with my next guest, Edwin Juarez, to learn about automated radio telemetry systems that track bird, bat, and insect movements in real time. Meet Edwin. He’s a...

Speaker Edwin Juarez: ... a bird biologist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department. I'm based in Phoenix, Arizona. And I have been working with our agency for almost over 20 years in the conservation of birds—resident and migratory birds within Arizona, within the Western US, and also internationally, recognizing that many of our species migrate south for the winter and breed in the summer or the spring here in Arizona.

Host, Leah Palmer: Having a long career like that, you must be pretty passionate about this. How did you find yourself in this work?

Speaker, Edwin Juarez: Well, I think my initial appreciation or embrace for nature in general came about from growing up in a small farm in El Salvador near the coast, in a kind of tropical deciduous forest sort of environment. My grandmother had a small farm, and the kids were responsible for helping out in the farm. So there was this constant kind of awareness of the changing of the season. The growing season for corn, when certain trees ripen their fruits, when we would get to eat certain fruits depending on the time of the year. And also, birds coming to those trees to eat those fruits. Or people in the rural areas, hunting birds for food. So, I think all that kind of really raised an awareness about my surroundings, the cycle of nature and the different elements of nature. And one of the typical pastimes at that time for young kids, especially young boys, was to target practice on birds using a slingshot. And I always thought, what a cruel thing to do. So, I would never participate in that, but I think that also raised my senses regarding wanting to protect and conserve what surrounded me. And so, I think I would like to attribute my passion for conservation, my appreciation for wildlife, and particularly birds, kind of back to those roots.

Host, Leah Palmer: So, as Edwin’s career unfolded, he discovered Motus, a tracking system that launched in 2014 by Birds Canada and by 2023 expanded to monitor over 100 species. Today, dozens of MOTUS towers can be found across TNC preserves, adding to an ever-expanding network of conservationists using technology as a tool to monitor ecosystems. 

Speaker, Edwin Juarez: Yeah, so Motus, it's a Latin word that means movement or progress or motion. And so the Motus Wildlife Tracking System consists basically of a network of stations, ground stations that are made up of sets of antennas, and as individuals, know, wildlife such as birds, bats, even butterflies that have been tagged with small transmitters as they fly over a station, that signal gets picked up by the station. And so we automatically know that a particular individual was in that area.

As you grow the network across the hemisphere, you're able to get more observation points because this migration of wildlife, which has a curve forever, we're able to kind of peek into it. We've always had assumptions about where birds or where different wildlife went in certain time of the year, but this technology is really either validating some of those assumptions or really kind of rearranging our belief, our awareness or understanding of how these birds move across an area, a country, a state or a region. And so, I think it's a really powerful tool that is really allowing us to expand our knowledge of movements for this wildlife, most importantly so that we can think about where there may be impact in terms of conservation issues where we may want to focus our attention. I see it as a strong conservation tool.

Just to give you a sense of how big the network is, right now there's over 2,700 stations worldwide across 14 countries. In the western US, which is where I primarily work, we have over almost 700 stations. And in Arizona we have about 20 state active stations and one of them is on a TNC preserve.

Host, Leah Palmer: Wow, so this tracking technology is really picking up in popularity. Do you think it's better technology than maybe what we would have used before to understand bird migrations?

Speaker, Edwin Juarez: I think it's better technology in the sense that it really gives us pinpoint information. So we know when a bird was where. And so that's very valuable information because we know, for example, when it arrived, when you went through an area, or how long it spent in an area. And all that information is very precise. T hat information is what really allows us to learn about the movements and learn and understand what negative impacts may be happening in those areas. You know in the past, one of the ways we learned about migration was through bird banding—putting little metal rings on the feet of birds in the hope that we would capture them at another time. And so that's a much more tedious, slow process, and the chances of capturing a bird to look at the tag, to look at the band is very slow, very low. The Motus technology has really supercharged the way we get this kind of movement information.

Host, Leah Palmer: That's fascinating. I'm curious if you could tell me a little bit more about some of the programs that you are working with TNC on in Arizona and how some of this technology has helped experts like you make decisions.

Speaker, Edwin Juarez: Yeah, no, that's a great question. So in Arizona, we have over 500 species of birds. And I'm going to use primarily examples of birds because that's my area of expertise. But, you know, we use the technology on bats and other critters as well. But for birds, have close to 550 species of birds in Arizona. About 255 are migratory, which means they either winter in Arizona, pass through Arizona on their way to the wintering grounds further south or they spend some time in the breeding. So, some part of their life cycle is spent in Arizona. And so many of the species we are concerned about, either because we know their numbers are declining or because we do not know what their population numbers are, so we will need to know what their population number are. So they if they were things that we need to do, we can do those things.

Motus technology helps us fill in those knowledge gaps about this, what we think of as priority species. We have over 155 priority species of birds in the state. And these birds occur in different habitats in Arizona. In Arizona, I think it's really awesome that we have a whole variety of habitats—have grasslands, we have forests, we have riparian, or river, areas. As we deployed Motus stations, we kind of think of it as a targeted approach. We want to make sure we have stations in grasslands areas, in forests, in river areas, because that means we're going to get detection on birds that use these different habitats, that use these different areas. That's where TNC comes in because several of the properties that TNC manages are riparian areas in the state. One of them is the TNC preserve on the middle San Pedro River. We've partnered with them, and we deployed a station earlier this year.

And so I think this is another cool thing about this technology is they really cultivate partnerships. It brings people together. You know, Game and Fish, my agency, had the funds to actually purchase the equipment for the station. TNC had the property and the infrastructure to host the station and also to kind of keep an eye out on the station. And the other thing, it's a really high priority area for us because it's on the river. Rivers for a lot of birds serve as migration corridors. And so we want to maximize our efficiency in terms of where do we want to put a station, and a migration corridor such as a river, is a perfect location. And so all those things kind of come together to really make that happen and to maximize the kind of information that we want to get, and also it cultivates that partnership.

Host, Leah Palmer: Yeah, you mentioned a term earlier. You talked about priority species and it's one that I think I understand, but could you tell me more about what that means?

Speaker, Edwin Juarez: Sure. One of the species we're getting information on through the Motus network is yellow-billed cuckoos that reproduces or nests in riparian areas in the state and throughout the Western US. And so, over the years, as dams have been put in, you know and there's a growing population of people, there is less water. And so, these river areas have reduced in size. The forests that used to exist along this river have shrunk in availability, so there's less habitats for this particular bird. That's one of the birds that is a priority for us. You know, it's listed as threatened. We work with partners to help conserve the species. One of the coolest things about the yellow belt cuckoos is their migration cycle. They breed in the rivers in Arizona and other Western states, but they winter in South America. Fully understanding their movements back and forth—going south for the winter, coming up north for the spring to breed and what areas they’re actually going through when they're going through this migration—is really important. And so there's cuckoos on the San Pedro River, where the station is. And so that's the kind of information that comes together for us to really target certain species and think about how can we best conserve them?

Host, Leah Palmer: Edwin tells me about a recent surprising result from tracking Snowy Plovers, a small plump shorebird with black markings. It was tagged in Utah on July 18, 2024. He traced this bird's movements all the way to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico on July 23, 2024. In just six days the bird flown hundreds of miles and stopped at a few key places where conservation is a priority and habitats have been protected. Ultimately, the technology not only affirms conservationists' efforts to restore critical stopover habitat, but it also provides nuance to long-held assumptions about where birds go when they’re on the move.

In Utah, Motus tracking technology and breeding surveys bring together a community of people hoping to protect migrating shorebirds who fuel up at the largest saline lake in the Western Hemisphere, the Great Salt Lake. I sat down with Tully Frain, a conservation ecologist at Tracy Aviary in Utah to talk about his favorite bird, the Wilson’s Phalarope.

Speaker, Tully Frain: My name is Tully Frayne. I'm a conservation ecologist at Tracy Aviary. We're a small bird zoo located in Salt Lake City, Utah. We've partnered with the Nature Conservancy on a number of our projects, including our breeding season surveys at a couple different locations that the TNC manages, including the Shorelands Preserve as well as the Legacy Preserve, both located north of Salt Lake City. And then in addition, we have been carrying out shorebird tagging on TNC property, mostly at Legacy Preserve, but a little bit at Shorelands Preserve as well, tagging Wilson's Phalaropes. In addition, Tracy Aviary hosts a number of Motus stations at TNC properties in various parts of the state. That's kind of a collaboration between TNC, Tracy Aviary, as well as the Utah Division of Wildlife that works to get all those up. And so those Motus tracking stations are really important to being able to track the migrating birds around the Great Salt Lake.

Host, Leah Palmer: Yeah, well, I can't wait to talk to you about Wilson's Phalaropes. But first, I wanted to just kind of set the stage here a bit. You you must be the kind of person who's really interested in this if you're dedicating your time and your energy to tracking data and supporting conservation organizations like ours. And I wondered if you could tell me a bit about how you first discovered your interest for tracking bird migrations.

Speaker, Tully Frain: Yeah, so I've been bird banding through citizen science projects for a little under 10 years now. And bird banding can provide a lot of really valuable things to science, but it is limited in the information it can provide to us about migration. And I was always kind of looking for ways for us to better learn about migration in some of these programs that I worked with. And I eventually came around to discovering Motus, which is a technology that is used for tracking migrating birds, also bats and insects as well. It really interested me. It's a lot lower cost than a lot of traditional migration tracking technologies that maybe use GPS technology. The tags were relatively cheap, and I was often working with a really limited budget at the banding programs I was working at, so I thought it would be a really great way for us to get involved in some of this migration research. I eventually convinced the nonprofit I was working for at the time to actually install two Motus stations. So that was how I really jumped into it. And then I was really excited when I got this job because of that focus on migration and being able to study more of those birds, and in this position that I have, there's also a focus on MOTUS technology. So we use that Motus technology to track all the different birds that we're tracking within our programs.

Host, Leah Palmer: And why would you say it's so important to be tracking these birds using this high tech?

Speaker, Tully Frain: Well, for a lot of these smaller birds that MODIS can track, some of these tags can be put on hummingbirds even, we didn't have any migratory data on these birds before. And we know that we're living in a changing planet. So understanding just where these birds are moving now before we start to see some of these large-scale changes in the future, we want to have a baseline data source for that. So, I think it's really important to understand how these birds are moving so that we can understand in the future what has changed about the way that they're moving through the environment.

Host, Leah Palmer: Tully hopes Motus technology will help others in his field understand that stopovers for Wilson’s Phalaropes, like the Great Salt Lake, are critical. His message is timely, as the lake faces decline due to a warming climate and human impacts that have tipped the balance of this fragile stopover habitat. I asked him to help me get to know the Wilson’s Phalarope, a shorebird he’s passionate about protecting.

Speaker, Tully Frain: Yeah, absolutely. So Wilson's Phalaropes are a pretty unique bird. One of the really cool things I like to chat about is that they have reversed gender roles. The males actually take care of incubation and raising the young. They mate with a female, and then the female will lay the eggs in the nest, and then she moves on to go lay other nests with other males if she can find another partner. They're really unique birds for that reason. They also almost exclusively use saline habitats, which is unique among shorebirds.

They also are like the least shorebird looking shorebird. They kind of have a weirder body plan than a lot of other shorebirds do. Something that we love to tell people about Wilson's Phalaropes: they do these little spinning dances. I encourage you to look videos up online. They use it to try and bring food up to the surface of the water that they can eat. It can be really cute. You can go watch them on the causeway of Antelope Island during migration, just spinning constantly along the shore to bring up food for dinner time.

Host, Leah Palmer: That sounds really cute. And can you tell me when is their migration season?

Speaker, Tully Frain: Yeah, so they move out a little bit earlier than some of our other birds. The Wilson's Phalaropes breed about two weeks and then they're kind of done, maybe three weeks if we're lucky. So they breed beginning mid May and then by the mid June, they're done with their breeding season and they have started kind of clustering at the Antelope Island Causeway, where there will be like almost hundreds of thousands of them on certain days. And then eventually that population decides to move on out of the area. And they're kind of completely gone by mid August. We started to see some of them pop up on our Motus stations in Ecuador probably around September this year.

