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Explore: A Canadian Geographic podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Canadian Geographic
Host David McGuffin talks to Canada’s greatest explorers about their adventures and what inspires their spirit of discovery.
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- 2 days ago48 min
The wild lives of our urban neighbours with Dan Werb
“It is a raccoon city that exists in the city of Toronto.” Raccoons cracking raccoon-proof compost bins, coyotes finding refuge in city neighbourhoods, and giant Pacific octopuses making homes in discarded refrigerators. These are just a few examples of wildlife adapting to urban life in extraordinary ways, while challenging our ideas about where nature belongs.On this episode of Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast, host David McGuffin welcomes epidemiologist and bestselling author Dr. Dan Werb to discuss his latest book, Our Wild Familiars: How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World.From Toronto’s back alleys to Seattle’s industrial waters and Saudi Arabia's garbage dumps, Werb investigates the ingenuity of animals living alongside us. He explains how raccoons learn — and spread new skills through overlapping social networks — why urban coyotes are becoming bolder, and the remarkable observations of baboons incorporating dogs into their communities.McGuffin and Werb discuss the “great urban shift”: how habitat loss, climate change and plentiful resources are drawing wildlife into cities. They also explore why treating cities as ecosystems matters for conservation and how the health of our wild neighbours is connected to our own.About our guestDan Werb is a Toronto-based epidemiologist and award-winning author. His previous book, The Invisible Siege, won the 2022 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Our Wild Familiars is shortlisted for the same prize.Listen nextExplore more conversations with fellow 2026 Writers’ Trust shortlisted authors:Episode 134: Trina Moyles on Black Bear.Episode 91: Julian Brave NoiseCat for We Survived the Night: An Indigenous Reckoning. He discusses his Oscar-nominated documentary Sugarcane and the legacy of residential schools.Support explorationBid on polar cruises, excursions with explorers, signed books and more in the RCGS Silent Auction, running until November 8 at rcgsauction.com. Proceeds support the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s education, scientific and exploration programs.Explore is hosted by David McGuffin and produced by David McGuffin and Explore Podcast Productions in partnership with Canadian Geographic.Canadian Geographic: Alexandra Pope, editor-in-chiefMadigan Cotterill, digital and travel editorCaroline Workman, digital marketing managerFollow Explore wherever you listen, and help others discover the podcast by leaving a rating and review.
- 2 weeks ago48 min
Quest: Shackleton’s last ship, with John Geiger
“Emerging out of this darkness suddenly was the bow of Quest.”— John GeigerNearly 400 metres beneath the Labrador Sea, John Geiger watched Sir Ernest Shackleton’s last ship emerge from the darkness. Two years after leading the expedition that discovered Quest, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society CEO returned aboard the research submersible Alvin to see the wreck with his own eyes.In this episode of Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast, Geiger joins host David McGuffin to discuss that extraordinary encounter and his new book, Quest: Shackleton’s Last Ship and the End of the Heroic Age. It reveals a surprising Canadian chapter in Shackleton’s life: his plans to explore Canada’s Arctic, his efforts to secure backing in Ottawa, and his thoughts of making Canada his home.Geiger takes us inside the rivalry between Shackleton and Canadian-born explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, whose competing ambitions divided Ottawa’s political and bureaucratic circles. When Canadian support fell through, Shackleton turned south instead—aboard a ship ill-suited to the Southern Ocean, on the expedition that would become his last.We also explore Quest’s remarkable working life after Shackleton, the expedition’s visit to Robert Falcon Scott’s last ship, Terra Nova, and how new technology is helping preserve both wrecks digitally. Along the way, Geiger reflects on Shackleton’s exceptional leadership and the power of exploration to bring Canadian history and geography to life.About our guestJohn Geiger is CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and Canadian Geographic Enterprises, an internationally bestselling author and a member of the Order of Canada. His books include Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, co-written with Owen Beattie, and The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible, which examines the mysterious presence people sometimes experience in life-threatening situations—including Shackleton during his crossing of South Georgia. His latest book is Quest: Shackleton’s Last Ship and the End of the Heroic Age.Revisit episodes 85 and 86 of Explore for the story of the 2024 expedition that discovered Quest, featuring John Geiger and expedition members David Mearns and Antoine Normandin.Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast is hosted by David McGuffin and produced by Explore Podcast Productions for Canadian Geographic.Next Listen: - Episode 85: Finding Sir Ernest Shackleton's lost ship with John Geiger - Episode 86: How the Quest was found Canadian GeographicEditor-in-chief: Alexandra PopeDigital and travel editor: Madigan CotterillDigital marketing manager: Caroline WorkmanEnjoying Explore? Follow the podcast and leave a rating or review wherever you listen.
