Episodes
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Competing needs are emerging in our boreal forest. Warming temperatures from climate change are making it easier to farm in the boreal – some calling it “the new agricultural frontier.” At the same time, massive increases in food production will be needed to meet our global food supply needs. But the Canadian Boreal Region contains the largest area of wetlands of any ecosystem in the world, serving as a breeding ground for more than 12 million water birds and millions of land birds. It is the largest intact forest on earth. Three million square kilometers are undisturbed, giving Canada the opportunity to do large-scale conservation work that just wouldn’t be possible in any other areas of the world.
The first researchers to study this issue, Lee Hannah and Patrick Roehrdanz of Conservation International, join Jennifer to explain how this is an issue of sustainable agriculture and climate mitigation above all else.
Also, Jennifer thinks this episode is best enjoyed with a glass of merlot.
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In her new book, The Bird Way, Jennifer is joined by NYT bestselling author Jennifer Ackerman to discuss the remarkable intelligence underlying how birds conduct their lives: how they communicate, forage, court, breed, and survive. Once considered only traits of humans, Jennifer dissects how birds show deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, cooperation, collaboration, altruism –and ingenious communication between species –showing us there so much more to our feathered friends.
Get to know Jennifer (link to): https://www.cbsnews.com/video/conserving-north-americas-bird-populations/#x
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Episodes manquant?
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There have been three sightings of the Asian giant hornet in the Pacific Northwest - a place they should not be. Lab findings determined that two of the hornets were from different colonies. This means there were at least two simultaneous arrivals of the Asian giant hornet. Yikes.
They are an invasive species that bully the native species to the point where they can't survive. And that's a problem for conservation efforts.
It's pollinator week - and Andrew MacDougall joins the pod.
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How will the efforts to address climate change look in a post-coronavirus world? Will it bring out the best in us? Or will our exhaustion and economic fears set the conservation movement back? Jennifer makes the case that important things can come from difficult events—including the existence of Ducks Unlimited. Seasoned crisis management expert Ben Morgan joins the pod to unpack this idea.
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Word Nerd meets Bird Nerd in this episode about how the three North American organizations of Ducks Unlimited are adjusting course with the unveiling of a new international conservation plan. The conversation also touches on mysteries of corn, ducks in horror films, Bernie Sanders, and Harley Davidson. Sounds random, but it was recorded in a simpler time.
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The theme of this year’s World Wetlands Day is biodiversity. As Australia’s bushfires rage on, the state of their biodiversity remains front-page news. Dr. Chris Dickman, a professor of ecology at the University of Sydney, assess the devastation and shares why he believes Australia is the canary in the coalmine for the rest of the world. Then, Canada’s own biodiversity expert, Dr. Kai Chan, helps us to understand what lessons Australia’s biodiversity challenges can teach us here at home.
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Join host Jennifer Sanford for a conversation with Dr. John Clague, the grandfather of Canada’s natural hazard research. Learn about what happens to wetlands after major earthquakes and what role wetlands play in mitigating floods, tornados, and wildfire.
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Ducks Unlimited Canada CEO, Dr. Karla Guyn, talks wins and challenges in conservation, how conservation partnerships lead the way, and the vision to strengthen Canada’s conservation community.
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In The Reeds host Jennifer Sanford is joined by the pod’s former host, Wayne MacPhail, as they celebrate the best and brightest moments of the year. Together, they open the vault to 20 previously aired episodes. Don’t miss the end, as Jennifer shares what inspires the spirit of the pod.
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What to do about carbon is a major issue. But what do we actually know about carbon? And how can the wetlands, grasslands, and coastal area we conserve help? We’re talking Carbon 101 on this special edition of our In the Reeds podcast.
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In this episode, we’re continuing our conversation on sea-level rise.
In Nova Scotia, the Acadian dykelands can no longer be maintained to the 2050 climate projections. The community must make critical decisions about dykeland maintenance and salt marsh restoration. But achieving a way forward will take community consensus – and concessions.
Our guest, Dr. Kate Sherren, is a researcher and professor at Dalhousie University. She studies the relationship between climate adaptation and public resistance in Atlantic Canada, especially in the face of climate-related changes, sea-level rise, and storm surge.
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Everything in conservation is about risk. That’s why, when you hear us talk about conservation, we always start with what’s at stake.
A big risk to our landscape is the rising of sea levels – and thus here is part one of our two-part series on sea-level rise.
In this episode, Jennifer is joined by Globe and Mail journalist Matthew McClearn, author of Sea Change.
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When the United Nations first ever biodiversity report was released in May, the results seemed pretty dire.
