I have been excited about Song Sparrows (Melospiza melodia) for a while. Theirs was one of the first complex songs I learned to identify, and being such a common neighbour on the landscape it’s hard to go a few days without hearing them, even in Winter, but especially in the Spring.While out today, I came across a couple Song Sparrow tracks in the silt newly laid down by the receding Eramosa River flood waters and it pricked my interest to dig in a little deeper to this common figure in my life. To learn more :Song Sparrow tracks on InaturalistBird Tracks and Sign by Mark Elbroch and Eleanor Marks. Stackpole Books, 2001.Bird Song : Identification Made Easy by Ernie Jardine. Natural Heritage, 1996.Peterson Field Guide to North American Bird Nests by Casey McFarland, Mathew Monjello & David Moskowitz. HMH, 2021.Baby Bird Identification : A North American Guide by Linda Tuttle-Adams. Cornell University Press, 2022.Birds of Forest, Yard, & Thicket by John Eastman. Stackpole Books, 1997.

I have found sign of three dead White-tailed Deer in the past three weeks. One, killed by Coyotes. Another, hit by a vehicle, found on the side of the highway. And also, I found a White-tailed Deer leg while trailing a Coyote. All of these encounters have been teaching me a lot about the legs of the deer and I wanted to look a little bit deeper into these moments, and to share the stories. I go on to detail what I have been learning about the legs, especially in the context of the hind legs, about the glands located there. Of course, you can read the blog post, or you can learn a little bit more from listening to the show. Enjoy!To learn more:Glands on a White-tailed Deer Leg blog postThe Deer of North America by Leonard Lee Rue III. The Lyons Press, 1997.Deer (The Wildlife Series, Book 3) edited by Duane Gerlach, Sally Atwater & Judith Schnell. Stackpole Books, 1995.Deer of the Southwest by James R. Heffelfinger. Texas A&M University Press, 2006.Biology and Management of White-tailed Deer Edited by David G. Hewitt. CRC Press, 2011.What The Toes Show - A question of deer hooves - another blog postMammal Tracks and Sign by Mark Elbroch and Casey McFarland. Stackpole Books, 2019.

Fishers aren’t known as an urban adapted species. They tend to avoid our built up landscapes and prefer landscapes of mature forests comprised of appropriate denning habitat such as old trees with cavities and lots of course woody debris (think of big piles of dead branches and fallen logs), characteristics not usually found in urban forests. Because of this Fishers avoid our cities… or so we thought.Sage Raymond is a researcher who studies urban adapted Coyotes in Edmonton. While out checking some trail cams intended to catch Coyotes on the landscape, she happened across a Fisher trail in the snow, in a small wooded area along the North Saskatchewan River. Later confirmed with footage from one of the remote cameras, Sage realized that this was a very unusual circumstance. Thankfully she wrote a paper about it and I had to read it, and, again, thankfully, she agreed to talk about her findings on the show. There is a link to the paper below.To learn more:Ep. 159 : Tracking Urban Adapted Coyote Ecologies with Sage RaymondSage Raymond’s Research Gate profileSage Raymond’s instagramFisher Use of an Ecological Corridor Near the City Center of Edmonton, Canada, A City of Over One Million People by Sage Raymond and Colleen Cassady St. Clair. Urban Naturalist, No. 77 (2025).Pictorial Guide of Important Fisher Habitat Structures in British Columbia (pdf)

As I mentioned on the previous show about the Lynx trailing trip, I was planning on heading up to Algonquin Park to trail Moose, Algonquin Wolves, Martens, Snowshoe Hare, Flying Squirrels, and whomever else’s trails we may come across. Well, I went and it was great. So good that I wanted to offer a bit of a report back from the trip and tell some stories of what we saw. This is the 24th year of this trip, and I am so grateful to get to not only be there, but to be helping lead the week. Kid me would be stoked… hell, adult me is still stoked!Big thanks to Alexis for being a great colleague and mentor, and to everyone who came. It was a blast.To learn more :Algonquins of Ontario overview of land claimMore information on the trip from EarthTracks.ca

I have had a lot of conversations with biologists and ornithologists over the years, trying to learn about how different animals sleep. Are the functions of sleep in humans similar to similar animals? What about different kinds of animals, like insects, or birds?More recently I have seen the Canada Geese along the Eramosa River where I live, standing or sitting still on the frozen river and wondered what’s up with the one-legged standing? When I got to thinking about birds resting, roosting and sleeping, I realized that I had a bunch of questions. Sometimes a book comes along with some good insight into the subjects I am wondering about, and at this moment, it was Roger Pasquier, and his new book Birds at Rest: The Behavior and Ecology of Avian Sleep, which helped to answer many of my questions. I arranged for an interview was very glad to talk to him. Do small songbirds have any special adaptations for sleeping through long freezing winter nights? Does photoperiod change the amount of time birds sleep? How does the changing climate affect birds at rest? Do birds dream?Roger Pasquier has taken the time to collect the information from a ton of various studies into avian rest and sleep and consolidated them into a useful and interesting book, and then taken the time to discuss some of this research on the show. Again, I am forever grateful to the folks who can help us, me, learn to better know the land. To learn more :Birds at Rest : The Behavior and Ecology of Avian Sleep by Roger F. Pasquier. Princeton University Press, 2025.

