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Buzz Blossom & Squeak — Be a Neighborhood Naturalist: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Jill McKinley
Buzz, Blossom & Squeak is a quiet, curious walk into the natural world right outside your door. You don’t need to be a scientist, a hardcore birder, or someone who hikes miles into the wilderness. This podcast is for anyone who has ever paused to notice a bird call, wondered about a plant growing along a sidewalk, watched insects move through a garden, or felt the seasons shifting without quite knowing why. Each episode focuses on small, approachable pieces of nature—birds, bugs, plants, weather, ecosystems, and natural patterns—explained in a way that’s calm, curious, and grounded in observation. Instead of rushing toward big conclusions, Buzz, Blossom & Squeak invites you to slow down and really notice what’s happening in the living world around you. You’ll hear about things like: How birds use different layers of trees and sky, Why certain plants grow where they do, What insects are actually doing when they buzz past, How seasons quietly reshape landscapes, The hidden systems that connect living things.
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- 2 days ago19 min
124 - The Birds We’ve Wrongly Decided Are Villains
A hawk at the feeder gets hate comments. A crow doing something clever gets called creepy. A circling vulture gets treated like an omen. In this episode, I make the case that none of these birds are villains — they’re doing jobs the ecosystem genuinely needs, and the “enemy bird” story we tell ourselves says a lot more about us than it does about them.Cooper’s Hawks: Quality Control, Not CrueltyBuilt for tight turns through backyard clutter, Cooper’s hawks aren’t wiping out songbird populations — they’re mostly catching the sick, slow, and distracted ones, which keeps the rest of the population sharper and healthier.Owls and Their Undeserved ReputationCenturies of folklore call owls omens of death, mostly because they’re silent and nocturnal. Meanwhile, a single barn owl family can work through an enormous number of rodents in a nesting season — which is exactly why farmers put up owl boxes instead of poison.Turkey Vultures: Nature’s Cleanup CrewBald heads, corrosive stomach acid, a habit of circling — every visual cue reads as menace. But vultures neutralize pathogens like botulism, anthrax, and rabies before they can spread, and regions that lost their vulture populations saw real public health consequences.Shrikes: The “Butcher Bird” Solving an Engineering ProblemToo small to have talons, shrikes impale prey on thorns to store it for later — dramatic to look at, but functionally no different than filling your chest freezer in the fall.Crows and Ravens: Smart, Not SinisterFacial recognition that lasts generations, tool use once thought exclusive to primates — the “creepy” reputation crows and ravens carry is really just discomfort with how intelligent they are.Why Removing These Birds Would Collapse the EcosystemPull every hawk, owl, shrike, and corvid out of the picture, and you don’t get a songbird paradise — you get unchecked rodent and insect populations and faster-spreading disease. These birds aren’t flaws in the system; they’re carrying a load the whole environment depends on.The next time you see a “scary” bird on a list, remember: it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing, and the whole yard is healthier for it.Find every show I do at jillfromthenorthwoods.com, and if you want to go deeper, Cornell’s All About Birds has an excellent page on every species mentioned here.Jill’s Linkshttps://jillfromthenorthwoods.com/ - Find my podcasts, videos, downloads and ways to contact mehttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspodhttps://x.com/NorthWoodsJillEmail the podcast at NorthwoodsJill@fastmail.comYouTube @BuzzBlossomSqueakBy choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge that you are doing so of your own free will. The content shared here reflects personal experiences and opinions and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. I am not a licensed biologist, ecologist, or wildlife professional. Any nature observations, identifications, or suggestions offered should not be considered a substitute for professional scientific or environmental guidance. Always follow local regulations when observing or interacting with wildlife and natural spaces. You are solely responsible for any decisions or actions you take based on this content.