But there is no better guest to help us make sense of a way forward than Dr. Kai Chan. He was one of the report's authors and he joins our pod to help answer this question:
In the great debate of climate change, what will it take to change?
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Abigail Derby Lewis marvels at monarchs and the perilous journey they make each year from Canada and the U.S. to Mexico and back.
She's the Senior Conservation Ecologist and Senior Program Manager, Chicago Region at the Field Museum's Keller Science Action Center. Abigail's also a science translator, she turns research knowledge into practical actions citizens can take to conserve nature.
And, Ms. Derby Lewis is also the first of a series of folks we'll be introducing you to who turned their passion for conservation in careers, creativity, and action in the community. Conservation of wetlands, of course, is near and dear to all of us at Ducks Unlimited Canada. But, we know we can’t tackle conservation alone and we’re happy to celebrate our fellow travellers.
Abigail became passionate about conservation when, as a nine-year-old girl she looked into the face of a zoo-keep silverback gorilla. She went on to study primates all over the world. But, these days she's making certain that Chicago provides migrating monarchs the vital milkweed they need to feed and reproduce.
I talk to her about the flight and plight of the monarchs, the role cities can play in providing those butterflies and other pollinators safe haven, and what you can do in your community to make certain that cities are habitable, not just for humans, but for the insects that are just passing through.
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This episode begins with a remarkable story about vision, persistence and, sewage. It’s the tale of the little town of Niverville, Manitoba and its groundbreaking solution to dealing with night soil. Next, as winter approaches we ask the question everybody thinks of when they stroll past frozen ponds. It’s about ducks and feet.
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Eider feathers, or down, aren't just for duvets. In fact, a hormone in those feathers called corticosterone, can indicate the stress eider ducks have been under as they molt. Yukon-based eider researcher Jane Harms explains that stress can be due to nearby predators or sometimes changes in their environment. So, not only can the stress hormone indicate eiders' health and their ability to reproduce, it may also be an indicator of climate change. Get undercover and tune into the tale.
Wetlands are delicate ecosystems. So the last thing researchers really want to do is churn up those wetland waters just to sample them. But what if a flying robot could do that for them? How? We do a flyby visit with a young inventor, Nathan Hoyt, who worked with a small team of high school students to figure it out. Plus, they're making a business out of it. Listen in. We promise we won't drone on.
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Dave Phillips, the chief climatologist for Environment Canada this country's homespun, homegrown weather guru. The Don Cherry of weather in terms of fame on the CBC anyway. For decades now he’s been the avuncluar go-to guy for journalists from coast-to-coast who want a folksy, informed dose of weather history, retrospective or prognostication. Why was it so hot in Calgary last August? Ask Dave. What’s with all the rain in Halifax. Ask Dave.
But these days Dave Phillips, now 72, is answering a different, deeper question. Why has the weather been so aggressive, so persistent and, well, just plain weird lately?
I caught up with Dave as he was about halfway through a Canada wide tour answering those questions in a talk he calls: Weather and Climate: Not What Our Grandparents Knew”
The exhausting tour is Environment Canada’s way of celebrating Dave’s 50 years as this country's most famous civil servant. And, as you’ll hear, its also a chance for an older, wiser Dave Phillips to share his concerns and hopes for a country and world facing what he considered to be the most important issue of the day - extreme weather and climate change.
We talked about that with a special emphasis on the role natural habitats, and especially wetlands, play as buffers against the increasing hard blows of amplified weather. As Dave says, it used to be that we worried about what falls from the sky. Now we need to worry about the surfaces it falls on. What happens with urban landscape replace and ignore the natural? Find out as I chat with Dave Phillips.
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This episode begins with an engraving that was tucked into the corner of a 18th-century map of North America, a beaver map. The engraving depicts an almost Hieronymus Bosch-like scene. One that’s a psychedelic, fever dream of beavers in Canada. In the background, a bifurcated Niagara Falls tumbled into a broad river. In the mid- and foregrounds are rodentesque creatures, dozens of them. These are part beaver, part bear, part human animals that have the orderliness and industry of a work crew of navvies.
Some carry logs on their shoulders like the seven dwarfs hefting shovels, some carry cowpats of mortar on their tails. Others seem to be barking orders from neatly constructed ramps. The beavers, an inscription on the engraving tells us, are building a Great Lake through their organized labour.
To understand that map, and beavers' relationship with the landscape I spoke with Glynnis Hood, a professor of environmental science at the University of Alberta, Augustana Campus.
Glynnis is a beaver expert. She’s studied the big-toothed rodents impact on the Canadian landscape. She’s especially interested in how its industry and ingenuity has keep water on the land, even in times of drought. And, how its ecological engineering has created and maintained wetlands for centuries.