Host, Leah Palmer: I want to talk about the fact that we are on a changing planet. And I know that humans maybe don't always see or notice the impacts until maybe there's a natural disaster, or a hot winter or less snow on a mountain that normally has intense snowpack, and there's lots of other examples. I wonder about the impact of climate change to this precious Wilson’s Phalarope and if you've seen anything or if you're anticipating anything that could impact them or their migration pattern.

Speaker, Tully Frain: Yeah, well, I think the risk is absolutely huge right now. I mean, we're just seeing it in Utah right now. There's been very little snowpack this year. It's the worst condition since I've moved here. It's just warmer. I think we had our warmest December on record. Someone told me it was by 10 degrees, which is really crazy. I mean, I was taken back by that. I haven't checked on that statistic, but it is crazy to see this really warm weather that we're experiencing. And that's going to play a huge role in the habitat that these birds use. If we don't get that snowpack moving to the Great Salt Lake, the lake is going to lose water this year. And we are very worried about the long-term health of the lake without that snowpack. And we're concerned about the birds being able to access food while they're stopping over at Great Salt Lake, while they're on their migration journeys. In particular, we did have the lake ecosystem crash a few years ago when it got really low and dried out. The brine flies and the brine shrimp that the birds rely on actually died out. The lake got too saline for them. And that only lasted a few months, thankfully. We were able to get some more fresh water into the lake to help save it, but it's a ticking time bomb and we're really nervous about it. There is currently a petition for the Wilson's Phalarope to be listed as endangered because of this risk related to the lake. When you have such a high percentage of the population using this lake as a fueling stop for that migration, and a significant portion of the population using Great Salt Lake as a breeding site, we're really worried for these birds and their future.

Host, Leah Palmer: Like many conservation efforts, protection of lands, waters and natural resources is directly linked to the relationship people have with a place. This sense of connection drives people like Tully to devote themselves to ensuring the area thrives for generations to come. But, what happens when a place gets a bad rap or community members lose their sense of connection to it? Well, I asked Tully about some of the underlying social dynamics he thinks are tied to the Great Salt Lake’s decline.

Speaker, Tully Frain: Yeah, it's really uniquely beautiful. It can also be a little saddening at times because you can see it's kind of active decline in some ways. We can see the areas that used to have water that have dried up since. It's such a harsh ecosystem and I think a lot of Utahns aren't really well connected with it or they have a bad relationship with the lake. But it really is just a beautiful spot in our country.

I think a lot of Utahns have just grown up seeing the lake as kind of like that dirty spot that they stayed away from. You know, and they don't have that like great connection. I was just talking to some Argentinian researchers at Laguna Marchita. They have like beach resorts along their saline lakes and stuff like that. So they have, you know, it's like a vacation spot for people. Sadly, because of the way that our lake has been polluted by the mining and other economic activities that have happened around it, we just don't have that same connection where it's like safe. You can go swimming, just don't swallow the water. But it's not like a place people go to necessarily have fun. So we are trying to just bring it more attention to the lake and its importance, especially to the local Utah population and really connecting them with it. We do a lot of bird tours out there and stuff. We also have a project with Snowy Plovers where we're trying to engage the public to connect with the lake through, I mean, what's just the cutest little bird you could ever imagine.

They just didn't grow up having that, their parents explaining to them that this is an important part of their environment. It was kind of just that dirty spot in the corner that we were all going to ignore. So yeah, I'm happy to see that I think a lot of Utahns are trying to find ways to better connect with the lake. That's been exciting to see as a community as we've tried to come together to help save it, really. And we have been able to see that in the state. I'm not completely out of hope about the lake. I think we do have really great opportunities to save it if we do come together. And we are starting to see some of that here as we watch the government get more involved in something that they're concerned about and as we are concerned about it as well.

If you ever have the chance to make it out here, Antelope Island is absolutely gorgeous. It's an island in the middle of the lake. Anyone can drive out to it. It's a state park. It's my favorite place to take guests when they come out here, just so they can just see how big this thing is and how important it is. And it's playing this central role in our ecosystem. And there's a lot of risks if we lose the lake. The lake has a lot of heavy metals and other things that we have to worry about that could get into dust storms if it does completely dry up. This isn't just about saving the birds, it's also about saving the humans a little bit. So being able to get people to connect with the lake in that way, it's really magical.

Host, Leah Palmer: I really appreciate you telling me about it. sounds like an idyllic spot to go visit and really just see one of those wonders in the country. I'm sure that they don't call it great for no reason.

Speaker, Tully Frain: Yeah.

Host, Leah Palmer: For my listeners who are intersted in experiencing the Great Salt Lake for themselves, and maybe spotting a Wilson’s Phalarope, Tully suggests that you...

Speaker, Tully Frain: ...come on out to the Antelope Island Causeway. It's probably one of the best places to see them throughout the year, at least during the migration season in the spring and fall. You can see a lot of them along that causeway. It's a great place to connect with them, a great place to bird if you're ever at the Great Salt Lake. But these birds are all over the west of the United States. Mono Lake in California has a huge migration of them. I know there's places that they breed in Oregon and Northern California, so there's lots of places where you can try and find this bird to connect with them, connect with their saline habitat, and really find ways to appreciate these birds. So, I encourage folks to go out and learn more about them if they can.

Host, Leah Palmer: This has been On the Move, a podcast about wild animals, their amazing migrations, and how people are freeing them up from anything standing in their way. In the next episode, we’ll explore ungulates—hooved animals—migrating across the Western US and Canada. And remember Kelsey from earlier in this episode? Well, she says researchers at the University of Montana discovered a surprising correlation between migrating sage-grouse and pronghorn.

Speaker, Kelsey Molloy: ...and seeing that they actually had a lot of parallels. So both species, their Canadian population is coming across the border into the slightly milder Montana winter. So then when they lined up the data, they found that they’re both migrating at the same time of year, both in spring and fall. They're also migrating through basically similar pathways.

Host, Leah Palmer: More on that in the next episode! Thanks to my wonderful guests: celebrity birder, Ted Floyd, Kelsey Molloy, Edwin Juarez and Tully Frain. And as always, thanks to my Storytelling Team, the creative powerhouse behind On the Move. This episode was written and produced by Leah Palmer with support from Kate O’Neill and Dustin Solberg. Custom artwork was created by Erica Simek Sloniker with support from Mitch Maxson. Web and social production come from Danielle Kagan and Traci Swift. Find more from this series at nature.org/onthemove.

Host, Leah Palmer: This is On the Move, a podcast mini-series about wild animals, their amazing migrations and how people are finding ways to free them up from all the things standing in their way. I’m Leah Palmer, a writer and storyteller at The Nature Conservancy.

Today, we explore animals completing some of the United States’ and Canada’s longest and most challenging seasonal migrations. Every year, hooved animals, also known as ungulates, travel hundreds of miles across the West, following the migration corridors their ancestors paved for millennia. In this episode, I talk with four top experts about migrating ungulates—their relationships to dynamic landscapes and the human cultures that have been strengthened by witnessing them. 

First up, we learn about pronghorn. Their Latin name is Antilocapra americana, which roughly translates to “American goat antelope,” but they’re not a goat and they actually aren't related to antelope. They were named during the Lewis & Clark expedition when Clark described them by saying they had the eyes of a sheep and the body of the African antelope. These misnomers just kind of stuck. And today, we call them pronghorn, pointing to the black, forked horns that crest their heads and shed annually.

Before we dive into my conversations, you should know pronghorn are the second-fastest animal on Earth, just after the cheetah, which was once their primary predator. They are the only large mammals remaining from the Ice Age. And their speed is critical, with some experts saying they “outran the ice age,” a feat not all their contemporaries, like the cheetah, woolly mammoth and saber-toothed cat, can claim.

Pronghorn shoot across the West at up to 60 miles per hour, throughout the treeless plains and grasslands of Canada, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. They migrate more than 400 miles round trip each winter. They’re driven by a need to escape blankets of snow covering their usual grazing habitats, moving their young to find fresh grass or sagebrush for grazing in lower elevation. But, as you’ll hear, human development has made their traditional migration pathways more like a maze than a clear path. Scientists sometimes call this disturbance “habitat fragmentation.” I wonder what happens when an animal's genetic memory drives them to pursue ancient migration corridors, without them evolving to navigate these new barriers, like fences and roads and infrastructure. Can they adapt to the way we’ve altered their pathways? 

My first guest, Tess O’Sullivan, is the land and water protection program manager for TNC in Idaho. I reached out to her to talk about pronghorn migrations because she’s dedicated her career to protecting these and other creatures roaming the West. And she has helped establish conservation easements to conserve these migratory habitats. Right off the bat, she introduced me to the idea that migrating pronghorn and other migrating ungulates are...

Speaker, Tess O’Sullivan: ... these incredible endurance athletes. They have these very strong bones that allow them to run at that speed across the sagebrush because it's not like they're, you know, running down a track. They're like running over these landscapes with rocks and hills and holes and lots of kind of big bushes. And then they can do all that because of their bones in part and also because they evolved alongside these ancient animals that are no longer here, like saber tooth tigers and dire wolves before the last ice age. And so they've evolved to see far and run fast. So their evolution happened before the conditions that we see on the land today. But they are just incredible to watch, kind of like, you know, people get really excited about watching what was it like the F1 race was just happening. And it's sort of the same thing. You're seeing the zero to 60, but out in the wild. And so, they are pretty fun to get to witness.

They have this superpower of speed and sight. And at the same time, they kind of have their kryptonite, which is they evolved in these conditions that aren't on the ground today. These predators are no longer the thing that threatens them. And what they're challenged by now, you mentioned their eyeballs and their eyesight is designed to see something from far away and to get away from it before it gets anywhere close. But now they have these things that are close and that are a problem that they have to navigate, like fences and roads and other human development. And, they actually aren't very good at seeing that. It's blurry to them is my understanding. And so even though they're physically these incredible athletes that could jump over fences with no problem, they can't really see what it is. And so they're looking for these ways, for example, with a fence, they want to go under it, they want to go around it. And so they'll run and run and run because that's their thing. And so sometimes you'll be driving and you'll be in an area where you're only one car. It's a small road. It's a small fence. And they'll just run and run and run. And you're just like, well, if you just like stopped and went the other way, I wouldn't be here. But it feels like they can be very stressed by these situations of, you know, what to us might not look like a big barrier. Like it's just a small dirt road. They should be able to cross it, but they need often support. And sometimes that support and something that I've worked on is looking at, can we modify fences?

Host, Leah Palmer: I wanted to learn more about how fences are impacting pronghorn migrations. So, I called up Dr. Corinna Riginos to help break it down. Dr. Riginos is the Wyoming director of science for The Nature Conservancy. She’s an expert on...

Speaker, Dr. Corinna Riginos: ... mule deer, elk, pronghorn. Those are the really common ones. And then in some places we have migrating bighorn sheep, moose. And even in some limited areas around Yellowstone National Park, have migratory buffalo.

Host, Leah Palmer: She studies the impacts of roads and fences on big game movement and behavior. She’s published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers on this and other conservation topics. I asked her to describe the impact of modern human development on these migration corridors.

Speaker,Corinna Riginos: Yeah, well, in terms of our big game species and their migrations, our human activities have a variety of impacts, unfortunately. These animals generally have what's called really high fidelity to their migration routes. So they learn from their mothers and they follow the same migration routes over multiple generations. And they don't change and adapt all that easily to changes in the landscape. So, when you have things like development of any kind on the land, in the middle of their migration path, animals generally find that a challenge. They might speed up through that area or just not use that area. They might pass through it. Or worse, we may create forms of development like fences and roads that make it hard for animals to cross.

But I think I really got drawn to the issue of migrations in the western U.S. after seeing some of the amazing photographs of migratory animals, you know, especially like pronghorn getting stuck in fences or having a hard time crossing roads, or elk or deer having to go through these river crossings that are really perilous, or like migrating over these big mountain peaks and just kind of connecting with those animals. Like they are really amazing creatures. They are endurance athletes going these huge distances. I think I have a soft spot for pronghorn. I think they're just such, kind of ancient animals that have lived here for so long and they evolved to be such fast runners when giant cheetahs that no longer exist were roaming these parts of the world. I think that's kind of incredible.

Host, Leah Palmer: Pronghorn are conditioned to run forward. Run fast. They run and run and run, and keep their eyes focused far into the distance. Their bodies evolved to support speed over a long distance. Their hearts, lungs and tubes are roughly  four times the size of a similar sized animal, allowing them to move oxygen and blood through their bodies faster. When they navigate snowy landscapes, where everything is blanketed in white and the horizon blends seamlessly with the ground it can be challenging for them to see obstacles, let alone manage navigating around them. Dr. Riginos calls these barriers, roads and fences a...