- Oct 6, 202659 min
Alan Doyle: Songs, stories and The Smiling Land
“We knew we had something that was ours and unique and different, and we figured we better shout it out loud.” - Alan DoyleFor Alan Doyle, travelling the world has only strengthened the pull of home.Along the way, he takes us back to his childhood in Petty Harbour, where music filled the family home, cutting cod tongues earned him spending money, and singing Anne Murray songs bought him a later bedtime.Doyle reflects on Great Big Sea’s beginnings in the shadow of the cod moratorium, the band’s unexpected role as ambassadors for Newfoundland, and the resilience behind their enduring anthem, “Ordinary Day.” He also shares what decades of touring have taught him about Canada — and why St. John’s remains his favourite place to be.Full of humour and affection, this conversation explores how the places we come from shape the stories we tell.About our guest: Alan Doyle is a singer, songwriter, actor and author from Petty Harbour, N.L. Best known as a founding member of Great Big Sea, his books include Where I Belong, A Newfoundlander in Canada and The Smiling Land.Check out: Our conversation with The Guess Who’s Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings, featuring more unforgettable stories from a life in Canadian music.Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast is hosted by David McGuffin and produced by Explore Podcast Productions in partnership with Canadian Geographic.Canadian Geographic:Editor-in-chief: Alexandra PopeDigital and travel editor: Madigan CotterillDigital marketing manager: Caroline WorkmanEnjoying Explore? Follow the podcast and leave a rating or review wherever you listen.
- Sep 22, 202651 min
What black bears taught bestselling author Trina Moyles about coexistence
“I knew about bears in this abstract theoretical way, but I didn’t really know what it meant to live closely with them.”What happens when a mother black bear refuses to leave the hillside beneath your fire tower?For bestselling author Trina Moyles, the answer became the heart of Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival. While working at a fire tower in northern Alberta, Moyles found herself living in a black bear corridor, where a resident mother and her cubs returned to the nearby slope. She tried noise, rubber bullets and even a helicopter to drive them away, but nothing worked. Eventually, she began to question what she thought she knew about bears.Moyles joins Explore host David McGuffin to discuss how she learned to share the landscape with the bears and what years of observing them revealed about their behaviour. They explore the challenges of living alongside black bears as towns and cities expand into their habitats, as well as the practical choices that can help prevent conflict.Black Bear also tells the story of Moyles’s relationship with her late brother, Brendan, who chose a life working in Alberta’s oil fields. She reflects on the distance that grew between them, their efforts to reconnect, and why writing about him became inseparable from writing about the bears.Black Bear is a 2026 finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.Trina Moyles is a bestselling author, environmental journalist and a frequent contributor to Canadian Geographic magazine. Her first memoir, Lookout, won a National Outdoor Book Award and the inaugural Memoir Award at the Alberta Literary Awards. In 2022, she received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. She lives in a cosy Yurt outside Whitehorse.Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast is hosted by David McGuffin and produced by David McGuffin and Graham McGuffin of ExploreProductions.ca in partnership with Canadian Geographic.Canadian GeographicEditor-in-chief: Alexandra PopeDigital and travel editor: Madigan CotterillDigital marketing manager: Caroline Workman For more stories of adventure, science, history and exploration, visit canadiangeographic.caRead more from Trina Moyles;Excerpt from Black Bear: A story of siblinghood and survival Caribou people: The story of conserving the Porcupine caribou herd is a story about working together (Canadian Geographic, 2026)Monitoring migration through the Nisutlin River Delta National Wildlife Area (Canadian Geographic, 2026)Born for this: Unravelling the disappearance of Dall sheep (Canadian Geographic, 2026)The good bear: Co-existence on Yukon’s Klukshu River (Canadian Geographic, 2025)
- Sep 8, 20261h 3m
The places that change us with Eric Weiner
“One of the main reasons we travel is to be different, hopefully better, versions of ourselves.”For Eric Weiner, travel has always been a way to pursue the big questions: What makes us happy, creative, wise, and fully alive? He has spent much of his career exploring the intersection of place and big ideas. A former NPR foreign correspondent, he reported from more than 30 countries before turning his attention to philosophical travel: journeys in search of happiness, faith, creativity, wisdom and awe.He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Geography of Bliss, Man Seeks God, The Geography of Genius, The Socrates Express and Ben & Me. The Geography of Bliss was adapted into a 2023 Peacock television series featuring The Office star Rainn Wilson. Weiner also co-hosts Toronto Pearson Airport’s podcast, Y We Travel, with Canadian journalist Erica Vella.In this conversation, Weiner and host David McGuffin trace his wanderlust back to the day he ran away from home at five years old. They look back on when it was still possible to be truly “out of pocket,” and consider how smartphones have changed not only travel but our relationship with place.Weiner explains why his journeys are always purposeful — ways of exploring ideas rather than simply accumulating destinations. He shares lessons from an unexpectedly transcendent pizza in an Arctic Finland gas station, reflects on experiencing awe amid the immense dunes of Oman’s Empty Quarter and makes the case for travelling more slowly, with enough time for serendipity.The conversation ends at the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, straddling the border between Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont. There, Eric watched Shakespeare from a seat in the U.S. while the actors performed onstage in Canada — a powerful reminder that borders can be both artificial and very real.Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast is hosted by David McGuffin.Produced by David McGuffin and ExploreProductions.ca in partnership with Canadian Geographic.Canadian Geographic:Editor-in-chief: Alexandra PopeDigital and travel editor: Madigan CotterillDigital marketing manager: Caroline WorkmanFor more stories of adventure, science, history, and exploration, visit canadiangeographic.ca
