Hear the latest from BirdNote on our other podcasts, Threatened, Bring Birds Back, and BirdNote Daily

Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Poetry Series, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, Loft Literary Center, First People’s Fund, and other honors. Erdrich has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Heid edited the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press. Her forthcoming poetry collection is Little Big Bully,...

Timothy Steele is an American poet who has received numerous awards and honors for his poetry, including a Lavan Younger Poets Award, the Los Angeles PEN Center Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for Excellence in the Study of Prosody. He has taught at Stanford University and the University of California in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. Since 1987, he has been a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. Stele is known for his...

A native of Minnesota, Traci Brimhall is an Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University. Her first published collection, Rookery, features many poems about birds. “Birds just seem to have a kind of spiritual or symbolic weight,” Traci explains. “They feel somehow ancient or ethereal – timeless in a way, and I think poets are often attracted to things that have that sort of feeling.” But her interest in birds began with a common bird, the Red-winged...

Wendy S. Walters is a non-fiction writer and poet, who holds a MFA/PHD in Poetry and Literature from Cornell University. She is the former Associate Dean of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, The New School. Currently she serves as Director of the Nonfiction Concentration and Associate Professor of Writing, Nonfiction in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. While Walters was living in L.A. during the early 2000s, she wrote a chapbook, or short collection of poems, about...

This episode we're sharing "Timber Wars," from OPB. The show explores the fight over old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. And at the center of that fight was… a bird!

Answering the call to protect the birds and places we love

In the final episode of Grouse, host Ashley Ahearn returns to a lek in Washington with biologist Michael Schroeder and finds it scorched by recent wildfire. We’re all looking for hope right now, but Ashley says what we really need is the courage to keep fighting, loving and dancing, as the sage-grouse have shown us.

Environmentalists and politicians love the phrase “common ground.” In the latest episode of Grouse, host Ashley Ahearn explores the role of compromise in the face of major environmental loss. Does the sage-grouse have time for it?

No matter how we feel about it, the natural gas industry is an important player in our national energy supply — and the future of sage-grouse. Can the two co-exist? Host Ashley Ahearn travels to Wyoming for answers. She talks with a biologist who has been studying sage-grouse in oil and gas country for 20 years, and the vice president of an energy company that is trying to reduce its impacts on sage-grouse.

What can the Greater Sage-Grouse teach us about our relationships with the Earth and one another? Ashley Ahearn turns to Wilson Wewa, an elder of the Northern Paiute Nation, for stories about sage-grouse from long ago that might hold lessons for all of us today.

Through the haze of a wildfire, Ashley Ahearn examines threats to the Greater Sage-Grouse

Ashley Ahearn searches for the Greater Sage-Grouse in snowy eastern Washington

Radio journalist Ashley Ahearn moves from Seattle to sagebrush country and gets curious about a weird, troubled bird

Grouse is a show about the most controversial bird in the West and what it can teach us about hope, compromise and life in rural America.

Take a Whirlwind Tour of Nearly Every Habitat on Earth

Relax to the Sound of Cool, Clear Water

Hear the Duet of Two Loons in Voyageurs National Park

Immerse Yourself in Eastern Washington’s Pipestone Canyon

Listen to Dawn in an Ancient Desert

Walk in the footsteps of John Muir as you follow the “water music” of Merced River in Yosemite National Park.

Listen for Miles in the Amazon Rainforest