Speaker, Dr. Corinna Riginos: ... silent killer. And what I’ve actually found is that animals are, you they're not crossing roads when they reach a certain volume of traffic. So, when roads get really busy, it gets incredibly hard for animals to actually find an opportunity to cross. Deer need 30 to 60 seconds between consecutive vehicles to actually even try to cross the road. Which is, if you think about it, that's kind of a lot of time between vehicles. So, if they're not crossing at all, then they're just not getting to the places that they want to or need to get to. And so, I think it's harder to see but possibly has an even bigger effect on animal populations and, you know, their long-term well-being and their ability to keep on migrating over time.

We talked about how pronghorn have a hard time going through fences, but they're not the only animals. If you think about a deer fawn, a deer fawn's not able to jump a big fence. It's gonna have to go under. And if those fences are barbed wire, they can get stuck. And there's actually some research showing that once fences get to a certain density, like some of these animals, especially, creatures like pronghorn just stop trying to move through that landscape because it's too many different fences they have to get across. And in other cases there was research... oh, there was such a tragic set of data from a couple of years ago in Wyoming showing these pronghorn like basically dead-ended by a sheep fence. It was this really rough winter, really a lot of snow, and they could not get further south to get away from the snow, basically because they hit sheep fence. And you see these really sad data from their movements where you see these animals like, go up against the fence and then spend like several weeks just trying back and forth, wandering along these fences, trying to find a way to continue further south and they're not able to, and then they die. So, fences are... you know, they can be a really big problem. Luckily, there's also solutions to that.

We can make fences much more permeable to animals, make it much kinder to them by certain fence designs, like keeping bottom wire, making it a certain height and making it smooth instead of barbed wire and the same for the top wire. Don't make it too high and make it smooth.

Speaker, Tess O’Sullivan: So for example, there are these different kinds of fences that people will have out on the landscape to help manage their livestock operations.

Host, Leah Palmer: Here’s Tess again.

Speaker, Tess O’Sullivan: And sometimes that'll be barbed wire, right? And if the barbed wire is barbed at the top of the fence and barbed at the bottom of the fence, if you go over or under as an animal, you can get cut by that. And that could lead to an infection and that can kill an animal. So we've worked with landowners to try to replace those wires to just be smooth and also to be a little bit higher on the bottom so that they can get under and also to make the top wire smooth. So that's an example of something we've worked on. And then there can also be these fences that just have these big panels, where it's meant to keep out a very small animal and then that could just be a total barrier. And often the landowners actually don't need that. Those were designed for the most part for managing sheep and there aren't very many sheep out on the landscape in this area. And, even where there are, the sheep are being herded and so they really don't need that type of fencing. And so just removing those panels can become a way that then the pronghorn can move through, across a fence.

Host, Leah Palmer: Tess tells me one of the major barriers to conserving these long-distance migrants is data collection. But, how does one catch an animal moving at 60 miles per hour? Well, it’s complicated.

Speaker, Tess O’Sullivan: When I initially studied the pronghorn migration, I was using radio telemetry, which meant that the animals had to be positioned with a collar. So, they had to be captured. And then you had to use a radio to figure out where they were and kind of triangulate and have a plane or helicopters checking on them. So it's all very expensive, but also not very accurate because you would only get a location when you went out looking for them. And the first time I did it, I was getting all this interference from like telephone poles. I didn't know exactly what I was doing.

Host, Leah Palmer: That sounds confusing.

Speaker, Tess O’Sullivan: I was like, wait, no, that's not it!

Host, Leah Palmer: As technology advanced, researchers started using new to track pronghorn: GPS collars.

Speaker, Tess O’Sullivan: The collars were placed on the animals and then they were programmed to fall off. And so that was one of the biggest, like stress points for me of this study was like, okay, they fall off and then we have to go find them. Like, are we going to actually find them? Are they going to be like broken or not recoverable? But we were able to locate these collars. And then they have the data on them from many times each day. And they're programmed to have more points in a day when the animals are predicted to be migrating. And so these studies have now been done a lot more.

Host, Leah Palmer: Dr. Riginos said similar things about the challenges scientists face when collecting pronghorn movement data.

Speaker, Dr. Corinna Riginos: I'd say there's two different types of data that are really, really helpful. One is animal movement data. That's usually from putting GPS collars on animals. And I think that doesn't really have a problem so much as just you can't get to everywhere. You can't get every animal. And then in terms of the roads issue, the other source of data is where collisions happen, where animals get hit and die. The challenge with that is that like, a lot of times animals get hit and they leave the road and they die somewhere else. And so we're under counting. Or they'll die on the side of the road. And then it might be weeks or even months before a highway crew comes through and cleans up and counts that and records that. You know, different places have different levels of, I would say, engagement from their transportation folks to actually document and collect that data.

Host, Leah Palmer: In 2008, wildlife biologists first tracked pronghorn migrations in Idaho. TNC led in partnership with the Lava Lake Institute for Science and Conservation, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game and a coalition called the Pioneers Alliance, which includes local ranchers and conservation NGOs. They captured ten pronghorn does and placed GPS collars on them, tracking their movements for two years. Tess was a major contributor to this study. They found a critical part of migration corridor goes through the Craters of the Moon National Monument,[TO2] [LP3]  snaking north and slightly east between two major geological formations. On one side, there are black lava flows that are nearly impossible to traverse, and on the other, there are foothills. The herd must pass through this pinch point, running through private ranches and public lands to join the largest wintering herd in Idaho. This bottleneck is known as Pronghorn Pass. Before our interview, Tess sent me a photo of this place and I’ve shared a link to it in the show notes.

Speaker, Tess O’Sullivan: This migration route has been going on for so long in such a specific area that you can actually see it from aerial photographs taken from space.

Host, Leah Palmer: What!?

Speaker, Tess O’Sullivan: From satellite imagery.

There are these lava flows that have happened across this part of Idaho, and there have been a few of these lava flows. So some are more recent, and it’s truly like black lava on the land. And then some happened a little bit longer ago. And so there's a little more vegetation mixed in with the lava. But it's not the kind of thing that anyone would want to walk across. So it's this very significant natural barrier. And that bumps up against the Pioneer Mountain foothills with a highway in between. And so the animals are kind of right at the edge of the foothills of the mountains, the highway and the lava. And so they're going along this same route. And I believe it’s only 150 yards wide.

But it was a great place for the park service to put some wildlife cameras. They were allowed to take those photos that I shared with you. And they were allowed to count the animals, using again some wildlife cameras. So they were able to see that there were different numbers, you know, ranging from like 450 to 650 animals making their route in this population here that we've looked at. We think that that same route was used, likely as a travel route, by Native Americans and other people moving across the landscape. And then it became part of the Oregon Trail. So, it's sort of like, people learning from nature of like, okay how can we get through this rugged landscape? And the pronghorn have been leading the way there.

And so now these migration corridors are being identified. And in the case of this pronghorn migration in central Idaho, it's very long. Some of the animals are traveling, you know, 80, there was one that traveled, I think it was 140 miles one way. And some of that is happening, you know, incredibly quickly. And it happens twice a year in the fall and in the spring.

So there’s a lot to that, right? When we think about conserving an animal, it's one thing to conserve a place. It's another thing to look at, you know, a pretty complex situation here where you've got summer range, you've got winter range, and then you've got all this land in between, and you've got highways. And we're in Idaho, which is a state that's had a lot of growth. And so that's put pressure on our highways. And there's been a lot of highway expansions happening and new development and new disturbance to habitat. And so over 75% of the long-distance migration corridors in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem have been lost, often, you know, interrupted from a road or highway or some, you know, change... significant change in the habitat. And so this is a big conservation challenge because it's across such a big area. So it requires a lot of cooperation too, across different land ownerships. There's private land, there's public land. And a lot of the animals, and in the case of this pronghorn migration, they're using the same route. And so I think sometimes there's this concept of, well, nature will need to adapt, right? Like they'll just have to move around the highway if we expand the highway. And there are some animals that are better at adapting than others, but for these pronghorn, they've been doing this the same way for thousands of years. And maybe that they're just not able to adapt.

Host, Leah Palmer: As with all the animal migrations I’ve covered on On the Move, people are finding ways to harmonize human infrastructure and animal habitats so these ancient migrations can persist. Dr. Riginos says one of the most effective solutions is building crossing structures.

Speaker, Dr. Corinna Riginos: ...which are basically either tunnels under the road or bridges over the road. So these let animals cross the road without touching the road surface. They're just expensive and big projects to build, especially those bridges over multi-lane highways can get pretty pricey. And so the limitation really is just that the costs and that the planning necessary to implement them are significant. But, on the other hand, they're extremely effective. And so now they have been around for long enough that we have a lot of data from all over the world—all different species of land animals—showing that these crossing structures reduce collisions by 80 to 90% really consistently.

And so when you think about the fact that animal vehicle collisions are expensive because they cause damage—a lot of damage to vehicles. Those are getting more and more expensive to fix. They can lead to, you know, injuries or sometimes even death in people driving in the cars. And they also, you know, kill the animals, which have value. They do have financial value when you think about the value of hunting those animals. Or just the undocumented value of those animals existing, you know, just the enjoyment of seeing them. So, when you think about all those costs, the price actually adds up, of vehicle collisions. And, when you can avoid them with a crossing structure that's going to last for 75 to 100 years of benefit, you're actually saving money in the long run by building crossing structures, because the cost is actually less than the costs of the collisions over time.

The other solutions unfortunately are much less effective, and they're much cheaper, but there’s not a lot of other great solutions out there. You can get some improvement in some places by clearing the vegetation along the side of the road to make it easier for drivers to see. You can put up warning signs, especially if you can warn drivers like, during peak migration times, that can help them be more alert. Unfortunately, if you leave those warning signs there all year, people tend to just kind of stop paying attention to them as much. You can also modify fences to make it easier for animals to cross. So if the animal can get across more smoothly, that helps as well.

Not too far from where I live in Wyoming, there's a great project where—this is on a highway that doesn't have a ton of traffic, so you know, pronghorn could cross if the fence wasn't a problem. And so it was exactly that, a place with a lot of barbed wire or sheep woven wire fence that's just really hard for animals to cross. And so, what folks did here is they found the places where animals were crossing the most already, and then they created  gates just for pronghorn that get opened during the migration seasons, and then they close them back up again during the summer, when those animals are not around and cattle are out there on the land and the fence, you know, needs to be there to keep the cattle from going into the road. But it's just a really great solution when you stop and think about it. Like, there's actually a relatively simple solution here to just open it up during those peak migration times and close it back down again.

Host, Leah Palmer: Among all these solutions to barriers for migrating big game, Corinna notes a broader responsibility we all share.

I think one of the most fundamental things is to keep those public lands public. And that's something that I think anybody in this country can do is to keep our politicians aware of the really incredible value and importance of public lands and the importance of keeping them intact and not selling them off to enable more fragmentation and development. A lot of land in the West is also really important land for some of our resources that we need, especially energy resources. There's a lot of oil and gas. There's a lot of wind and solar energy in the lands that are shared with migratory big game and a whole lot of other species. And so, the balancing act there becomes, not saying no to all of these developments because we need them, but making sensible decisions about where to locate them and really taking into consideration how is this going to impact things like migratory big game? Can we site a new solar farm not in the middle of a big game migration path? And I think as a citizen, something we can do is keep our decision makers accountable to making those sound decisions.

Host, Leah Palmer: My conversations with these two experts left me thinking about humans being accountable to nature. All this talk of human development makes me think the habitat fragmentation that impacts pronghorn is a symptom of fragmented connection between humans and nature. So, toward the end of our conversation, I probed Tess a bit more on this topic.

Host, Leah Palmer: Yeah, it's fascinating to me that our modern society and some of the ways that we've developed naturally as humans  means that we're a little bit disconnected from our animal relatives, right? Like, we don't really notice. I live in a really big city and so sometimes I don't notice the wildlife around me because there's so many other things towering above me and concrete around me. And so, I've been thinking about how people can become disconnected from the reality that animals do migrate and move across the landscape year after year. I wonder if you could talk to me a little bit about how our modern infrastructure has really created deterrents to such a historic migration.

