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PODCAST

Natural Connections

Natural Connections is a weekly newspaper column created by Emily Stone, the Naturalist/Education Director at the Cable Natural History Museum in Cable, Wisconsin. In each episode, Emily reads her fun and informative weekly column about Northwoods Nature.

science natural sciences

All Episodes

06:40

330 - Avian Anglers

Natural Connections ·

2024/07/11

I pretty much stopped fishing after my dad stopped untangling my line and tying my hook. The few times I’ve tried as an adult, I’ve come up empty-handed. So I have the utmost respect for osprey, who catch at least one fish for every four dives. How do they do it? Osprey, eagles, kingfishers, and green herons have adaptations that make them excellent anglers.

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06:23

329 - A River of Life

Natural Connections ·

2024/07/04

With a quick push from shore, my old green canoe caught the current and we swept downstream on the Namekagon River. The recent rains have filled the river with more water than I’ve seen in a couple of summers, and warm days have filled the river with life. I’m not sure that we’d been searching for anything in particular when we decided to paddle on the Namekagon, but what we found was a river, that, in the words of Mary Oliver, is “touching every life it meets.”

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07:14

328 - Finding the Lady’s Slipper

Natural Connections ·

2024/06/27

Coggin and I followed Karen’s memory through the dark swamps in search of this rare flower. The dirt path wound around spruce, fir, birch, and cedars. A hint of color caught my eye. There, almost crushed by the tip of a spruce tree blown off in some strong wind, the white and pink of the Ram’s Head orchid glowed through the gloom. Since the fungi, forest community, and pollination have to coalesce perfectly for an orchid to bloom, we felt lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

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06:45

327 - Old Turtle

Natural Connections ·

2024/06/20

The old turtle scraped at the sand with her naily toes as the kids gathered in a wide circle around her. Sometimes I get questions about dinosaurs on field trips, but they don’t fit into the Museum’s focus on Northern Wisconsin species. Today, instead, the first- and second-graders got a close-up look at a creature whose species has existed on Earth for over 40 million years, with direct ancestors much older than dinosaurs.

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06:48

326 - A New Coralroot

Natural Connections ·

2024/06/13

The fleshy stem bore no leaves, just a sprig of beautiful little flowers on the upper half. Each blossom looked like a whimsical elf. Coralroots exist underground for much of their lives, and their flowering stalk may not pop up every year, or in the same place. So, while widespread and not uncommon, coralroots can be hard to spot – or at least that’s my excuse for never having seen one before this year!

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06:35

325 - Flowers from Stone to Sand

Natural Connections ·

2024/06/06

As I climbed back into my car with a camera full of more lovely wildflower photos, I smiled at my good luck. Here in Wisconsin and Minnesota, we have quite a variety of habitats and soil types in a relatively small area. I can explore rich soils and maple forests filled with trilliums, wild oats, and large-flowered bellwort one day, then delight in the bedrock home of bird’s eye primrose (and a not-yet-booming mystery plant) the next. And now here I was enjoying prairie flowers in a barrens! What

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06:01

324 - A Festival of Birds and Nature

Natural Connections ·

2024/05/30

This week I attend a festival of birds and nature.

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05:45

323 - Beautiful Bird's-eye Primrose

Natural Connections ·

2024/05/23

Last week, with evening sunshine glinting off the riffled waters of Lake Superior’s North Shore, and a surprisingly warm breeze wafting over the spit of wave-washed bedrock, a flower caught my eye. Rock-hopping over, I discovered the pink petals and yellow centers I’d been looking for. Notches in each of the five petals gave them a lovely heart shape. At the base of the flower’s wiry stem was a little rosette of bright green leaves with wavy edges. This flower was one of dozens all sprouting from

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05:54

322 - The Speed of Spring

Natural Connections ·

2024/05/16

Even though I wish my beloved spring ephemerals could last longer, each spring I also cheer them on in their race against leaf-out. In many ways, the speed of spring is what makes it such an amazing season!

