The Wild with Chris Morgan

Today, a fun trip down memory lane! 

Lots of things have shaped my life and work as an ecologist, and this experience when I was 25 was one of them. As I wrapped up my master's degree at the University of Durham in England, I was hired onto a grey seal project on some tiny, uninhabited islands off the coast of Scotland. 

While I was there, I recorded the seals and the six weeks of fieldwork on my Walkman cassette recorder...

Anton Mzimba was the head ranger at the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve in South Africa. Anton and hundreds of wildlife rangers like him risk their lives every day to protect endangered species, mainly the rhino, from poachers and organized crime. 

Anton is the focus of a documentary film called Rhino Man. It tells the extraordinary story of the rhinos, and the brave rangers that are out to protect them. In this episode,...

De-extinction! You probably saw the headlines - big, splashy statements about bringing the dire wolf - the ancient wolf species - back from the dead. But are they really back?

Dr. Helen Pilcher says no. She’s an author, science communicator and an expert on genetically modified wildlife. And she joins me to make sense of this controversial idea of “editing” the genes of animals.

It’s a heated conversation in...

I drive across the mountains and forests to a small corner of Washington state, where there's a group of ranchers from the Kalispel Tribe of Indians. They’re known as ‘The Buffalo Boys.’

Generations ago, members of the tribe would migrate hundreds of miles to the great plains to hunt buffalo. There were millions of buffalo until white settlers hunted them to near extinction, and the Kalispel were pushed from their...

Animals and music? What a tantalizing mix! In a fascinating conversation with scientist and musician Dr. Diego Ellis Soto we learn about the way animals move - through music. When animals swarm, mill, or migrate, patterns are revealed. Soto explains that animals all prefer to move together with proper space, time, and direction....just like harmony in music.

Soto’s work combines his academic work and his passion for music to ...

There was a time when the existence of the giant panda was nothing more than legend. A fairytale to those in the western world. Whispers of a black and white beast echoed around the early 1900s.

In this episode, my conversation mixes three of my favorite things - bears, mystery, and adventure as I hear an incredible story that Dr Nathalia Holt tells in her book The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Ques...

Humpback whales in the Salish Sea have a complicated history. They were hunted to near extinction a century ago, with whalers turning some of the largest creatures on Earth into buckets of oil, slabs of meat, tubs of cheap margarine and fertilizer. These coastal waters were emptied of these magnificent creatures who once called them home. 

But now, in an amazing turn of events, Humpback whales have started to come back. And wh...

Happy holidays! Thanks for tuning into THE WILD. I’m so glad you’re here. 

THE WILD team is hard at work on some more brand-new episodes that will come out in the new year. But for now, I want to revisit a very popular episode from last season that I think is perfect for this busy time of holiday travel. 

It’s a conversation I had with author Ben Goldfarb about roads and their impact on pretty much every...

Bear attacks in Japan have been in the news a lot recently. There have been over 220 attacks so far this year, and a record 13 people dead. 

Why is this happening? And what can be done about it? There’s a lot of information out there, and it’s hard to separate fact from fiction when it comes to conflicts with wildlife.

So I made two quick phone calls: one to a reporter from The New York Times and another to a Japan...

JAWS can only mean one thing! The movie that forever changed how we feel about sharks. It did me, that’s for sure. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the movie, we thought it might be time to help separate fact from fiction in a fun way……by playing audio clips from the movie and having a real shark expert react to them and tell us the truth about how dangerous they are, how sharks really think, why there&rsq...

“Life is earth, animated.” When I heard this statement for the first time it made me think about my relationship to our planet differently. That all life on earth is part of a giant feedback loop, a process of self-creation that has been ongoing for billions of years.

This is the idea that Ferris Jabr explores in his book, Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. Jabr traveled the world to find examples of this crea...

This is not an easy story to tell. In the town where I live, Bellingham, Washington, there’s a beautiful urban creek. It flows just four miles from a lake, through a city park, down through the town to the sea. But in the summer of 1999, disaster struck. A gasoline pipeline ruptured, causing an explosion. Young lives were lost, and the creek and the ecosystems around it were obliterated. 

But amid the destruction, amid a...

Have you ever wondered why your dog takes such a long time to sniff a patch of grass? Or why flies buzz around so sporadically? It’s because most of what a creature actually senses is invisible to us. They perceive their world as differently as we perceive our own.

Pulitzer Prize winning science writer Ed Yong wrote a book about this called An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.

Join me for a ...

Blink and you’ll miss ‘em! In this episode we get to know hummingbirds eyeball-to-eyeball. 

The world of the hummingbird is changing fast in the deserts of Arizona. So much so that even an animal as quick as a hummingbird is struggling to keep up. Native plant ecosystems that make up the nectar landscape that hummingbirds use to migrate are shrinking.

Join me as I travel to the mountains and deserts of the American...

Environmental author Brooke Williams believes that dragonflies are messengers of wisdom and enlightenment. This idea got my head buzzing so I invited Williams to join me at a pond near my home to talk about it. He told me he has been on a 20-year journey to forge a new relationship with nature and that the dragonfly has been his guide to discover unseen forces in nature that are so captivating when we learn how to see them.

In his ...

Twenty-nine years ago cowboy Warner Glen took the first photograph of a jaguar that crossed from Mexico into Arizona. His surprising story opens our show. Today though, there is something very different happening on the border.

Chris and his producer Matt Martin follow two biologists, one from Mexico and one from the USA, as they track the biggest cats in the Americas along the border. Jaguars are expanding their range from Me...

Welcome back to a brand new season of THE WILD! Travel with Chris as he uncovers unexpected stories from nature. Like jaguars - America’s biggest cat - trying to navigate the giant steel wall on the Mexican border; tiny hummingbirds searching to find their next meal along a landscape of nectar; a magnificent humpback comeback right off the coast of Vancouver, and many more. There's so much inspiration among creatures that are...

Happy Earth Day!

There is a lot of uncertainty in the world right now when it comes to the environmental health of our planet. Political leaders seem unable or unwilling to take action on climate change. And we continue our rapid loss of biodiversity. But I wanted to give you a little hope on this special day by sharing a little different perspective on this tiny blue marble we call home.

If you enjoy this episode, please shar...

Tom Mangelsen is one of the most gifted and prolific wildlife photographers of our time. He may be best known for documenting the life of Grizzly Bear 399 in and around Teton National Park in Wyoming. I’ve spent thousands of hours alongside, and guiding some of the best wildlife photographers in the world, but I’ve never been lucky enough to spend time in the wild with Tom. And he has always seemed to possess a connecti...