Speaker, Tess O’Sullivan: Sure, yeah. And I think about that concept a lot as well in terms of the connection. So maybe I'll speak to both of those pieces. Because in terms of the connection, you know, I do think people are craving for a connection to wildlife and wild things and to their non-human relatives. And I do think it's why when people learn about pronghorn or they get a chance to see wildlife out on the land, it's such a big deal for people. They realize, like, oh my gosh, like I didn't realize I was missing that in my life. You know, I've read it from Robin Wall Kimmerer. She talks about that concept of like, species loneliness. We want to have this connection with our non-human relatives.

Host, Leah Palmer: This term, species loneliness, is found deep in the pages of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s bestselling book, Braiding Sweetgrass. In a chapter titled, “In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to a Place,” Kimmerer writes, “Can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore? What happens when we truly become native to a place, when we finally make a home?” Just a page-turn later, Kimmer describes a feeling people have when they’re disconnected from nature. She says, “I think it would be a little scary and disorienting—like being lost in a foreign city where you can’t read the street signs. Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnect ‘species loneliness’—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship.”

And that’s really what my conversations for this episode ended up being all about—finding ways for humans to reconnect with nature. Here’s Tess again.

Speaker, Tess O’Sullivan: It’s exciting to share the migration information and just these photos of wildlife, or videos.  You know, not everybody can necessarily have the chance to be in Idaho at the perfect moment to see the migration. I do think it can be a really important part of conservation approaches of like, okay, how do we get people to care and how do, you know, they're not going to care if there's not a connection. But also, there's the struggle, right, that people have now. We hear so much about like, we have this culture of busyness and overstimulation and too much scrolling. And so it's like when you're in that moment with wildlife, all that busyness kind of fades away because what's important is this witnessing, this incredible thing.

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Support comes from The Nature Conservancy. We’re working with partners across seven Western states to keep the Sagebrush Sea connected, protected and resilient for wildlife and communities.  Learn more at nature.org/sagebrushsea.

Host, Leah Palmer: As you just heard Tess describe, bearing witness to and connecting with nature is where conservation starts. A 2025 study by Miles Richardson, titled “Modelling nature connectedness within environmental systems” published by University of Derby, reveals a significant decline in human connections with nature due to urbanization and broken intergenerational knowledge in Western society. Richardson’s research suggests that humans lacking nature-connectedness and affinity for the Earth could result in risks to environmental stewardship by 2050 and may accelerate the dual crises of biodiversity loss and climate change. Psychologists say human well-being is enhanced by connection to nature. Ultimately, people suffer from this decline in connection.

So, in the next interviews I learn from people who are deeply connected with nature, specifically to talk about caribou. Caribou are a large migratory deer native to the arctic and boreal regions of North America. Their large hooves and unique hairy coats help them survive in cold climates. These features made them a reliable and vital source of food, clothing and other resources for Indigenous communities in the North. To this day, caribou are considered relatives of Indigenous peoples in the arctic, and their efforts to protect migrating herds from threats, like climate change and habitat fragmentation, are ongoing through land stewardship and Indigenous guardianship.

Speaker, Amos Scott: I learned a lot from others. I learned a lot from the land, being an observer, and I learned a lot from elders, the teachings I was brought up, those Dene values that I was brought up with. It’s very much about respecting and living with our animal relatives and with respecting the land and respecting the water. And that is a very core value of who I am. And that came from spending time with elders and being on the land. And those opportunities were afforded to me because of a camera, right? And so they're very much linked together in that sense.

Host, Leah Palmer: That was Amos Scott, Project Director of the Northern Indigenous Stewardship Circle,  a partner of Nature United, the Canadian affiliate of The Nature Conservancy. Amos has a background in videography and photography documenting life in the arctic and working to support Indigenous governments and organizations across Northern Canada in land stewardship. From behind his lens and through cultural teachings, Amos has become a keen observer and protector of this species. Here’s Amos again.

Speaker, Amos Scott: I'm sitting here at my house in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. And I work for something called the Caribou Guardians Coalition as the executive director and also a project director for the Northern Indigenous Stewardship Circle. And then lastly, I wear another hat. I'm on the board of directors for, and this is a big thing in the Northwest Territories. We recently came into our own conservation trust fund called the NWT on the Land for the Future Trust. And I'm on the board of directors for that as well, and it's now a funding body for Indigenous-led conservation throughout the territory. On my mom's side,  I'm a Tlicho Dene, which this is kind of traditional territory for Tlicho Dene, but our communities are about a start at a hundred kilometers just northwest of here. And for in the aspects of caribou, we're in the caribou ranges at the Tlicho Dene, which is the Dene I am from. This is some of our traditional caribou ranges at this time of year, in years past. We'll get into like why they're not now, but...

The type of work I was doing was always on the land with elders, in wilderness, in like these beautiful spaces, places. And I had the opportunity to take photos along the way. And after I stopped producing and filmmaking as a producer, I started just working for the Indigenous Leadership Initiative and filming the Indigenous-led stewardship programs in Northern Canada and in other parts of the country, actually. And that's when the conservation piece came in. As a result of spending all those years as a journalist and filmmaker, filming elders and their traditional stories and the importance of the land, kind of my upbringing as a Tlicho Dene and my upbringing around land-based values. When starting to work with Indigenous-led conservation programs and stewardship programs, behind the camera, I got to a point where I really wanted to be more involved in it. And I put the camera down at some point and started working for the stewardship circle and trying to support Indigenous guardian programs in Northern Canada. And then at some point you get back out to traditional places with guardians and bring a camera with me everywhere I go.

Host, Leah Palmer: I'm realizing that there might be some of my audience who has never seen or interacted with a caribou, or like me, who don't come from cultures that were nearby caribou herds, and so we don't have those honoring traditions of caribou. So I want to ask you if you could describe what a caribou even is and I'd love to know the first time that you witnessed caribou in the natural world.

Speaker, Amos Scott: Okay, well, let's start with the description. What is a caribou? In my language, barren-ground caribou are called Ekwǫ̀. And for us, the Beringram caribou are an ungulate species, kind of the wild version of reindeer if nobody's ever heard of it. And so in North America, caribou are mostly free roaming wild animals. In Scandinavia, reindeer are mostly farmed. The fur is used, has traditionally been used for clothing, tools, tents. The fur is known to be really warm. And there are certain times where the fur is best. They've been really excellent sleeping mats in the wintertime because the fur is so warm. They're a beautiful, I'd say medium size ungulate. Not too big, not too small, like, bigger than deer, smaller than elk. They subsist on mostly lichen, and so the meat is tender, often less gamey than some other animals. Traditionally, they have roamed from the tundra to the tree line during the fall season. And in the fall, that's when they're the most fat and healthiest. That's when they start their rut, their breeding season. And then they used to make their way through the tree line and then back up to the tundra in the springtime to their calving grounds above the tree line, and then spend the summer raising the young ones as they wander towards the tree line again but you know, feeding along the way. The natural predators are wolves mostly but also wolverines and grizzly bears at times.

They are majestic, always. And they don't make a lot of sound generally. If they're running really fast, their hooves click. The other really cool thing is if you're on the ice in the Arctic, winters when it's minus 40 or colder. And I saw once a single wolf chasing down a small herd, and it never was able to catch them. But that group of say, 50 animals would run away from this wolf. And, because the sound reverberates on the ice and the crisp snow, it turned into this magical, kind of, sound I've never heard before. So there's this. That's what I mean. It's so magical. Every experience seems to be a magical experience. You just observe them differently every time.

And so I don't exactly remember my first experience seeing a caribou. But one of the most special ones is understanding the personalities that they have. Over the last number of years, I was working with a documentary film crew, and we spent a whole day on the ice with a caribou herd. And so we would kind of get ahead of them, and just park our snow machines and cover them with canvas tarps and just sit and wait and have the cameras rolling. Eventually the caribou would walk by us. And we did that a handful of times over the course of the day. And as you're getting to the end of the day, we found an island that we snuck behind. So they approached us a little closer and so we got some more intimate footage.

But what I got a kick out of was just watching a couple of young bulls. They would be digging for feed, digging, trying to dig the snow out so they could feed lichen and nutrients from the ground. And they would kind of get in each other's way. And then what they would do is they would bounce up on their hindquarters and box each other with their front hooves. And that happened multiple times. And you can hear them like hit each other and stuff, then huff and puff, and then go back to trying to eat. And it just reminded me so much of the playfulness of other animals. And I've witnessed the playfulness of caribou so many times, and when you see playfulness, you know there are so many other aspects of emotion that they feel, right? And a lot of people don't always consider this around wild animals, but there is a tenderness, there is an emotional tenderness between each other or between each animal.

Host, Leah Palmer: I wanted to pick your brain about caribou today because their migration has been fascinating me a lot lately and I don't know much about them. I know that you have featured caribou frequently in your photographs. And I just wondered what draws you to caribou and maybe you could tell me about some of the personal connection that you have with them.

Speaker, Amos Scott: Okay. This might take a while. Well, I just answered this question a couple of weeks ago. So it feels top of mind, but in the aspect of what is co-management in the Northwest territories. But for me, the relationship with caribou, starts as a kid again in my household. It became a really important source of nutrients for my family, and not understanding the dynamics of how important it was to have caribou in the household and how we got caribou in the household. And that was my grandfather making sure my mom always had a proper source of caribou in our home.

Out of that, there was traditional food, traditional cultural practices that I learned from my mom and values. And so I start that conversation with that now because our communities are increasingly having a harder time of getting caribou within their house. Harvesting is becoming increasingly more difficult. Our food sovereignty is more difficult. And that is because caribou numbers across North America have struggled. There are some healthy herds, but by and large caribou have struggled in the last 15, 20 years. A lot of that is climate change related. And, there's not a clear sense of the answers around that, but we can know that that's a main factor. And as Northern Indigenous peoples, have very little influence over mitigating climate change on us and on caribou. So that's kind of the top issue of the point, or the top point to make around the issue. The caribou, then, become something more transcendent of time for Indigenous peoples in northern Canada. This hat I'm wearing, it's two people embraced facing each other, but they're surrounded by a caribou antler and next to that caribou antler is the North Star in orange, which is the color of a cloudberry—the berry that is on the tundra across North America.

But caribou are the unifying factor for Indigenous peoples across the North as well, regardless of our different regional areas or cultural differences with languages, whether we're Inuit or Dene or otherwise. If you're Indigenous to the North, the commonality is you are here today and you are thriving people today because of your relationship with caribou that go back to our ancestors. So to me, there's always been a fascination around caribou because of how much it is a part of our life.

If you fast forward to today, as I get into this work around Caribou Guardians Coalition, the particular herd that we work on is called the Bathurst caribou herd, a barren ground caribou herd. Its range is traditionally just north of us to the east and it circles all the way to northern Saskatchewan and up to the Arctic Ocean and through this area. Their numbers, according to Western science, have dropped to 3,600 animals as of this past summer, from a peak in 1986 of 470,000 animals. That is a drastic, drastic drop in numbers. There are neighboring herds, the Bluenose East to the east, which is a herd of about 30-35,000 animals. And then there's a herd, called the Beverly herd, that has gone up 50,000 animals and they're in the 150,000 range now.

So if you take the entire range of all three herds, you're at about 180,000 animals. In ‘86 if it was peak 470,000 animals, and that included animals from all three herds, then we're still at a much lower number than at its peak. You can split up caribou between like Alaska, Yukon, parts of the Northwest Territories and that would be Porcupine Caribou Herd. And then as you move east, you get into the Bluenose West Herd, which is east of here. And then there's another pocket, Bluenose East, Bathurst Beverly, and then you keep moving along and there's other herds and that takes you in the major herds across all the way to the Eastern Arctic.

There's always been a connecting point, and Indigenous peoples have settled even communities around those herds. As a Tlicho Dene, one of our four communities is Wekweètì. That community was founded by an elder specifically because it was a good place for caribou harvesting. And there is still caribou in that area today, in the lower numbers of them. And that community is not allowed to harvest those animals anymore. So the link between our ability to be food sovereign, healthy peoples with our knowledges around caribou, is starting to fracture because of those lower number drops. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to be involved in trying to help around the issue. And at this stage, it's more in the management perspective, but also getting as much as I can out in the field visiting caribou monitors that work for their communities and trying to evolve the conversation around that type of work, and what more we can do when there's future challenges and future development and resource development desires in those caribou ranges.

