Ep. 186 : Squirrel Life Project with Elizabeth Porter

Birdwatching is obviously a thing as birds are everywhere, loud, demonstrate interesting behaviours, and they are often brightly coloured. Squirrels too are everywhere, loud, and demonstrate interesting behaviours. They aren’t brightly coloured, but their brindled, black, red, brown, grey, or even white in the case of some albino individuals at Trinity Bellwoods downtown Toronto, are still a joy to observe. So why not take up Squirrelwatching?
Elizabeth Porter is the project coordinator for the Squirrel Life project which is developing an app to collect community sourced observations of Squirrels and their varied, interesting and often comical behaviour and then enables future researchers to access the shared collected data for their research. It’s a project with many aims including getting folks outside to observe wild life close to home while encouraging a closer look at varied Squirrel behviours which are happening all around, all the time. Along the way, Elizabeth is looking at how to communicate scientific research and findings with broad diverse communities. A great goal.

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Ep. 151 : Nokom’s House

Dr. Kim Anderson, Dr. Sheri Longboat and Dr. Brittany Luby are the driving force behind Nokom’s House, a new lab in development at the University of Guelph. Together with a community of elders they are establishing an indigenous learning, sharing, teaching space which will be using relational pedagogies, community research, and land-based learning to make home for cultural recovery, inter-generational training, and the creation of indigenous futurities.
On the show we hear why there is a need for Nokom’s House within the academic setting, what the cultural architecture of safety can look like for marginalized students, the roles of women, especially older women, have within indigineous communities, and also why there needs to be spaces specifically for indigineous people on the University of Guelph campus, within the city of Guelph, and further afield.

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Ep. 135 : Brian Husband and The Ontario Heritage and Feral Apple Project

Learning about the ecologies and biologies of Apples with Dr. Brian Husband of the Ontario Heritage and Feral Apple Project where they hunt down the genetics of these heritage species looking to see how they are changing, evolving, and how they are interacting with the local environments where they are found.

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Ep. 133: Dr. Katie Clow on Black-legged Ticks and Lyme Disease

Dr. Katie Clow is an assistant professor at the Ontario Veterinary College, and Vet by training, and expert in zoonotic epidemiology. Today we talk about ticks and tick borne diseases such as Lyme disease. You may need to take notes for this one as Katie has a lot to share.