The Wild Quiet
The Wild Quiet is a podcast about nature—and our place within it. Host Bre Harris follows her curiosity into conversations with scientists, gardeners, writers, farmers, artists, herbalists, naturalists, and other people who help us look more closely at the world around us. Some episodes are conversations; others are shorter explorations of ordinary things that turn out to be surprisingly strange. Together, they ask what changes when we slow down, pay attention, and reconsider what we thought we already knew about nature.
P-22 and the Lines Animals Can’t See
What happens when one wild animal becomes someone?
P-22 was a mountain lion living in Griffith Park, surrounded by Los Angeles. He crossed two enormous freeways, spent more than a decade in an unusually tiny home range, survived mange and exposure to rat poison, and somehow became one of the most famous wild animals in America.
In this episode, I follow P-22 from the Santa Monica Mountains to the Hollywood sign—and into the much bigger story his life helped people see.
We get into the secret lives of mountain lions, wildlife communication, ha...
What Happens When Animals Can’t Move? with Ben Goldfarb
We tend to think of roads as routes to somewhere else. But for wildlife, those same roads can become moving fences—cutting animals off from food, mates, migration routes, and sometimes entire futures.
Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb joins me to explore the strange and surprisingly emotional world of road ecology: wildlife bridges, salamander tunnels, migrating pronghorn, mountain lions trapped among Los Angeles freeways, road noise as habitat loss, and why the animal always gets the final vote on whether our solution actually works.
We also discuss the tragically underused historical insult flivverboob, which deserves another ch...
What Happens When We Really Start Noticing Insects? — with Barrett Klein
What happens when we stop sorting insects into beautiful, useful, annoying, disgusting, or terrifying—and actually look at them?
Biologist, artist, and author Barrett Klein joins me to explore what can happen when we start paying closer attention to the tiny lives around us.
We get into sleeping bees, monarch mysteries, mud-dauber architecture, childhood encounters with dead butterflies, insect-made art, milkweed beetles, the strange ways insects are woven into human culture, and whether understanding something can actually change the way we feel about it.
We also assemble a three-creature team for an insect ba...
Soap Opera in the Milkweed Patch
What happens when you plant milkweed for monarchs—and discover an entire tiny world living there?
What started as a few volunteer milkweed plants in my front yard became a miniature neighborhood full of ant farmers, aphid mummies, four-eyed beetles, chemical warfare, disappearing caterpillars, strange pollination tricks, and conversations happening through the stems that I can’t even hear.
In this companion episode, we’re looking past the monarchs to explore some of the other lives tangled up in a milkweed patch—and the surprisingly complicated relationships happening on one ordinary plant.
We get into...
Introducing The Wild Quiet
The Wild Quiet is a new podcast about nature—and our place within it. Every Tuesday, Bre Harris follows a new curiosity about animals, plants, landscapes, and the complicated ways humans live alongside them.
Sometimes through conversations with people who have spent years paying attention. Sometimes straight down the rabbit hole.
The Wild Quiet launches September 15. Follow the show now so the first episodes are waiting for you.