Host, Leah Palmer: Caribou in the Northern territories are met other challenges too, including hotter, drier summers that decrease nutrient availability. There’s also an increase in wolf predation due to a trapping industry that Amos says has bottomed out. And similar to migrating pronghorn, roads that support diamond mining have posed barriers to their migration routes. So, Amos and the Indigenous guardians are working to increase monitoring and data collection to educate and advocate for stronger regulations. Despite these challenges, Amos expressed hope.

Speaker, Amos Scott: Well, I think some of the things that should be celebrated now is that we still have a relationship with caribou. That there are elders that still can share their in-depth knowledge around caribou. And we actively are working with elders on doing that. We collectively as multiple communities who are caribou people, we're finding ways to reengage youth into this aspect because that disconnect that's happened as a result of not being able to harvest caribou, is many youth don't have the knowledge. So we're trying to bring them into understanding that importance and having them participate and learn and find their voice, express their voice as caribou people. We all want the future relationship with caribou. In all of it, I think it's important to remind people that we still need to eat caribou. You know, like it's one thing that I say harvesting can stop, but our relationship with caribou is so fluid and so dynamic and so deep. As Indigenous peoples, we can't, we don't want to give up that relationship. It is something deeper than just nutrients. It's a spiritual connection. And so I think if you step kind of and look at the bigger picture, think you see examples of Indigenous nations trying to find ways to do that. Reminding young harvesters of our harvesting practice of how we share meat, in caring for each other, how we respect the animal after it's harvested, when not to harvest, and trying to reinforce those values and lessons. I think everyone is actively working toward that. I think that’s really encouraging.

Host, Leah Palmer: TNC’s Canadian affiliate, Nature United, works with The Northern Indigenous Stewardship Circle to support capacity. This frees up Amos and his staff to steer local communities toward Indigenous-led conservation, rooted in traditional teachings.

Speaker, Amos Scott: The challenge is most communities are small, we have still a lot of issues recovering from the legacy of residential school and the impacts that has brought into our communities. Now that we have an opportunity to lead conservation that returns our kind of our living knowledge and our living kind of aspect with the land, I think you can see the healthy returns of investment, if you will, into our communities, but they get so far because there's only so many people with the capabilities and they start to spin their wheels a little bit. And so I try to find a way to find a solution for that capacity.

So far my relationship with the Nature United has been really special. They have become part of my broader community. I have a fortunate ability to move into a lot of communities and build a quick relationship and start a working relationship really quickly. What I'm discovering in this work, the longer I do it, is there's also a larger international community and many other Indigenous communities who do very unique work, and something like Nature United exposes me to also that broader body of work across the world. And I think that's also an important learning and support system and also an uplifting system. Like all of this work takes an aspect of faith that, yes, we can make a difference, but the other aspect is the learn from others and the hope that it gives. And that, I think, is a lesson I learned from one of my leaders long ago is always focus on the positive and the hopes, the hopes and dreams of our people and the positive work that is being done, because we're going to always face challenges, right?

I will end with Leah, maybe the moniker, if you will, a year and a half ago, two years ago, I was organizing a little caribou gathering, knowledge gathering with the Caribou Guardians Coalition partners. And this elder from Hatchet Lake, think, northern Saskatchewan, George DeSani. We caught him in a quote that he didn't quite realize was going to be a quote that I would latch onto. He just, end of the day after eating some caribou meat, he a big smile on his face and he said, “you know what, caribou is happiness.” And that for me is everything about the work, everything about caribou, everything about our relationship is just to us, caribou is happiness.

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Host, Leah Palmer: To close this episode of On the Move, I talk with an artist who put herself in close proximity to an ungulate migration, backpacking and following a migrating herd of caribou as she safely documented their Spring migration from start to finish. Leanne Allison is a documentary filmmaker living in Canmore, Alberta. Her first film, Being Caribou, produced by the National Film Board of Canada, gives viewers a front seat to Porcupine herd’s ancient migration path from Canada to their calving grounds in Alaska. Leanne completed the journey with her late husband, Karsten, filming their experience from April to September. They hiked a total of roughly 1,500 kilometers across a variety of terrain. Leanne and Karston transform, becoming more attuned to the herd and changing because of the pressures of the trip. Being Caribou concludes with a call to conservation action and political advocacy for this migration corridor, and though the film is now 20 years old, the conversation is, sadly, just as relevant today.

Host, Leah Palmer: So could you tell me a little more about what the project is and how it came to be?

Speaker, Leanne Allison:    Yeah, so a part of this puzzle that I should address right away is I didn't do this trip on my own. I did this trip with my husband, Karsten Hoyer. Sadly he passed away last year. He had a rare neurological disease and died at the age of 56, which is really sad. I miss him a lot. But yeah, he was a big driver in this whole idea of Being Caribou. And it kind of stemmed out of this big walk that he did back in the late ‘90s, where he walked all the way from Yellowstone to the Yukon, following the wildest line possible to see how wild it still was. Like, he went traveled as a grizzly bear would. And he came and told stories about his journey and what he was seeing and did over a hundred presentations and really tried to inspire people about this whole idea of large landscape conservation. And then he ended up working in the Yukon on the Canadian side of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The national park was established in order to protect the Canadian side of the caribou calving grounds, and the very first time he did a patrol through the park, he came across the migrating caribou, like literally thousands of them crossing this river called the Firth. And it was this total drama where there was, you know, tons of other animals around and bears and wolves. It basically blew his mind. And as like, it was as if the whole landscape filled up with these animals and then they kept moving and it disappeared, and it was all quiet. And the thing he wanted to do more than anything was just follow after them.

So we started in April. We literally started in winter in a Quichin community called Old Croy, in the Yukon. We weren’t even sure where exactly we should go, or when they were going to be leaving or anything. But we ended up fairly quickly picking up with them and we traveled with the caribou for the next five months, living through all the things they lived through.

And like I said, we started out in the snow, with skis and eventually got rid of the skis and hiked. Total kilometers. Gosh, I want to say around 1,500, something like that. I mean, it really depended on the terrain and like we were, you know, on caribou trails only. Like I said, we didn't cross a single road. You know, the caribou were definitely at the beginning through the snow, they would sort of surge ahead and then find an area where there's been more snow melt and then they sort of feed and then they'd surge ahead again. So, it sort of felt like the tortoise and the hare at the beginning where we weren't, you know, right with them, but we would be with some stragglers. And then the calving was this kind of, totally, this pause almost in this amazing time right on the coastal plain. And then, at one point it just kind of felt like everything, like it was game on. And I think it was the bugs driving them to get to these high places and get away from the bugs. And then they sort of get stronger and stronger and almost they start to lose a lot of their fur, and they just got really like, they were just in prime, prime shape. And it was interesting because it was at that point where like we were just getting tired. And I like, I remember one day in August where it just was an early season snowstorm and it was like kind of wet snow and cold. And I think we got quite cold that day and just realized how tired we were getting.

Host, Leah Palmer: I’d say, the crescendo of Leanne and Karsten’s journey was reaching a critical stopover, where the herd has brought new life forward each Spring. At the calving grounds, young caribou take their first steps and begin feeding in the beautiful, biodiverse landscape. While pristine, the calving grounds are also rich in oil. Twenty years after the documentary film was produced, the land still remains unprotected from developers who are actively seeking to mine resources underground.

Speaker, Leanne Allison: Their calving grounds were threatened once they crossed the border into Alaska. It's a bit of a misnomer because it's called the, you know, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but there's this one strip right where they have their calves. That's always been unprotected because, yeah, because it has oil and gas potential underneath. And yeah, getting ready to talk to you today, I was thinking about how it's just in the last few months, unfortunately, President Trump has opened up that area for exploration again, for the first time in decades, or the only time, I mean. Yeah, so that's really not good news, but there will be a lot of people still working to protect that and not ever have it be developed. But we wanted to bring alive this story of what was at stake for these caribou. And so we thought the best way to do that was to literally follow them on their migration. And even as two people in a tent, you know, we were literally surrounded by all these caribou having their calves, right where this oil and gas was just opened up. And even us, as two quiet humans, we literally were peeing in cups inside our tents, we were whispering, we were crawling for  the water. We just felt so bad for being there, because it’s such a precious time for them, right? So to imagine a big industrial development right there is just... We vowed we would never go back, you know? It was important to tell the story, but you can see in the film, I’m whispering to do the interviews, and it’s just like, yeah, they’re so vulnerable right then.

And at the time when we followed the caribou, they figured there were around 126,000 animals in that particular herd. And it's actually one of the few caribou herds that's gotten larger since then.

Host, Leah Palmer: In the film, we see Leanne and Karsten hiking the migration route, with the herd in the distance. They carried packs that weighed up to 80 pounds, filled with their most essential gear—a tent, sleeping bags, clothing, skis, binoculars, a solar panel, of course camera gear, gloves, sunscreen, maps, water bottles and more.

Speaker, Leanne Allison: To put it into perspective, these animals have been doing this migration for the last 20,000 years. Like you look at all the mountains, and they're literally etched on the sides of the mountain by all the caribou hooves that have done this migration so many times. And there's three main things that they, the reason they go to this, this little strip of land right on the coast. One is it's the timing of this certain type of willow that really is crucial that the mothers get that food to produce the milk for their calves. You know, of course this has been studied and if they don't get that precious food right at that time, their milk isn't as rich and the calves don't have as good survival. So there's that. There's also, one of the main predators, the wolves are having their pups and they're kind of off in the foothills so they're kind of in a predator-free zone there,  and there's also lots of wind so they don't have as many bugs, so it's like all these things have evolved for them to go to that place at that time that make it so crucial.

Host, Leah Palmer: What a wonderful adventure and a beautiful story to tell. I want to back up a little bit because I'm curious about what was going through your head when your husband was saying, I want to follow them. I want to get to know this migration in such an intimate way. How did you feel about that and how are you responding to him?

Speaker, Leanne Allison: You know, I was able to talk to him on a satellite phone that first time he saw the caribou and that story I told of them filling up this valley and then leaving. And I kind of knew that our lives had changed and that probably something was going to happen like this. I mean, it was an extremely adventurous trip. Like we did not cross a single road for five months, and y ou know, we literally allowed the caribou to guide us across the landscape. So, you know, a lot of people do these long trips, but they have it all planned and you know, food caches are there and so on. But we had to be flexible. We wanted to follow like truly be caribou and follow them. So we had food set up in, on the Canadian side and on the U.S. side. And we would generally have around 10 days or so of food. And then when we started to run out, we had some packaged up in these balls so that the plane didn't have to land. It could just like pump these balls out the window or out the door and they would just land on the tundra and we would have our food. But, it was that... it was mentally demanding that way too, right? Because you didn't know where you'd be going next. And you really, you really had to respond more to the caribou.

Host, Leah Palmer: In 2005, Being Caribou won a Gemini Award for the best nature documentary. As an audience member, I think that’s due in part to the transformation I witnessed in Leanne and Karsten. Nature tested them, and it was clear they experienced a full range of physical and mental challenges as they ventured among wildlife unfiltered for five months. So, I was thrilled for the opportunity to ask Leanne about the things caribou taught them along the way.

Speaker, Leanne Allison: The thing was, we were in such a remote location, even if we wanted to quit, we couldn't. There was no way of getting out of there. One of the things that that taught us though, was that like, well, what happened actually, just by chance is it got kind of foggy for the next few days. We couldn't see for miles. We couldn't see every bear on every hill. And the caribou kind of taught us that, you know, you don't have to be... like, they're not freaking out about the bears every minute of the day. They're just dealing with things that are right in front of them and what’s happening. So  we kind of calmed down over a period of four or five days and just realized we, you know, we didn't have to be that worried but that was probably the most doubts we had in the whole thing.

Host, Leah Palmer: I'm glad you brought up some of the things that caribou taught you along the journey. I wanted to ask you about this because you did have such an intimate connection with their migration, and I'm sure you made observations along the way that you find profound. So, I wondered if you could share some of those with our listeners.

Speaker, Leanne Allison: Sure, yeah. On the way there, amazingly, like you, again, we started in late spring, so there's lots of snow and we were actually traveling by skis, with our skis at first. And believe it not, it's the pregnant females that lead the way. So, they're breaking trail, they're pushing to get to the calving grounds and the bulls just hang around in the background and let the females do all the work. So, that was kind of amazing. Yeah, j ust seeing them as new mothers, tending to their calves at the calving grounds was pretty inspiring for me.