- 1 weeks ago12 min
123 - How Wildfire Smoke Affects Birds, Insects, and Water
This week’s episode started with something small and annoying: my air purifier kept kicking on every time I walked across my living room. Turns out my floor wasn’t dirty — it was covered in wildfire smoke particles from Canadian and Boundary Waters fires, and every footstep was stirring them back into the air. That one observation turned into a much bigger question I couldn’t shake all week: where does all this smoke actually go, and what happens to everything living outside that doesn’t have an air purifier of its own?What Wildfire Smoke Actually IsThese particles are smaller than 2.5 microns — about a thirtieth the width of a human hair — small enough to stay suspended in the atmosphere for days or weeks and travel thousands of miles on the wind. It doesn’t even smell like a campfire anymore by the time it reaches us; the wood smell burns away, leaving a chemical smell behind.Nature’s Own Cleaning CrewSome smoke particles simply settle out under gravity, sticking to leaves, rooftops, and fences. But the real workhorse is rain — every raindrop acts like a tiny vacuum cleaner, hauling particles down as it falls. I watched our local air quality index drop from 453 to the 70s after one short rain shower.Nothing Goes to WasteThe particles that come down don’t disappear — they mix into soil, wash into streams and lakes, and become nutrients for the next generation of plants. Carbon locked inside a tree that burned continents away eventually feeds something else, somewhere else.Why Birds Feel This Differently Than We DoBird respiratory systems are far more efficient than ours — air flows through their lungs in one direction instead of in and out, which is exactly why canaries were historically used in coal mines. That same efficiency means smoke can hit them harder, and researchers have observed birds shortening migration flights, changing altitude, or grounding entirely during heavy smoke events — sometimes right in the middle of already-started migrations.Beyond BirdsPollinators and insects are affected too, since dimmed sunlight disrupts temperature and the light cues many species depend on for reproduction. Aquatic life isn’t spared either — ash settling into lakes and streams changes the water chemistry.The Encouraging PartWildfires and the smoke that follows them have been part of this world since the world existed — the same way Saharan dust crosses the Atlantic to fertilize the Amazon rainforest, or pollen and seeds ride the wind across continents. The atmosphere isn’t empty space above us — it’s a river that never stops moving, and everything outside has been living inside that system all along.Next time the sky looks hazy, it’s worth pausing to ask what’s actually causing it — and remembering that the animals outside have been dealing with this, in one form or another, for a very long time.You can find everything I do at jillfromthenorthwoods.com. My email is jill@startwithsmallsteps.com.Jill’s Linkshttp://jillfromthenorthwoods.comhttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspodTwitter - https://twitter.com/schmernYouTube @BuzzBlossomSqueakBy choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge that you are doing so of your own free will. The content shared here reflects personal experiences and opinions and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. I am not a licensed biologist, ecologist, or wildlife professional. Any nature observations, identifications, or suggestions offered should not be considered a substitute for professional scientific or environmental guidance. Always follow local regulations when observing or interacting with wildlife and natural spaces. You are solely responsible for any decisions or actions you take based on this content.
- 2 weeks ago19 min
122 - The Hidden Logic of Beaks, Snouts, and Faces
Can you identify a critter without ever opening a field guide? I think you can — if you just look at its face first. I stumbled on a chart lineup of bird beaks recently, and it hit me: sometimes the whole story of an animal is sitting right there in its face, before you even check the color or the size.Seed Eaters: A Nutcracker Built Into the FaceCardinals, finches, and sparrows have short, thick, conical beaks that work like a pair of pliers, not tweezers. The shorter the beak, the more crushing force it generates — like a short wrench giving you more torque. Many even have a “tomial tooth,” a hard ridge that wedges into a seed and peels the shell right off.Precision Probers: Hummingbirds and ShorebirdsLong, thin beaks aren’t about reach so much as sensing. A hummingbird’s beak isn’t a straw — it houses a grooved tongue flicking in and out dozens of times a second. Shorebirds like dowitchers use the nerve-loaded tips of their bills as living metal detectors for worms and clams hidden in wet sand.Hooked Predators, Filter Feeders, and ChiselsHawks, eagles, and vultures carry a sharp downward hook built for tearing, not killing — that’s the talons’ job. Ducks and spoonbills filter-feed with combed ridges, straining out anything edible. And woodpeckers get their own category entirely: a shock-absorbing skull structure, with a tongue that wraps around the back of their head, built to survive thousands of impacts a day.Spears and the “Murder Bird”Herons and kingfishers strike with dagger-sharp, straight beaks after standing motionless for what feels like forever. And then there’s the shrike — a small songbird with a hooked beak nearly identical to a raptor’s, despite being an entirely different family. It impales prey on thorns and barbed wire, which is exactly how it earned the nickname “butcher bird.”Beyond Birds: Turtles, Alligators, and AnteatersThe same rules apply outside the bird world. A snapping turtle’s hooked jaw works just like a raptor’s beak. A pelican hunts by volume (scooping) while an alligator hunts by clamping force (and has surprisingly weak jaw-opening muscles). And an anteater’s tubular snout exists purely to house a tongue that can be over two feet long.The underlying rule ties it all together: form follows food. Before you reach for a field guide or an app, just ask three questions — is it short and thick, long and thin, straight or hooked? That’s usually enough to land you in the right neighborhood of what you’re looking at.Jill’s Linkshttp://jillfromthenorthwoods.comhttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspodTwitter - https://twitter.com/schmernYouTube @BuzzBlossomSqueakBy choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge that you are doing so of your own free will. The content shared here reflects personal experiences and opinions and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. I am not a licensed biologist, ecologist, or wildlife professional. Any nature observations, identifications, or suggestions offered should not be considered a substitute for professional scientific or environmental guidance. Always follow local regulations when observing or interacting with wildlife and natural spaces. You are solely responsible for any decisions or actions you take based on this content.