I just got home from an amazing week away up North in Elk Lake, Ontario, Robinson-Huron treaty territory, trailing Lynx with Earth Tracks. It was an amazing time and I had a ton of fun. We trailed Lynx for days, as well as get on some trails of other animals including Peromyscus mice, Short and Long-tailed Weasels, Marten, Snowshoe Hares, Fisher, Grey Wolves, Moose, and more. There are so many stories to tell and so much to integrate over the next few weeks, but I wanted to share some highlights of these weeklong tracking expeditions. I am so grateful to mentor, colleague and friend Alexis Burnett for organizing this week, and for the Lynx for laying the trails for us to follow. To learn more :Earth Tracks.ca

I was out for a walk along the Eramosa River in Guelph with a pal on New Years Day, when she lifted a log and showed me some strange white patches along it. We both recognized them from our walk a couple of days before. I guessed by the appearance of them, being small, white and silken-like, with many around, that they were likely egg cases of some small invertebrate, but I didn’t know who may have made them. I also wasn’t certain about egg case, but it seemed a likely guess. White, circular with a thin shallow dome constructed of webbing got me wondering who may have created this? I decided that this find, like a lot of the small wonders of the world would be worth researching a bit and recording a show about. Happy 2025! To learn more : Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates by Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney. Stackpole Books, 2010.Common Spiders of North America by Richard A Bradley. University of California Press, 2013.Further Studies on the Activities of Araneads, II by Thomas H. Montgomery, Jr. Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Vol. 61, No. 3 pp. 548-569, 1909.The Spider Subfamiliy Castianerinae of North and Central America by Jonathan Reiskind. Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College, Vol. 138 num. 5, 1969.Spiders of North America by Sarah Rose. Princeton Field Guides, 2022.Hearing in a Jumping Spider by Princeton University, 2016. (video from youtube.com detailing Jumping Spider trichobotheria and perception of sound)Spiders of Toronto : A guide to their remarkable world by City of Toronto. 2012. (pdf)

It is nearing the Winter Solstice once more. Only days to go, and that means with the dark nights growing longer, I am spending a little more time indoors. I have been baking, reading, writing, listening to a lot of film soundtracks and just relaxing with friends. This time of year also means the recurring celebrations of the solstice season are upon us again. Story telling, big fires, sharing food and giving gifts are big this time of year. More pertinent to the show though is the rebroadcast of the 1985 radio play by Alison McLeay “Solstice” for the 7th year in a row!! I am so grateful to get to air it again and celebrate the season of darkness with a deep dive into the origins of the my ancestral celebrations this time of year. Get yourself a nice warm drink, a cozy blanket, dim the lights and enjoy.

I spent the day out tracking, first with a class backtracking a Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes) and examining the track patterns and interpreting their gaits, an afterwards, alone, following up a possible Fisher (Pekania pennanti) sighting, and instead finding a Coyote (Canis latrans) bed and trailing them through a rough hewn White Pine (Pinus strobus) plantation. I got to thinking about gifts that are the tracks which are left behind without consideration of how the tracker might feel or what we may want out of the experience. I was struck by awe and wonder when I came across the bed and was truly grateful for this gift left behind by the animal that was there so recently. In philosophy, a true gift is one that doesn’t involve reciprocity or exchange, and breaks away from the system of mutual accounting that’s created when something is given. A few philosophers have written about this true gift, including wolf tracker Baptiste Morizot. Considering the tracks and sign left behind by animals, it could be that these are examples of true gifts? But what about our responsibility as a culture and as a species to honour the land and our relationships with all beings we share the land with? When and how does reciprocity fit in the context of this gift? I am not a philosopher and likely butchered some of the ideas that I am working with for this episode, but I was also just inspired, sipping hot tea sitting cross-legged on my gloves in a hedgerow beside the Pine plantation watching the first snowy squalls blow in across the fields. I am grateful for the trail that led me there, and for those animals who teach me along the way. To learn more :On The Animal Trail by Baptiste Morizot. Polity Press, 2021.Ep. 178 : A discussion of On The Animal Trail by Baptiste Morizot with Julian Fisher

In 2017 I interviewed Arlene Slocombe for the second time but the first time it was recorded. She was telling the story of a successful event, “Waterstock” where thousands of people came out to support Water Watchers and raise awareness of exploitive water drawing in Wellington county to be sold as bottled water. The harm to the watershed, the incredible amount of plastic garbage, another corporation not listening to their neighbours resounding “No!”, it was the continuation of a bad relationship between, at the time, Nestle, and the people of the county. Blue Triton was formed when two private equity firms bought Nestle Waters Canada with junk bonds and hugely leveraged debt. They continued Nestle’s legacy of bottling water across North American into polluting plastic bottles made from fossil fuels. This is totally unsustainable and as many markets are starting to come to understand growing more and more difficult to convince a public they are worthwhile. Blue Triton are now moving out, and may likely try and sell what’s left of the operation in hopes to recoup some of the costs. This was a huge victory for local water advocates, and I wanted to learn more so I invited Arlene back on the show to give me the scoop on what was happening and how Water Watchers ran such a successful campaign. Lots to learn here. To learn more :WaterWatchers.ca Water Watchers instagram