And then, you know, one of the things that the Arctic is famous for is bugs. And we found that as long as we went where the caribou went, we were often in the most bug-free zones because they would literally just farm the wind up on the ridgetops. And so sometimes they'd be on one ridge and we'd be on another. So they really were like the perfect guide for the landscape of just being adaptable. It was so interesting how well they accepted us depending on the stage of the migration. Like I was saying earlier, in the calving grounds, they're so sensitive, it just was like they were super skittish. But then later on, when there were quite a few bugs, and there's kind of a lot of caribou around, they could care less. We could be right in with them, and we are literally surrounded by grunting caribou and hearing their tendons going off. And yeah, we could... it just didn't feel like we were bothering them at all.

The other thing about the Arctic that really, I think, pushed us into this almost different way of being is the 24 hours of daylight, so we didn't have to have a normal schedule of sleeping at night. And, you know, there was a point in the migration where the animals were really moving. And so, in order to kind of try and keep up, we started to do this thing of just like sleeping for just short periods of time. And then we would travel again and sleep for a little bit, travel again, because it's all 24 hours of light. So who cares? But, you know, I think we're getting quite tired. We were getting quite thin because we just couldn't carry enough food. But, we actually started to have these dreams about where we would see the caribou. And then like a few hours later, it's like, oh, my God, this is the scene from my dream. Yeah, no, we kind of crossed over into it felt like this really old way of being human because we were just so immersed. And, you know, if you think about this, all this being around these animals that are doing this instinctual thing that's been happening for so long. We're just, you know, we have caribou fur in everything, you know, we're constantly hearing them, we're constantly looking for their tracks. You know, it's just, we got so immersed over time and all the other things in our lives were just gone. You know, we were just so, so into it. And it makes sense as human beings that we could tune into these other kinds of things. It did feel like we tapped into this kind of herd intelligence or something, you know, where it was like waking up to an old way of being human.

Host, Leah Palmer: Among the many lessons, Leanne describes growing a deeper understanding of the impacts of climate change on this critical migration.

Speaker, Leanne Allison: This herd, like I said, is around 160,000 animals, which sounds like a lot, which would maybe make one think that they can, you know, handle a bit of stress and the population will be fine. But, like I was saying, this migration and their timing for getting to the calving grounds is so finely tuned. And things like climate change are really affecting that quite a bit, like even the timing of the emergence of these willows, like I was saying. And there's a lot more snow now than there used to be in places. And these weird rain events that make these crusts. They're facing a lot of uncertainty, you know, as are we humans with climate change that could really have devastating impact on their population. Yeah, it's just the worst possible place to ever think of developing, right where they have their calves. So yeah, that's the main thing is just like to give them every fighting chance, you just have to leave that area alone.

Host, Leah Palmer: Yeah, that message I think is so clear and important for people to hear. I hope that as my listeners hear this story that you're telling that they're interested in watching Being Caribou and learning more about your work because it was one of those projects that just really stands out as an example of like, humans connecting to nature in ways that I think sometimes we have lost as people.

Speaker, Leanne Allison: Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it definitely changed us totally. Like it just changed the way we see the world, basically, right? Like,  it's impacted my filmmaking, storytelling. Like I often take on that point of view of the animal or... I mean, interestingly, I think at first we thought the film could just be about the caribou. We pretty quickly realized we did, we did actually have to be characters in this story as well because we needed to interpret what we were seeing and also just how they were guiding us to these incredible places, mentally, that we never anticipated or never experienced before, right? That kind of deep, deep immersion. So, that was really, I think, a lot of the power of the film is the transformation in us over that time. And I think that comes across pretty clearly.

And, you know, at the beginning of the trip, I mentioned we started in the Yukon in a Gwich'in community called Old Crow. And a fellow named Randall Tetley-Chi took us out to start. And he was caribou hunting, and so we participated in that. We had an evening with him in a cabin and thought he was the one who said, “pay attention to your dreams.” And so it just really felt like he sort of set us up. And then the craziest thing was when we came back. I mentioned that we canoed back on the Porcupine River,  and he was the very first person we met like still, you know, a hundred kilometers from the community, but Randall happened to be out hunting again, and he was the very first person we saw. And we were so excited to see him and tell him everything about the trip. And it was so interesting. He just, he just sort of told us to wait and not talk. He just wanted to be, he just wanted to be with us, you know, he just wanted to be around our energy. And, you know, he recognized it was this really precious transition we were going through and about to go through. Yeah, he helped us once we got back to the community;  we had a sweat with him. Yeah, I mean, kind of can’t even believe this stuff is for real, but it did actually happen.

Host, Leah Palmer: With three weeks remaining on the trip, Leanne and Karsten discovered an opportunity to share the story of migrating with caribou to lawmakers in Washington, D.C. They knew they had something compelling to tell, so they joined lobbyists in D.C. to inform lawmakers of the value of protecting the Porcupine herd’s calving grounds.

Speaker, Leanne Allison: So that was the first time in the trip where we made a plan and we're like, okay, in three weeks time, we're going to get out and we're going to go down to Washington and we're going to tell the caribou story and see how it goes. So that was kind of an unplanned way to end the trip, but we still, I mean, that was still three weeks of walking and then we actually canoed the last part on the Port-de-Line River to a community, a Gwich'in community called Old Crow. And then from there we flew right to D.C. There was a big lobbying effort to try and protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And we were so, like that was actually a really hard transition from this trip, if you can imagine, from this wilderness for five months to the big city, and you know, we're literally looking for their tracks in the vacant lots and stuff like that still.

I think we realized then that we needed to just get the story out to people. And the neat thing was we worked with a group back then to get you know, the story of our journey out there. So it was pretty great. It was like the story just totally went to the grassroots and you know, someone even did their master’s trying to figure out the impact that the story had. I mean like literally trying to measure the number of letters that were sent. So it was awesome that it actually, like it became this, this thing that people could just share. Yeah, try and make an impact. Unfortunately, it didn't fully, or enough at that time, obviously, like I started out saying it's been opened up recently, but like I said, there'll be a big fight.

Host, Leah Palmer: This February, the fight to protect the oil-rich lands where caribou give birth each Spring was dealt a devastating blow. The Department of the Interior opened the coastal plain grounds to oil and gas leasing nominations, under President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Advocates are working through coalition and with legal guidance to protest the lease sales by submitting comments to the Bureau of Land Management in Alaska, and they’re educating bidders and financers about the significance of the refuge. I encourage listeners to do your research, watch Being Caribou, and take action in the effort to protect this migrating herd. Lastly, I followed my curiosity and asked Leanne:

Host, Leah Palmer: Do you still find yourself imagining what it's like to be caribou?

Speaker, Leanne Allison: Yeah, well, I still think about them at certain times of year for sure. Like, June is the time when they have their calves, and I always think of them around then. Yeah, I mean it's definitely always going to be a special place. Like, Karsten wants some of his ashes taken there, so I'll go there in the next few years and do that. Yeah, I've been in touch with this fellow, Randall, from Old Crow in the last little while, so it's time to go see him. Yeah, who knows? Maybe there's a way for us to contribute again to the cause.

Host, Leah Palmer: Thank you so much for your time and just for sharing so much of your story with me. I really appreciate all of your perspective and your wonderful storytelling.

Speaker, Leanne Allison: Well, thanks, Leah. And I’m glad you’re telling all these great migration stories. I love migration stories, too. They’re the best.

Host, Leah Palmer: Well, thank you for listening to this episode of On the Move, a podcast about wild animal migrations and the people working to protect them. In the final episode of On the Move, I talk with experts who say keeping public lands public and protected is critical to all wildlife migrations. They break down ways listeners like you can become advocates for responsible public lands policy and share their visions healthy lands and waters across the West.

Special thanks to my guests for this episode, Tess O’Sullivan, Dr. Corinna Riginos, Amos Scott and Leanne Allison, for their generous conversations and giving all of us an intimate look at ungulate migrations across the West. And lastly, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to my Storytelling team, the folks behind every episode of On the Move. This episode was written and produced by Leah Palmer with support from Kate O’Neill and Dustin Solberg. Custom artwork was created by Erica Simek Sloniker with support from Mitch Maxson. Web and social production come from Danielle Kagan and Traci Swift. Find more from this series at nature.org/onthemove.

Speaker, Nancy Fishbein: I think it was a family trip that we took out West when I was a little girl. I was probably eight years old, seven or eight years old. And the large spaces of the Western United States just really captured my imagination. And I knew that that's where I was going to end up. I have lived in Colorado for 35 years now. So I've been here for a long time. There's something, there's still like a little bit of a wild spirit left in the West. And it's infectious.

Host, Leah Palmer: Welcome back to On the Move, a podcast mini-series exploring animal migrations in the West and how people are working to keep them wild and free. I’m Leah Palmer, a writer for The Nature Conservancy. In this episode of On the Move, I learn about efforts to protect one of America’s national treasures—our public lands. I talk with conservation and policy experts who say keeping public lands public is key to sustaining migration corridors.

You were just listening to Nancy Fishbein, director of the Resilient and Connected Lands Program at TNC in Colorado. You heard her describing a family road trip to public lands in the West that became the catalyst for her work today.

Speaker, Nancy Fishbein: Boy, we went everywhere. We packed the family car, and we drove out west and we went to lots of national parks, just from the dramatic landscape of the Tetons in Wyoming to the more subtle desert landscapes of Southwestern Utah, and everything in between. It was just the big open skies, was just so inspiring to me. And it was long enough ago that I was seven years old that there weren't as many people as there are now in these places that we love. So recognizing that as we do have a tendency to love places to death. And there's a lot more people that want to enjoy these spaces. So we have to be really thoughtful about how we take care of them and what we're allowed to do in these spaces too, or they won't be here for the next generation to be able to have those same experiences that I had when I was seven.

Host, Leah Palmer: As director of the Resilient and Connected Lands program in Colorado, I thought it would be maybe a silly question to ask, but what does that mean? What does it mean to have resilient and connected lands?

Speaker, Nancy Fishbein: It's not a silly question at all. People often wonder what that all means. So, I'll do my best to describe it for you. Over the past, I don't know, decade or so, The Nature Conservancy science team at the North American level has been working with external scientists to develop something that we call the Resilient and Connected Network. And basically what that is is a map of the entire United States that shows where are those places that have lands that are the most resilient in the face of our changing climate. So where can animal species go, plant species go to find sort of refuge as the planet gets hotter and drier?

So, these places are places that have lots of different nooks and crannies, lots of different elevation changes and aspect changes so that the animals, and plants to some degree as well, can find places to go that can help them survive. So that's the resiliency. The connectivity comes from putting those places together. Take an example of like a pronghorn antelope that lives on the eastern plains of Colorado. It would be wonderful if we could build a connection, build a network of resilient places so that that antelope could move from eastern Colorado into western Kansas, or move from eastern Colorado into northern Wyoming. And that's what we're trying to build is those physical connectivities between important habitats and important landscapes so that species can move in the face of our changing climate.

Host, Leah Palmer: That's wonderful. I mean, that makes crystal clear sense to me. You know, as someone who's interested lately in wildlife migrations, I wonder if that's a part of your discussions when you're talking about resilient and connected lands.

Speaker, Nancy Fishbein: So, one thing to, it's important to clarify is that animals migrate for lots of different reasons. And I'm not a scientist, so this is going to be a very non-scientific explanation of migrations, but animals migrate seasonally. So, in the summer, they'll be in place A. In the winter, they'll be in place B, and they have to get from A to B. That's a migration.

When we're talking about resiliency and connectivity across vast landscapes, we are trying to protect and preserve those sorts of migration corridors. So places where animals go year after year after year after year, that's the way they always go. Animals also, and plants to some degree, migrate with a changing climate.

So, we have noticed over the years that certain species of plants, for example, are no longer found as far south as they used to be because as the climate warms and dries, they're moving further and further north. That's also a migration. And what's important in that sort of a migration is that you preserve the places where they might go in the future, where they can find new homes when the homes that they're currently in are no longer suitable for them to live in.

Host, Leah Palmer: Migratory species in the West move through a checkerboard landscape, where one section of their migratory path could be privately owned and managed, and then the next could be stewarded by a Tribal Nation, and yet another section of their pathway may cut through a national park or public lands. Nancy says this is the case for migrating elk in Colorado.