- 3 weeks ago12 min
121 - Yard Work Is a Dinner Bell for Birds
The second I start mowing, trimming, or dragging branches around my yard, I get company — robins, sparrows, cardinals, all showing up like they’ve been waiting for me to start. There’s a genuinely fun explanation for why, and it turns out I’ve been running a temporary buffet this whole time without fully realizing it.Disturb the Ground, Feed the Birds. Mowing, raking, and digging expose the hidden world living just under the grass — earthworms, beetles, grubs, spiders, ants — turning what was tucked away into an easy meal. Different birds cash in differently: robins are visual ground hunters who trail right behind anyone disturbing soil, sparrows go after newly exposed seeds, and cardinals — who eat plenty of insects but are also just deeply curious birds — show up to check out whatever’s happening.You’re an Ecosystem Engineer. Beavers build dams, woodpeckers excavate cavities other species reuse for years — and when you’re out there dragging branches and flipping logs, you’re running a small, temporary version of the exact same thing.This Pattern Is Ancient. Long before lawnmowers, birds followed bison, elk, deer, and rooting pigs moving through grasslands, snapping up whatever got exposed in their wake. The behavior is ancient even if the tool driving it now is a lawnmower — and there’s real evidence that birds learn to associate specific human routines with food showing up.It’s Not Just Birds. Toads and frogs hop out looking for the same exposed insects. Garter snakes do the same. Rabbits like the shorter sightlines after mowing (plus easier access to clover). Squirrels find it easier to dig for buried nuts once the grass is trimmed.Not All Yard Work Is Equal. Mowing down clover and dandelions can temporarily cut food supply for bees and pollinators, even while it benefits ground-feeding birds — but clearing overgrown areas also opens up sunny patches that some ground-nesting bees and beetles actually prefer. Underground, mowing stimulates denser grass growth, clippings add natural nitrogen back into the soil, and raking aerates compacted ground, which benefits earthworms — who, in the short term, mostly end up serving robins. Circle of life.So the next time a bird shows up the second you start yard work, you’ll know exactly why — and it’s a connection that stretches all the way back to bison herds on the ancient grasslands.Jill’s Linkshttp://jillfromthenorthwoods.comhttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspodTwitter - https://twitter.com/schmernYouTube @BuzzBlossomSqueakBy choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge that you are doing so of your own free will. The content shared here reflects personal experiences and opinions and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. I am not a licensed biologist, ecologist, or wildlife professional. Any nature observations, identifications, or suggestions offered should not be considered a substitute for professional scientific or environmental guidance. Always follow local regulations when observing or interacting with wildlife and natural spaces. You are solely responsible for any decisions or actions you take based on this content.
