The Wild with Chris Morgan

Bears in swimming pools… in Los Angeles? Of course I had to find out more.

I've been studying bears and working with them in the wild for over 30 years, and I thought I'd seen it all. Polar bears in Canada, grizzlies in Alaska, Andean bears in South America. But I never thought I’d be racing to see a family of black bears lounging in a pool in a swanky LA  neighborhood. 

A lot of my work is about keeping bear...

Welcome back to THE WILD! 

 All around the world, humans are getting up close and personal with wildlife. In Los Angeles, black bears are playing with floaties in swanky backyard swimming pools. Mountain lions are dodging cars trying to get across 10-lane highways. In subarctic Norway, generations of Eider keepers are bonding with vulnerable ducks.

But when is getting too close to wildlife too far? 

Join host Chris M...

We lost a good friend a few days ago. A friend of the owls, and a man who made a real difference for them.

I was very lucky to spend time with David Johnson for an episode we did about his delightful burrowing owls a few years ago - an experience that’ll always stay with me. David was a kind and inspiring man. He looked like an owl - inquisitive, wide-eyed, and full of magic, and possibilities.

David Johnson passed away ...

You look amazing, you look beautiful. Those are the words of Victor Glover, pilot of NASA’s Artemis 2 mission. He spoke those words less than a month ago on his trip to the moon. His way of describing our planet as he peered out the window of his space capsule and took in the view. I couldn't think of a better message than that as we reshare our special episode to celebrate our planet. So I hope you enjoy and happy Earth Day!...

When I was eight, growing up in England, I was already really into birds. I was in the Young Ornithologists Club for goodness sake! I didn't have one friend who was into birds. But these days, things are different. Here in the USA, almost 100 million people birdwatch. And that number's growing.

There's a lot going on between the birds, as they flit around chirping and singing  To us, it might just sound like beautiful ...

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...