Finding Wild

Wild Puffins — with Dr. Heather L Major, University of New Brunswick

Dr. Heather Major is a Professor and Department Chair of Biological Sciences at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John, and the Lead of the Atlantic Laboratory for Avian Research. Since 2016, she’s headed the long-term seabird monitoring program on Machias Seal Island — a small island in the Gulf of Maine that hosts the largest Atlantic puffin colony south of Newfoundland — building on a dataset that stretches back to 1995.

In this episode, Heather walks us through what makes puffins such a strange and fascinating species...

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

Wild Lobsters — with Dan Rodgers, Bottom Line Fisheries

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

In this episode, Dan walks us through what a day of lobstering off the coast of Mai...

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

In this episode, Ma...

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

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

Learn more about the Corolla Wild Horse Fund: Website: corollawildhorses.com Instagram: @coro...

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

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

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