- Jul 2, 202611 min
120 - Let Somebody Else Raise Your Kids — A Bird Strategy
My friend and I were out at our local federal marsh when we spotted brown-headed cowbirds, a black-billed cuckoo, and a yellow-billed cuckoo — all in the same outing. Three birds with three very different levels of commitment to the same strategy: letting someone else raise your kids. That’s the whole episode right there.The Spectrum of Commitment. Not all brood parasites operate the same way. The brown-headed cowbird is all-in — she never builds a nest, never incubates an egg, never raises a chick. Her entire reproductive strategy is to find other birds’ nests, drop an egg, and leave. Cowbirds are what’s called obligate brood parasites. Our cuckoos (black-billed and yellow-billed) are facultative parasites — they mostly do the normal bird thing and raise their own young, but they’ll occasionally slip an egg into another nest as a side bet when the opportunity is right.Why Bother? Building a nest, incubating eggs, and feeding chicks for weeks is expensive — in energy, time, and exposure to predators. A cowbird skips every one of those costs and spreads her eggs across multiple nests in a single season instead of betting everything on one. Some European cuckoo species take it further with egg mimicry, producing eggs that look remarkably similar to the host’s own so they aren’t detected.The Hard Part to Watch. When a parasite egg shows up in a host’s nest, it’s rarely a neutral addition. The parasitic chick often hatches earlier, grows bigger, and out-competes the host’s own chicks for food — and in some cases physically pushes host eggs or chicks out of the nest entirely. The host bird — a warbler, a vireo — raises a chick that isn’t hers, sometimes at the direct cost of her own.The Host Fights Back. This isn’t a one-sided story. Species like the American Robin and Gray Catbird can recognize a foreign egg and eject it. Others abandon the parasitized nest entirely and start fresh. Some aggressively mob cowbirds they spot near their territory. And yellow warblers have been known to nest near red-winged blackbirds — who are so loud and aggressive in their own defense that they effectively provide an early warning system for the whole neighborhood.Where I Land. I’ll admit I’ve groaned at cowbirds before — standing around like teenagers with nothing to do. But a cowbird didn’t choose this strategy any more than the warbler chose to be the host. Two different survival patterns, shaped over a very long time, colliding in our local marsh. It’s uncomfortable to watch sometimes, and that’s okay. But it’s not a villain story.Jill’s Linkshttp://jillfromthenorthwoods.comhttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspodTwitter - https://twitter.com/schmernYouTube @BuzzBlossomSqueakBy choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge that you are doing so of your own free will. The content shared here reflects personal experiences and opinions and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. I am not a licensed biologist, ecologist, or wildlife professional. Any nature observations, identifications, or suggestions offered should not be considered a substitute for professional scientific or environmental guidance. Always follow local regulations when observing or interacting with wildlife and natural spaces. You are solely responsible for any decisions or actions you take based on this content.
- Jun 25, 202619 min
119 - What Are Birds Actually Fighting About?
That bird that acts like it owns your entire backyard? It probably does — and it has good reasons for the attitude. While camping last month, I watched a string of bird fights break out around my campsite, and it got me wondering: what are they actually fighting about? It turns out bird aggression isn’t random at all. It follows rules, and once you know what to look for, you’ll start seeing the logic everywhere.Fighting is expensive, so it’s never random. Conflict costs energy and risks injury, and an injured bird doesn’t survive as well. That means when birds do fight, it’s almost always over one of four things: territory, mates, food, or protecting eggs and chicks.Territory drives the most conflict, especially in spring. A male robin singing from your rooftop at 5 a.m. isn’t celebrating the morning — he’s broadcasting a warning. Song is a substitute for physical combat. When song fails, things escalate fast: robins are known for genuinely brutal territorial fights, rolling and pecking on the ground.Mates create a second layer of competition. In most songbirds, males compete for choosy females, and a good territory often wins a good mate — which is exactly why territory and mate competition tend to overlap. But it isn’t always males competing: house wrens and spotted sandpipers flip the script, with females holding territory and competing aggressively for males.Nest and egg defense is its own category. This is where the famous red-winged blackbird dive-bomb comes from — small, furious, and completely unbothered by your size. It’s also why an eagle resting with a fish in its claws can suddenly find itself mobbed by shorebirds defending their own nests nearby.Feeders reveal a stable dominance hierarchy. A dominant chickadee displacing everyone else at the sunflower seeds isn’t bullying — it’s a pecking order doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. Real fights mostly break out when that hierarchy gets disrupted: a new bird arrives, breeding season shifts the balance, or resources get scarce.How a fight actually unfolds. It usually starts with a display — puffed feathers, spread wings, an “arrow” body posture — that lets one bird back down before anything physical happens. Birds also practice the “dear enemy effect,” responding far more aggressively to an unfamiliar male’s song than to an established neighbor’s, because the neighbor already understands the boundaries.Hummingbirds are the extreme case. Pound for pound, they may be the most aggressive birds in North America — chasing at speeds near 30 mph, spiraling in aerial combat, and one dominant male often controlling an entire feeder or flower patch.Next time a cardinal displaces a junco at your feeder, or a red-winged blackbird goes after your bike helmet, you’re watching a survival calculation play out in real time. It’s not bad behavior — it’s a bird telling the world exactly what it’s protecting.If you’ve got a backyard bird drama of your own, I’d love to hear about it. Email me at jill@startwithsmallsteps.com, and find all my podcasts at jillfromthenorthwoods.com.Jill’s Linkshttp://jillfromthenorthwoods.comhttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspodTwitter - https://twitter.com/schmernYouTube @BuzzBlossomSqueakBy choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge that you are doing so of your own free will. The content shared here reflects personal experiences and opinions and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. I am not a licensed biologist, ecologist, or wildlife professional. Any nature observations, identifications, or suggestions offered should not be considered a substitute for professional scientific or environmental guidance. Always follow local regulations when observing or interacting with wildlife and natural spaces. You are solely responsible for any decisions or actions you take based on this content.