Speaker, Nancy Fishbein: So, elk are found everywhere in Colorado. They are one of those emblematic species of the Western United States, and they are just, I mean, they're beautiful, majestic animals. They have these huge, the males have these huge racks that they carry around with them for most of the year. And they bugle in the fall. So, they make, again, another amazing sound, wildlife sound. Once you hear it, you'll never forget that one either.

So, they're found in lots of different landscapes. They are found in the San Luis Valley. We have elk on our Zapata Preserve. They're found high up in high elevation forests. So, they really are found in lots of different places and lots of different habitats. But Northwest Colorado is host to one of the largest elk herds in the state. And they migrate seasonally from the Flat Tops Wilderness Area in Northwest Colorado, in Routt, Moffat and Rio Blanco counties. They migrate in large numbers. It's not quite the same volume as like a Serengeti migration of wildebeest or something like that, but it can be pretty impressive. It can be thousands and thousands of elk traveling together from their summer habitat into their winter range. One thing that's super important about large animals, they have to cross roads, they have to deal with traffic, they have to deal with fences, they have to deal with lot of obstructions to their migration. And what we as The Nature Conservancy are trying to do by working with our wonderful private landowners and our ranchers in the Western United States is to figure out how we allow that kind of migration to happen without putting too many obstacles in their way. 

Host, Leah Palmer: Just take a moment and notice. As Nancy described this elk herd’s migration route, she mentioned they travel through the Flat Tops Wilderness Area—public lands; in the Routt, Moffat, and Rio Blanco counties—a combination of federal and privately owned lands; to the Yampa River and surrounding valley—which is comprised of mixed ownership between ranching families, state and federal lands.

Now, I don’t want to bore you with numbers, but I found some data that illustrates the value of our public lands for migrating species. Bear with me as I break this down. A recent series of reports from the U.S. Department of the Interior maps ungulate migrations across 11 states in the West. Knowing where animals are on the landscape can help federal, state and private land owners enhance the quality of their migrations across this checkboard ownership we’ve been talking about. In an analysis of 101 migration maps compiled for the study, the report states there are 83 herds crossing Bureau of Land Management lands, 19 herds who cross 11 national parks and monuments, 22 herds cross Tribal Nations, 94 herds cross U.S. Forest Service Lands and 16 herds navigate U.S. Fish and Wildlife Refuge lands. Needless to say, Nancy’s work to ensure connected and resilient lands for migrating animals is critical. Toward the end of our conversation we got a little vulnerable. I shared...

“Something that keeps me up at night is thinking about future generations being able to experience the beauty that I see now. Which kind of brings me to one last question: If you were to look back on your work in the last, you know, let's say 20 years from now, if you were to look back on your work, what are you hoping you have accomplished in your partnerships and collaborations with people and with the land?”

Speaker, Nancy Fishbien: You ask very deep questions. This is a hard question too. I have done a lot of land conservation in my tenure at The Nature Conservancy and have been responsible for directly protecting a lot of land and then helping partners protect lands as well. And that's very gratifying.

I think for me, what I really hope for as I look back is that we have built conservation that can last well into the future—that it's not isolated postage stamps of protected land with fences around them, but it's a connected and resilient landscape that crosses Colorado and goes into our adjacent states, and the people in those adjacent states have done the same thing, so that all of a sudden we can see physically on the land habitat connections that go from Mexico to Canada. Like, that would be just such an incredible legacy to leave behind. And we'll see. It's, I think people in the West recognize the importance of these open spaces, whether it's for people's livelihoods or specifically for wildlife habitat. It's so interconnected, and understanding how we tie working landscapes together with conserved places is just such a critical part of building this mosaic of land that's going to sustain us well into the future.

Host, Leah Palmer: Nested in the mosaic Nancy describes are massive and stunning swaths of public lands, made for you and me. The federal government manages roughly 650 million acres of public land, and over 600 of those acres are in the American West. Our public lands are iconic and accessible, drawing hundreds of millions of visitors to recreate. They are the backbone of rural economies, which thrive on agriculture and tourism. With the right permit or day pass, visitors of public lands break free from towns and cities to enjoy outdoor adventures, observe wildlife and harvest food for their tables. Public lands are often the backdrop to our connections with each other, too. They’re our vacation destinations, where kids first learn to reel in fish, friends form shared memories of a view, couples steal away to reconnect and elders teach youth to identify food. Immersion in nature has a way of informing personal identity, shaping family tradition and reminding people they are part of a greater collective of living things.

There’s overwhelming bipartisan support for keeping public lands public. But, Americans have recently questioned whether the policy protecting them could be rolled back, opening doors for our lands to be irreversibly bought, sold, mined, developed and fragmented. What would this mean for wildlife—and us? I sat down with Kelsey Schober, Director of Government Affairs for TNC in Alaska to understand how she and other advocates are taking action to protect our public lands.

Host, Leah Palmer: Hi Kelsey, I'm so thrilled to talk to you today. And you know, I know that you have a policy lens, so I'm really excited to dig into that. So would you take a minute and introduce yourself?

Speaker, Kelsey Schober: Absolutely. Yeah, and thanks for having me here today, Leah. It's great to chat with you. My name is Kelsey Schober. I'm the Director of Government Affairs for the Alaska chapter of The Nature Conservancy. I've been with TNC for a little over four and a half years, and I live and work in Anchorage, Alaska, which is about an hour and a half away from where I was born and raised here in Alaska.

Host, Leah Palmer: Wow, okay, so you have a pretty deep knowledge about Alaska. I hope to dig into that a little later, but I wanted to ask you first, what does it mean to be Director of Government Affairs?

Speaker, Kelsey Schober: Yeah, it's a good question. I think first and foremost, it really depends day to day. So many days look so different. But generally, in an overarching way, what I do is I lead and manage the policy work for the Alaska chapter on the state level and also on the federal level. So on the federal level, I work with our team that's in D.C. as well as colleagues that are in positions like mine that are based in state chapters around the country. And we all work collaboratively on federal policy. And I work specifically with the Alaska delegation. Similarly, my colleagues in other states that are in these positions will work with just their respective delegations. And then on the state side, I oversee our state policy work. When I started at the chapter four and a half years ago, we didn't do any state policy work at all. And so this is a newer area for us, which is exciting and it means that it's a space of growth. And it also means that we are still figuring out what that looks like. And we've kind of started to lean into some specific areas and types of work that make a lot of sense to us, but we're also still growing into that.

So my work generally falls into the state bucket and this federal bucket. But one thing that I always like to mention too is, if you're reading the news, you see Alaska in the news all the time. And, you know, there's other states that are in the news a lot, but Alaska is huge and particularly for conservation issues and resource issues it comes up a bunch. So, one big part of my job, beyond just kind of the technical part and the leadership that I'm doing in the policy sphere, is also honestly advising and educating about Alaska. I have a lot of conversations about how certain policy issues touch down here, maybe ways that they might be impactful in Alaska that they're not in other places, or ways that things don't really apply in Alaska that they might apply elsewhere. And so that's a big part of my job as well, is kind of this interpretation and advising and educating on all things that are Alaska based.

Host, Leah Palmer: It's a huge job and you know as I've been talking with others about wildlife migrations, policy consistently comes up. I will ask people, “what are some of the solutions to making sure that these historic migrations continue and they can persist and continue the balance of nature that migrations you know lend themselves to?” And every single time people are saying we have to get better about policy that benefits nature. So, I was curious what compels you to advocate for places in Alaska in your role?

Speaker, Kelsey Schober: Yeah. Oh my gosh. That is a big question. So, like I said at the top, I was born and raised in Alaska and I grew up in a family where every fall we were hunting for moose. Every summer we were fishing for salmon and every fall we were also doing berry picking, just around our property, around our house. So, I grew up in a household where we were doing these things on a regular basis and they were part of the seasonality of our lives in a really regular way. And you know, when you're a kid and you only know the context that you know, it's hard to tell if it's unique or if it's just everyone's experience.

So, I didn't really realize how unique and special that was until I moved away and I moved to the East Coast, where I went to college. And when I was gone from Alaska, I really started to miss that seasonality. And when I moved back to Alaska, it just sort of fell back into place in a really natural way. And I say all of this to say that I think in Alaska, we are so tied to the natural world and to the seasons that we don't even realize how important it is in our lives until we don't have it anymore.

So for me, I never chose to have a career in conservation, and I never chose to have a career in conservation policy. It just sort of happened. Clean air and clean water is so important to everywhere, but in Alaska, it's so front and center because it plays a role in your day-to-day life in such a prominent way, as it might not if you lived elsewhere.

So for me, I feel compelled to advocate for Alaska and for these places because I can't imagine living in Alaska where you can't go moose hunting in the fall and where salmon fishing isn't something that you get to do and where the berries aren't, you know, everywhere where you want to sit down to pick them. I... that's not the state that I grew up in and that's not the place that I, that I fell in love with. And so for me advocating for Alaska isn't actually about being a conservationist. It feels like advocating for a way of life and for a future that gets to experience the same things that I experienced growing up here and the same things that I get to base my life around living in Alaska now as an adult.

Alaska is such a big state, so it's impossible to have your eyes on everything all the time. And also, I'm not a scientist. I'm a policy expert. But, I think that there are certain things that happen. There are certain migrations that happen on an annual basis that do come to mind. Salmon are so important. They're so important even here in Anchorage in the largest city in the state, but they're even more important in rural communities. And it's important for food security. It's important for heritage and culture and tradition. It's important for economies.

And that's a migration that happens every single year, and you can really feel it, right? When the salmon are running, even, again, even in Anchorage, folks are more likely to take a day off work to go salmon fishing because the fish are running and you have to be there for that. You have to catch that.

But some other migrations that come to mind that are less intimately familiar to me, but I know matter a lot to other folks, bird migrations. I mean, Alaska is the northern end of the Pacific flyway and there's so many species that make their homes here in Alaska for certain portions of the year. I also think about caribou when I think about migrations, and this connects to Canada as well. We have caribou that are important in both places, and of course these animals don't see borders, right? So when we talk about migrations and we talk about policy, sometimes it feels like those two things are at odds because policy is so often constrained by the governmental bounds to which it is responsible.

And I think that's a really tough thing about migration and migrating species is how do we make policy that's smart, recognizing that animals don't see boundaries, fish don't see boundaries, those don't matter to them? And so we have to take more of an ecosystem-based approach, even if it creates complexity across those boundaries. I think that's tough. And also there are examples of ways that it can be done well. And I think in a place like Alaska and again, stretching into Canada, where we have so much ecosystem intactness, we have these corridors for wildlife, we have these chunks of public land, whether it's state land or federal land, we have these pieces of land that have connectivity to them. And that's such an important enabling condition for migrations and for the continuance of migrations. Just that intactness and that connectivity is so critical, and something that we see across so much of Alaska, and I think is also pretty spectacular to folks when they come visit and see it for the first time, because it's not as familiar in many parts of the lower 48. It's just oftentimes more urban or more developed in a way that so much of Alaska isn't.

Host, Leah Palmer: Yeah, and you know, one of the reasons why I'm so excited to talk to you today is to really dig into policy and how it impacts public lands. But I really think that maybe we could start with some simple definitions. Could you take a minute and define what public lands even are and how that impacts people?

Speaker, Kelsey Schober: Yeah, it's a good place to start. So, public lands can mean a lot of different things. Generally, when we talk about public lands, we can be talking about state lands or we can be talking about federal lands. More often when folks talk about public lands, they mean federal public lands. And those are the things that you think of automatically, like national parks, like these important places that are so known to folks even outside the United States. But federal public lands also include lands that are maybe less visible. They're not the places that people are going for a vacation. It's not Yellowstone and it's not these big places that hold iconic spaces in our minds.

It can also include lands that are, you know, wildlife refuges. It can include Forest Service lands. It can include BLM lands that are used for multiple uses. Maybe there's mining happening, but there's also hunting, there's also ATV use. So, public lands on the federal side can mean so much and there's varying levels of protection for these different lands depending on who they're managed by and what they're managed for.