Ducks Unlimited Canada folks, like many Canadians, have a relationship with the beaver that is, well, complicated. As Glynnis will explain, the fur trade almost wiped out the entire population castor condensis, our native species of the rodent. In the late 1930s Ducks Unlimited wanted to enlist beavers as ecological good soldiers. It encouraged a beaver comeback, that was pretty successful. But these days, loggers, folks in the oil and gas industry and cottagers have seen the reborn beaver populations flood their lands and thwart their industries.
Even Ducks Unlimited Canada researchers find their wetland water control efforts confounded by busy beavers.
I spoke with Glynnis about all of that, and how Canadians can best make peace with our little rodent friends.
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We begin this episode 40 miles above the fertile fields of Alberta. From up here the rectilinear hashmarks of crop boundaries are pocked and dented by darker, irregular patterns, like raindrops pooling on a patio table. Those are pothole wetlands left behind by the scraping and gouging of the receding Wisconsin glaciation thousands of years ago. These days you’ll find these watery basins, often as many as 40 per square kilometre, all over the prairies in Canada and the U.S. But, when the glaciers receded their were many, many more of them, millions of them. They became an essential habitat for hundreds of plant, animal and insect species - especially at their margins. But in the last century humans have managed destroy a lot of those formerly abundant wetlands. In some places 70 per cent are already gone. Those that remain are often sometimes precariously surrounded by vast fields of canola, wheat or barley.
In previous podcasts we’ve talked about the importance of those wetlands to waterfowl, for flood and drought protection, as natural water filters and as environments that increase our general health and sense of well-being.
But, in this episode we’re going to explore another advantage of prairie potholes. To do that, we need to get a lot closer to the ground.
Down there, a few feet about the heart of a wetland we’re in insect territory. Thousands of species of bees, flies, spiders and beetles make their homes in hollows, holes and native grasses. And many of those insects are pollinators. Others are predators that could make a light lunch out of other insects that attack the crops that surround the wetland.
So, could the insects this wetland husbands be of service to the surrounding crops? In other words, could pollination and pest control be another advantage of keeping wetlands around?
To find out I talked with Paul Galpern, a Landscape ecologist at the University of Calgary.
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This episode is all about scum. Stinky, toxic, and beach fouling scum, better known as blue-green algae. You’ve probably seen it in a pond or lake near you. It looks like someone changed their mind about painting their living room French Canadian pea soup green and dumped gallons of the ill-considered pigment into a nearby body of water.
But, it’s not paint, it an early form of life on earth called a cyanobacteria. If the conditions are right, sunlight, high temperatures and lots of nutrients, especially phosphorous, those bacteria can multiply like samollena on luke warm chicken. The billions of bacteria cause what’s called a bloom, but not one that smells very sweet. And, when the bacteria die they can release a toxin that can cause kidney failure.
In fact, in 2014 a blue green algae bloom in the west end of Lake Erie was so huge it caused the city of Toledo, Ohio to completely shut down its water system for fear of poisoning Toldeoans.
But, ironically, if it weren’t for cyanobacteria billions of years ago nobody would be alive in Toledo, or anywhere else in the world. That’s because we have Cyanobacteria to thank for the oxygen we breathe.
Cyanobacteria are biological survivors. Billions of years ago they were literally, the scum of the earth. They grew on land, rocks and in water - fresh and sea. They were early photosynthetic organisms. That means one of their waste products was oxygen, oxygen that until about three billion years ago was removed from the earth’s atmosphere as its surface iron rusted. But then, over the next 100’s of millions of years the rusting slowed down and oxygen started building up.
So, if you like breathing, thank a lake scum.
These days, we’re cyanobacteria’s best friends. Human activity has helped global warming, we’ve converted swamp and other wetlands into towns and cities or turned them to farmlands that dump phosphorus rich runoff into creeks and streams. We fertilize our lawns injudiciously and produce all manner of waste rich in the nutrients blue green algae eat like it was a free wedding buffet.
To learn more about blue green algae and what’s being done to combat it I spoke with Katie Stammler. Katie is water quality scientist and source water protection manager at the Essex Region Conservation Authority. The Windsor Essex area is a short hop across the shallow Lake Erie from Toledo. It’s home to the world-famous birder’s paradise Peele Island and is a flat, fertile terrain full of streams, creeks and wetlands that feed the Great Lake. Katie and her team have worked with Ducks Unlimited Canada to save and nurture those wetlands.
To date, DUC has completed more than 60 projects within the Lake Erie watershed and DUC’s Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research is implementing research, monitoring, and outreach components projects in the area.
Katie and her all-female crew, known as the Ladies in Wading, are the home grown heroes here. They also monitor water quality and educate the public about how not to succumb to the scum.
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