- Jun 18, 202618 min
118 - Nobody Loves the Possum. Here’s Why They Should.
Nobody loves the possum. That’s kind of the point.The hissing, the drooling, the naked scaly tail, the teeth — all fifty of them — and the dramatic habit of passing out and smelling like death when startled. None of this is doing the possum any favors in the public opinion department. But here’s what most people don’t know: that possumwandering through your backyard at night may be one of the best things for your family’s health that you’re never going to think to thank.I’m making the case for the possum today. Stick with me.Opossum or possum — and what’s the difference?The animal in the United States is the Virginia opossum, written with an O, but spoken without it. Americans dropped the silent O sometime after the word was recorded from the Algonquin language around 1600. The possums in Australia — the common brushtail possum — are a related marsupial but a different animal entirely. Both usages are considered acceptable in everyday conversation, which makes me feel better about the fact that I’ve been saying it wrong my whole life.North America’s only marsupialYes, really. Right here in the Northwoods, waddling through the leaf litter at night, is our very own pouched mammal. Their ancestors migrated up through South America at some point and have been here for a very long time — long enough to be a genuinely tropical creature that has slowly pushed northward and now has to contend with Wisconsin winters on a body designed for warmer climates. Their ears and tail tips are prone to frostbite. January is a hard month to be a possum.The tick vacuum in your backyardThis is the part worth remembering. Researchers at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies spent years testing which animals were most effective at killing the black-legged ticks that spread Lyme disease. They put different species in enclosed areas with ticks and counted survivors. White-footed mice? Terrible. Chipmunks and shrews? Similarly bad. Possums? Extraordinary. Because possums are compulsive groomers, and when ticks find their way into their fur, the possum eats them. Researchers found possums killed approximately 96% of the ticks that landed on them. A single possum may kill thousands of ticks per week — up to an estimated 5,000 per season. They’ve been called a “dilution host,” meaning they absorb tick exposure in a way that reduces overall disease pressure in an ecosystem. No spray, no barrier, nothing else out there does what a possum does on the night shift in your backyard.Playing possum — and why it’s not a choiceThe hissing and drooling when threatened? Bluffing. The possum is a small, slow animal with limited options and it’s doing its best impression of something scary. But the playing dead behavior — that’s genuinely strange. Scientists believe it’s involuntary: a catatonic state triggered by the nervous system in extreme moments of stress. The animal isn’t choosing to play dead. Its body just does it. Brain activity recordings show the possum is highly alert throughout. The smell of death it releases is apparently convincing enough to work on most predators, and the possum simply waits it out — anywhere from a few minutes to several hours — then quietly recovers and walks away.A short, useful lifeVirginia possums in the wild live one to two years, occasionally longer. Even in captivity with regular food and no predators, they rarely make it past four. They reproduce quickly — two litters per year, six to nine young each time, born after only thirteen days of gestation at the size of a honeybee, crawling into the pouch to develop. The population constantly replenishes itself. It’s a strategy built for a species that’s going to be someone’s dinner a lot of the time.A friend shared a photo recently of a possum skeleton in the woods — nearly intact, long narrow snout, all fifty teeth still present. It had been there for months. That was what started this whole episode. A creature that spent its whole short life eating ticks, cleaning up carrion, asking nothing of anyone, and returning quietly to the forest floor. There’s something worth respecting in that.Next time you see one frozen in your headlights: there goes the tick vacuum. There goes North America’s only marsupial. There goes a creature that nobody loves, doing the work anyway.Jill’s Linkshttp://jillfromthenorthwoods.comhttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspodTwitter - https://twitter.com/schmernYouTube <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@smallstepswithgod" rel="no
- Jun 11, 202638 min
117 - From the Rockies to Alaska: Why the West Is So Different