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06:56

321 - Honeysuckle from Near and Far

Natural Connections ·

2024/05/09

The cool, damp air smelled delicious as I ambled up the gravel road. I’ve been up and down ladders and scaffolding for exhibit construction lately, and so I haven’t had the energy for big bike rides in the afternoon. That’s fine. I will still be able to bike once the mosquitoes hatch, but I won’t be able to walk slowly without a head net. When the blossoms of a honeysuckle bush caught my eye, I was even happier for my slow pace. I stopped to admire the prismatic raindrops caught under each

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06:01

320 - Plant Professors of Early Spring

Natural Connections ·

2024/05/02

“During this activity,” I explained, “you will each become a professor of something in these woods.” Over the years, I’ve found that this Professor Hike activity is very effective at connecting students to nature. What’s been a surprise, especially as I lead it with adults instead of sixth graders, is how wonderful it is at connecting people to each other as they teach and learn. Professors indeed, these little plants have reminded me of the value in taking the time to look closely. I can’t wait

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05:52

319 - The Woodcock Dating Game

Natural Connections ·

2024/04/25

I heard it first, since I knew what to expect. I pointed eagerly toward a featureless place in the bushes. Peent. The brand-new birder with me strained to pick that one sound out of the thicket. Peent. We waited; breaths held. Peent. Nature has invented some pretty interesting courtship behavior over the eons, and American woodcocks are a lovely example. Somewhere in the bushes, a female woodcock pretends not to watch the male’s strenuous antics. If he passes muster, she will let him approach her,

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06:54

318 - Appreciating Earthly Gifts

Natural Connections ·

2024/04/18

What if we stopped calling trees, water, minerals, fruits, fish, soil, and everything else Natural Resources and started using the term Earthly Gifts? This was one of the first questions posed by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer at a talk last month in La Crosse, WI. Kimmerer is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. I’ve been thinking about Robin’s words…and finding her ideas echoed elsewhere. Kathleen Dean Moore is another of my favorite

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05:42

317 - Finding Snow Fleas

Natural Connections ·

2024/04/11

With soggy skies above and soggy snow below, my recent hike on the North Country Trail was not inspiring a love for spring. But with my head bent to watch my footing, I noticed a sprinkling of debris coated the surface of the softening snow. Suddenly one of the little specks vanished. Crouching down for a better look, I discovered that most of the sprinkles were tiny, leaping springtails known as snow fleas. I dug out my macro camera.

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06:45

316 - Protecting Birds from Your Windows

Natural Connections ·

2024/04/04

Birds can collide with windows in any season, but I’ve always noticed an increasing number of those sickening thuds in spring. As waves of migrating birds head north, we see both a huge increase in the number of individuals, and an increase in birds who are new to the neighborhood and more likely to be hoodwinked by windows. Now that warm days are turning even window washing and yardwork into attractive tasks because they give us excuses to get outside, it’s a good time to think about making your

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07:07

315 - Predaceous Diving Beetle Trends

Natural Connections ·

2024/03/28

As a naturalist, I get the strangest emails. I try not to check them at home, but when my phone buzzed and the subject said “June bug on steroids?” it was worth interrupting my evening chores. “The past couple nights I’ve heard something hit our window at night when we have lights on and each time I’ve thought ‘that sounded like a June bug… but BIGGER.’” wrote a Museum member. Chuckling, I wrote her back, “Looks like a predaceous diving beetle! That’s their normal size!”

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07:18

314 - The Vocabulary of Seeing

Natural Connections ·

2024/03/21

“To name and describe you must first see, and science polishes the gift of seeing,” wrote Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. In this week’s Natural Connections, we’ll explore some of the vocabulary of winter tree identification, and the beautiful ecology it helps us to see.

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06:57

313 - Freezer Burn

Natural Connections ·

2024/03/14

One consequence of this weird winter is that plants like mosses, ferns, and wintergreen who are usually protected by a blanket of snow are now exposed to drying winds. This can result in what is essentially freezer burn in nature.

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07:04

312 - Bark Eaters

Natural Connections ·

2024/03/07

“Who’s eating my trees?” asked a participant on a hike last week. I’d been wondering the same thing! A few weeks ago I noticed creamy colored exposed wood on several small maple trees along my driveway. “Why do animals even eat bark?” someone else asked. Good question.

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06:07

311 - Frozen Flows

Natural Connections ·

2024/02/29

As our world changes, I’m grieving my old friends cross-country skiing (on natural snow) and the subnivean zone, while still making a point to appreciate new delights. I can’t even count how many times I’ve looked at the frozen surface of a North Shore river and wanted to walk the whimsical ice formations up through bedrock canyons. But on past visits the snow was too deep, the wind chill too brutally cold, or the skiing too good to choose that adventure. This past weekend, conditions were finally

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200 results

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