Generally, I will say, I think also important in the definition of public lands is most of the public lands in the United States are concentrated in Alaska and the West. That isn't to say that there aren't public lands elsewhere, but when we talk about federal public lands, the vast majority of them are in the West and they're in Alaska. So, a lot of times folks that live in these places have a different experience of these public lands. They might be the places that they go out regularly to go hunting or fishing with their family in a way that supports food security and their communities, rather than just folks that are coming and visiting these places and having kind of a more recreational or tourist experience. There's nothing bad about either of those. There's nothing better or worse about either of those. They're just different experiences depending on your proximity to them and where you live and the relationship that you have with them.

Host, Leah Palmer: I also have this conception of public lands that they are owned by American citizens. Could you unpack that for me a little?

Speaker, Kelsey Schober: Absolutely. The short answer is yes. They're publicly owned. They are owned by American citizens, and if you came to Alaska, you would have just as much right to access the BLM lands 10 minutes from where I live for a cross country ski as I would. Similarly, you would have just as much right to go to the Chugach National Forest and cut down a Christmas tree, as I would to go for a hike and enjoy just looking at the trees that are still standing. So, the short answer is yes, public lands belong to all Americans, and they are a public resource for everyone to use.

I think digging into that a little bit deeper, there is a history of public lands that we don't like to talk about as much, or it's talked about in certain circles. But so many of these public lands, particularly, like I said earlier, public lands are more concentrated in the West. And many of these lands were and are the homelands of Indigenous peoples that lived in these different places. And these lands were taken, were stolen, were borrowed and then kept. However you want to state it, in a lot of places these lands belonged to other people and had been stewarded by Indigenous peoples for millennia. And the reason that we have the public lands that we do today is due to that history of taking, but also the history of care and stewardship that Indigenous peoples gave these public lands.

I think, especially as a policy expert, it's really easy to talk about, you know, this federal policy protects these public lands. This federal policy is really important. But I think it's important to take a step back and say, wow, actually, these public lands look the way that they do and are the way that they are because they were stewarded and cared for millennia by Indigenous peoples. And, you know, federal policy can protect these lands and keep them in this protected status, but also recognizing that we in so many instances have cut off that tradition of stewardship and care and also connection to land and heritage that these public lands offer.

So, I think we do have to grapple with that as conservationists. What does it mean that these places that we love, and that belong to all Americans, and are a public resource for all, also, you know, were the homes of many people and were the places where people develop traditions and heritage and maybe their ancestors were even buried there. So I think as conservationists, it's really important for us to be able to see both sides of that and recognize that the full story is really important when we talk about land and who owns them and who manages it and what it looks like today.

Host, Leah Palmer: Absolutely. I would add too that as a Black and Native woman, something I've learned from my Choctaw traditions is that those shared lands before colonization weren't even—the concept of ownership isn't the same, and that really it was more about relationship and stewardship of lands, and that there was like equitable kind of distribution of access to lands without needing like a title or a deed to designate it as one's land. So, I do think that history is really important. I appreciate you bringing it into the forefront.

I'd love to talk to you about policy now. Since we're talking so much about public lands, I'm curious if you might unpack some of the policies that impact the health of these public lands we're talking about.

Speaker, Kelsey Schober: Absolutely. So Alaska has more than 220 million acres of federal public lands. And these public lands, for the most part, are governed by generally the same laws that are governing public lands in the lower 48. So when we think about healthy ecosystems, we're talking about clean water, clean air, intact working ecosystems. And that is the same in Alaska as it is everywhere else.

Some of the policies that are really important to protecting public lands in Alaska, it's the same policies that matter to public lands in lower 48. We're talking about laws that protect endangered species. We're talking about laws that protect our national parks. We're talking about laws that protect clean water, clean air, and the ecosystems that we depend on and the ecosystems that make these places function in the way that we know them now.

Host, Leah Palmer: Yeah. Okay, well thank you for giving me some insight. You know, I often feel the shifts and changes in federal power on a cycle, right? When we elect a new president, it can feel sometimes like you're experiencing like a whole new worldview, being displayed through policy or through leadership. So, if I think about those shifting values and priorities, I'm wondering how you might feel that these shifts impact your work or even just your person. And if you could point to any recent policies that might be swinging in those shifts.

Speaker, Kelsey Schober: It's a good question, especially as we're in the first year of a new administration. Of course, there are changes that everyone is experiencing. And I would say broadly, certainly there's recalibration, right? A new president comes in, a new administration comes in, and they have different priorities. And they have been voted into office, and so they have the support of different folks that are asking, in many cases, for these different priorities.

So there is a recalibration and I think oftentimes we, or the media or the population in general, gets really focused on these big shifts that happen on kind of this four or eight year basis. But I think in my work, we experience a lot of these shifts on different timescales. So, we have at the federal level, we have house elections that happen every two years. And there also might be transitions in power that mean there are special elections, as happened in Alaska in the last five years. So that's happening every two years. We also have Senate elections that happen every six years, and those are offset from each other. So, we have transitions that are happening outside just the years that the presidential cycle is happening.

And on the state level, that also looks really different. We have, again, House elections that happen every two years, Senate elections that happen less frequently, but those also are happening in the same context that those federal elections are happening. And then in Alaska, we don't work on local elections, but in many states we do, right? So then there's local elections and sometimes those don't even happen in November. Sometimes those happen in the spring.

So. I think as policy experts, we're always contending with these shifts. And certainly, there are shifts that bring more change or less change, but it feels like a pretty regular situation that we're having to say, oh this person is new in their role. We've got to get in and educate them and also start building a relationship and get to know them. Maybe even we have a new commissioner and that's something that happens just because of life and job changes. And, so then we have to build relationships with those folks.

So yes, there are these big transitions that happen that certainly change agendas and make us think about whether we are digging in on one issue or defending another issue. But I think there's also these micro adjustments that happen on a smaller scale that can make us more resilient to these bigger changes and help us practice what it means to recalibrate for new leadership and for new relationships and for new priorities.

I think one of the bigger challenges beyond just these changes and these transitions is that clean air and clean water and healthy lands and ecosystems, they don't operate on a two-year time scale or a four-year time scale or even a six-year time scale. Certainly there are things that can happen in those time periods that impact the health of lands and waters and ecosystems and air, but in general, for these systems to continue working and for us to continue to have these healthy natural conditions, we need longer-term time commitments. We need a longer-term time horizon that we're looking at and that we're making these decisions around so that maybe a decision that happens in a certain two year period, you don't see the impacts of that decision for maybe another 10 years.

And so I think that is a really big challenge that we see across conservation is helping elected officials make these decisions that might not pay off in their term and might not help bring voters to their side because they don't actually see the impacts on the ground. So in conservation, that's a really big challenge is how do we build this incentive to act on a shorter term scale that juggles all of these things that we know is a reality that our elected officials are contending with also look towards the longer term future, look 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down the line and know that we're making decisions that are going to be good decisions at that time scale.

I think we navigate that as policy experts on a regular basis and it's a challenge. But I also think that's why policy is so important is because it can create that durability for that long-term time scale that we need.

Host, Leah Palmer: Sounds like a dual challenge that you face in policy, which is that when it comes to migrations, animals aren't cognizant of the borders, the political jurisdiction that they designate and nature is not cognizant of our political transitions or our policy timelines. And so I can imagine that that just creates an interesting world for you to work in.

Speaker, Kelsey Schober: Absolutely. You said that so succinctly. I think you summed up 10 minutes of me speaking in a few sentences.

Host, Leah Palmer: Toward the end of our conversation, Kelsey shares actionable steps we can take to ensure our public lands remain ours for generations to come. 

You know, I think there are probably a lot of listeners who will resonate with exactly what you just said and who might want to become part of a movement to protect public lands. So how can they do that?

Speaker, Kelsey Schober: In this moment, particularly when folks see something that they care so much about that is under attack or under threat, people want to act and people want to do their best to show up for those issues. So there's a couple ways that I would encourage folks to engage.

Number one, I'm a policy person, so I would be remiss if I didn't say, tell your elected officials that. They need to know that you care. You can call them and leave a message. You can send an email. In order to do that, all you have to do is Google their name and their website and there should be a “contact us” form. You don't need to know a special email. You don't need to know a special phone number. There are phone numbers on the website that are there for public members of the public to call. And there are contact us and email forms that folks should be filling out. And they are there for that explicit purpose.

So, talk to your elected officials, tell them what you care about and tell them that it matters, and hold them accountable to that.

The second way that folks can engage is to express their opinions, whether that is to your friends around the dinner table to make sure that everyone knows that this is important and knows what's happening. Whether that is in an op-ed form, maybe you don't like talking over the dinner table, that's totally fine. Writing an op-ed or a letter to the editor of your local newspaper is a really good way to get your voice and your opinion out there.

And I think just generally making sure that people you engage with know what's happening and that they also know to contact their elected officials and tell them that this matters. That matters a whole lot. In Alaska, there are so many people that use our public lands for so many different things. And everyone that uses our public lands and cares about our public lands should be vocalizing their opinion about our public lands and should be motivating and organizing the people around them to do the same.

The third thing I'd say, and I work for a nonprofit, so I would be remiss if I didn't say this, if you have the capacity to donate or support these causes financially, please do so. Policy so often we see it as being this flash in the pan like this moment of urgent action where we we need to contact our elected officials, like I just said, or we need to speak up or we need to do something right now. And those moments are really important, but also the folks that are organizing you in those moments belong to organizations to nonprofits to groups that have to operate on an annual basis. They have budgets. They have work that needs to get done. They have people that they need to pay. And being able to support those causes financially means that they can show up for you and tell you when to engage. They can show up and tell you when the moment is to contact your elected officials. And that infrastructure is so, so critical and needs to be supported on a regular basis, on a regular timeline, even when these big action moments aren't occurring. So, the third way that I would encourage folks to engage on these issues is to pitch in financially if you can and if you're able.

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Support comes from The Nature Conservancy. We’re working with partners, Tribal Nations and the U.S. Forest Service to restore dry forests across the West.  Learn more at nature.org/Westerndryforests.

Host, Leah Palmer: My experience with the recent threats to public lands has been essentially that that was like a non-issue until recently. I didn't even think about the idea that such access to these beautiful places could possibly slip away. It became clear to me that there was so much more that I could do, that just kind of engaging further would be healthy for me and for my community. So thanks for talking to me about that.

Speaker, Kelsey Schober: Yeah. I guess one that that I'll just add to that that I think is so important, and you just sharing your own personal story reminded me of, is I think it's really, really easy to slip into a place of overwhelm about these things and to feel disempowered and like your voice doesn't make a difference and like your voice doesn't matter. And especially that's true when there  issues that you didn't even realize were going to come up, like public lands, like you just said. So many folks love our public lands, care about our public lands, and didn't expect that our public lands would be under threat, and yet here we are.

So that makes it really easy to feel like there's nothing you can do in order to help this. And I would just encourage anyone listening to this to try to flip that mindset, and remind yourself that public officials are accountable to you. Public officials respond to messages, to outreach, to communication. And even if it doesn't feel like your one voice will make a difference, you are a part of something bigger than yourself. And every single one voice that pitches in is one more voice than there was previously As a collective, we have the power to do that and we just need to tap into that.

Host, Leah Palmer: Thank you so much, Kelsey for your time and just downloading all of this really good information that puts wildlife migrations into a real context. I think that the empowering message that you left at the end just reminds me that this is all of our work together to do to protect these wonderful patterns and rhythms of our earth. So,  thank you so much for talking to me today.

Speaker, Kelsey Schober: Absolutely. Leah, it sounds like you would say, together we find a way. Is that accurate?

Host, Leah Palmer: I love it. Together we'll find a way.

And just like that, we’ve reached the end of the last episode of On the Move. It’s been a true pleasure to take you with me as I learned about wild animals, their amazing migrations and how people are finding ways to free them up from all the things standing in their way. I’m Leah Palmer, a writer and storyteller at The Nature Conservancy.

I’d like to thank my guests on this episode, Nancy Fishbein and Kelsey Schober, for sharing their expertise with their whole hearts. And my deepest gratitude to all 18 experts who weighed in on animal migrations over the last six episodes. You’ve inspired me more than you know. And to my storytelling team, thank you for your work on this project. Your creativity, problem-solving and collaboration are unmatched. This episode was written and produced by Leah Palmer with support from Kate O’Neill and Dustin Solberg. Custom artwork was created by Erica Simek Sloniker with support from Mitch Maxson. Web and social production come from Danielle Kagan and Traci Swift. Find more from this series at nature.org/onthemove.