If the Appalachians are ancient, rounded, and quiet — worn down by hundreds of millions of years — then what are the Rockies? The answer is: still under construction. This episode picks up where the eastern geography series left off, and heads west into some of the most dramatic, geologically active, and ecologically distinct landscapes on the continent.Young Mountains and the Rain Shadow That Made the WestThe Rocky Mountains are young by geological standards — sharp, dramatic, still rising. Unlike the Appalachians, they haven’t been worn down yet. The Cascades and Sierra Nevadas do something remarkable to the weather: they intercept the moist Pacific air as it moves inland, force it upward, cool it, and squeeze out enormous amounts of rain on the western slopes. By the time the air crosses the mountain crest and descends on the eastern side, the moisture is gone. The land on the far side sits in what’s called a rain shadow — which is why the western slope of the Cascades is one of the wettest places in North America while Oregon’s east side and the Great Basin are semi-arid desert. Same latitude, completely different worlds.The Great Basin: Where Rivers Go to DisappearBetween the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas lies one of the continent’s most unusual landscapes: the Great Basin. Rivers here have no outlet to the ocean. They flow inward toward salt lakes and desert playas and simply evaporate. The Great Salt Lake is the largest remnant of an ancient inland sea called Lake Bonneville, which once covered much of the region. The ecology is highly specialized — sagebrush, juniper, pronghorn antelope (the fastest land animal in North America) — and it all exists because the mountains blocked the rain entirely.The Pacific Coast: Cold, Productive, and Geologically VolatileThe Pacific Ocean is older, colder, and geologically more violent than the Atlantic. The western coast of North America sits on the Ring of Fire. The Juan de Fuca plate pushes under the North American plate, building the Cascades and threatening a mega-earthquake along the Pacific Northwest coast. The California Current flows southward, bringing cold water from the north and driving upwelling from the deep ocean that produces some of the richest marine life on Earth — kelp forests, fish populations, seabird colonies, sea otters, gray whales, humpback whales. The Pacific Flyway runs this entire coastline from Alaska to Mexico, carrying shorebirds, waterfowl, raptors, and songbirds in enormous numbers every spring and fall.Temperate Rainforests, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Longleaf PineWhere Pacific moisture hits the mountains directly, you get the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest — the Olympic Peninsula, the western slopes of the Cascades — 140 inches of rain in some locations, trees of staggering size and age. Jill’s Olympic Peninsula road trip is one of her all-time favorite travel memories. Moving south and east, the episode fills in the missing pieces: the Gulf Coastal Plain (ancient seafloor, karst landscape, cypress swamps, bayous), the once-vast Longleaf Pine Savannah (now reduced to less than 3% of its original 90 million acres), and the Gulf of Mexico itself — not a warm-water backdrop but the engine that drives the entire continent’s weather and a critical corridor for the most dramatic bird migration event in North America: the trans-Gulf crossing.Alaska, the Boreal Forest, and How It All ConnectsAlaska is its own category — larger than Texas, California, and Montana combined, with more coastline than the entire lower 48. It holds tundra, boreal forest, temperate rainforest, glaciers, active volcanoes, and some of the most productive marine environments on Earth. And the boreal forest — the taiga — stretching across Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, and Siberia, is the breeding ground for nearly 3 billion birds, more than half the species that migrate through North America. That yellow-rumped warbler in your backyard in September? There’s a reasonable chance it hatched in a spruce bog in northern Canada. North America is not a collection of separate places. The birds connect them. The rivers connect them. The weather connects them.Jill’s Linkshttp://jillfromthenorthwoods.comhttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/smallstepspodTwitter - https://twitter.com/schmernYouTube @BuzzBlossomSqueakBy choosing to watch this video or listen to this podcast, you acknowledge
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About Buzz Blossom & Squeak — Be a Neighborhood Naturalist
Buzz, Blossom & Squeak is a quiet, curious walk into the natural world right outside your door. You don’t need to be a scientist, a hardcore birder, or someone who hikes miles into the wilderness. This podcast is for anyone who has ever paused to notice a bird call, wondered about a plant growing along a sidewalk, watched insects move through a garden, or felt the seasons shifting without quite knowing why. Each episode focuses on small, approachable pieces of nature—birds, bugs, plants, weather, ecosystems, and natural patterns—explained in a way that’s calm, curious, and grounded in observation. Instead of rushing toward big conclusions, Buzz, Blossom & Squeak invites you to slow down and really notice what’s happening in the living world around you. You’ll hear about things like: How birds use different layers of trees and sky, Why certain plants grow where they do, What insects are actually doing when they buzz past, How seasons quietly reshape landscapes, The hidden systems that connect living things.
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