- Aug 25, 202657 min
Echo Maker: James Raffan on the people and stories behind the Historical Map of Temagami
“To be in a relationship with a place is a very complex and beautiful dynamic.”Bestselling author, explorer and master storyteller James Raffan returns to Explore to discuss his new book, Echo Maker: Craig Macdonald and the Lives That Produced One of Canada’s Most Significant Historical Maps.The book tells the remarkable story of Craig Macdonald, a quiet and determined ethno-geographer who spent decades travelling through the Temagami region of northern Ontario and learning from Teme-Augama Anishnabai elders. Through hundreds of conversations and journeys by canoe, snowshoe and dogsled, Macdonald documented traditional place names, portages, winter trails and patterns of land use that had never appeared on conventional maps.The result was the historical Map of Temagami, which showcases the traditional travel routes, campsites, and geographical names of the Indigenous Anishinaabeg before 1900. An extraordinary record of Indigenous knowledge, the map has helped preserve language and culture, strengthen connections between generations and support an ongoing land claim.Raffan and Explore host David McGuffin discuss what drew Macdonald to this work, why he learned the language of Anishinaabemowin, and how a landscape often described as “wilderness” was revealed to be a deeply known and inhabited cultural landscape.They also discuss James’s new documentary, Signs of Life, about a music-and-storytelling project with Inuit youth in Kugluktuk, Nunavut, and reminisce about an unforgettable #CanGeoPolarPlunge through Arctic sea ice at −38C.James Raffan is a cultural geographer, bestselling author and Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. He has spent more than 50 years travelling, researching and telling stories across Canada and the circumpolar North.Purchase the Historical Map of Temagami. Learn more about James, Echo Maker and his touring one-man musical show, The Accidental Canadian, at jamesraffan.ca.
- Aug 11, 202650 min
Encore — Paddling the Peel Watershed with Bobbi Rose Koe
"In my mind, when I want to relax, I take myself back to the Wind River." Tetlit Gwich'in means people of the headwaters, and Bobbi Rose Koe is on a mission to live up to her people's name.Born and raised in the Tetlit Gwich'in community of Fort McPherson, on the Peel River north of the Arctic Circle in the Northwest Territories, Koe spent her childhood with her grandparents, who regularly took her hunting and fishing out on the land. When she reached her mid-20s, she translated those skills into guiding adventure canoe trips on rivers in the Canadian Arctic. But just a decade ago, she was shocked to discover that she was one of the few First Nations people in the industry, let alone Indigenous women. The resistance she felt coming into river guiding led her to be the change that was needed. She set up Diinji Zhuh, an Indigenous-run canoe-tripping outfitter based in Whitehorse, YT. She is also setting up the first school to train Indigenous river guides. Koe and her teams lead trips across the Arctic. Still, her favourite rivers are in the traditional lands of her people, the Peel Watershed, a system of stunningly beautiful whitewater rivers. I paddled some of those rivers with my son Graham and cousin Terry in 2018 for Canadian Geographic. Koe and I bonded over talk about her favourite rivers in the Peel watershed, her role in the successful fight to protect the watershed from mineral development, mapping by storytelling, her mission to get Indigenous people back out into their ancestral lands, and the warm feeling of excitement she gets paddling through lands that her family have travelled and known for generations. Also, in 2021, Koe was presented with the Canadian River Heritage Award. Enjoy!
- Jul 30, 202652 min
Encore — Newfoundland, Cod Collapse and saving the North Atlantic right whale with Jenn Thornhill Verma
Raised on Newfoundland’s west coast, Jenn Thornhill Verma grew up immersed in the life and lore of fishing communities and the rhythms of the North Atlantic. She is the author of the bestselling book Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys, a contributor to Canadian Geographic, and a fellow with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network, where she recently reported a series for the Globe and Mail on the endangered North Atlantic right whale.In this episode of Explore, Thornhill Verma and podcast host David McGuffin discuss the legacy of the cod fishery collapse in the early 1990's, the politics of fisheries management, and the urgent effort to protect one of the world’s most endangered whales: the North Atlantic right whale. With fewer than 400 individuals remaining, these whales face a variety of threats, including ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and, of course, the climate crisis.Want to learn more?Visit Thornhill Verma’s favourite place in Canada: Nain, Labrador Watch the documentary, Angry Inuk (National Film Board of Canada)Browse Thornhill Verma's art (Art - Jenn Thornhill Verma)Discover more about whales in Explore episode 99 with Canadian sperm whale researcher Shane Gero – a fascinating conversation about the attempts to decode the sperm whale's click language using AIRead Punctuation's mark: Can we save the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale? by Alanna Mitchell with photography by Nick Hawkins
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Host David McGuffin talks to Canada’s greatest explorers about their adventures and what inspires their spirit of discovery.
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