(Airdate: June 18, 2025) Marine mammals, especially the cetaceans, are a popular focus for wildlife viewing throughout the world. So, which species live here in the Salish Sea, and how are they doing? Local cetaceans include harbor porpoises, Dall’s porpoises, Pacific white-sided dolphins, minke whales, gray whales, humpback, and killer whales. Other local marine mammals include Steller sea lions, California sea lions, northern elephant seals, harbor seals, and sea otters.
(Airdate: June 11, 2025) Please join Nature Now host Debaran Kelso this week as we speak with founder Linda Landkammer and naturalist Dr. Fred Sharpe out in the garden, celebrating the lovely Kul Kah Han Native Plant Garden on a gorgeous summer afternoon!
(Airdate: June 4, 2025) Nan Evans talks with Thor Hanson, biologist and author, to explore the wonders of biodiversity. Biodiversity is the variety of life on earth from genes and species to ecosystems. Biodiversity encompasses the interactions between all living things, animals (including humans), plants, fungi, microorganisms and the environments they inhabit and communities they create. Biodiversity has been attributed with holding the world together.
(Reprise Airdate: May 21, 2025) Nature Now host Jackie Canterbury talks with Bev McNeil about the nature of Anderson Lake State Park. The park encompasses 496 acres of land with a diversity of plant communities, wetlands, and forests. The name bears the family name of an earlier owner, Amanda Anderson. The land was purchased in 1947. The park now offers trails that pass along the lake and through grassy marches, patches of salmonberries and huckleberries and through forests of young and older western red cedar and Douglas-fir.
(Reprise airdate: May 14, 2025) Ancient bacteria, single cells and long strands of strange little plants, plus minute single celled animals and weird fantastical animal larvae – these are the members of the Earth’s massive and hugely important planktonic ecosystems. Come with Nan Evans as she talks with Dr. Gretchen Rollwagen-Bollens about this strange world and its significance to global ecology and human well being. Consider eutrophication, the world’s biggest threat to water quality or cyanobacteria and one of the causes of toxic algal blooms such as the ones in our local Andeson Lake.
(Airdate: May 7, 2025) Nan Evans talks with Port Townsend photographer Kerry Tremain about the beauty of his bird photography and the emotional connections we all have to birds once we open ourselves to honor that we humans co-evolved with birds.
(Airdate: April 30, 2025) In this reprise airing, host Debaran Kelso delves into the amazing world of secretive wetland birds! Our guest is Cindy Easterson from the Puget Sound Bird Observatory. She is program manager for the Regional Wetland Secretive Bird Monitoring Project, and will share details on this grand new research effort in our region.
(Airdate: April 23, 2025) Please join Nature Now host Debaran Kelso as we take up Part 2 of our conversation about seabird conservation with our guest Peter Harrison, this time joined by his wife Shirley Metz. Peter is a world-renowned seabird expert, artist, and conservationist, and his wife Shirley an avid adventurer and conservationist in her own right. This show highlights their remarkable joint conservation efforts.
(Airdate: April 16, 2025) Whales of Alaska have been studied by NOAA scientists for many years. For a third of a
century, Dave Rugh flew in small aircraft, stood on sea cliffs, rode various ships, and spent a lot of time on sea ice documenting the abundance of whales around Alaska. This included the enigmatic bowhead whale, belugas (which are white whales) in Cook Inlet near Anchorage, and gray whales which migrate from the Arctic to Mexico’s warm lagoons.
(Airdate: April 9, 2025) Nan Evans and Christie Lassen are at it again in this Part 2 of “Birds and Their Feathers”. Join them this week as they explore such topics as: What is the impact of diet on feathers? How do feathers keep birds warm? And cool? How do feathers help birds fly?
