Jay is joined by Ryan Trimbath, a Biologist at Cuyahoga Valley National Park where he has worked for the last eight years. Prior to working for the NPS, Ryan got a degree in Wildlife & Conservation Biology from Ohio University (2007) then traveled around the country working as a field biologist on various research projects. During this time, he honed his skills as a field biologist and pursued his interests in forest and avian ecology. Ryan has the honor of being the only Ornithologist to ever hold a living Northern Parula x Cerulean Warbler hybrid which he discovered at Deep Lock Quarry in 2014, with a second bird found at Oak Hill in 2015. You can read more about this discovery in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology “Evidence for hybridization between Northern Parula (Setophaga americana) and Cerulean warbler (S. cerulea)” (Trimbath et al. 2019).

This is a two-part interview.

Jay interviews Jihadda Govan, the Monument Manager of Sand to Snow National Monument in Southern California which encompasses 154,000 acres and is co-managed by the Bureau of Land Management (83,000 acres) and U.S. Forest Service (71,000 acres). Jihadda holds a bachelor’s degree from California Polytechnic University, Humboldt, where she studied wildlife management with an emphasis in ornithology, botany, and environmental planning. She grew up in the Pasadena/Altadena areas, where she spent time hiking and exploring in the San Gabriel Mountains which sparked her love of the outdoors. Jihadda has previously worked as a wildland firefighter, wildlife biologist, and wildlife refuge and preserve manager.

Jay talks with Rob Ament, Senior Conservationist at the Center for Large Landscape Conservation. Rob leads the Center’s efforts in advancing wildlife corridors and ecological connectivity, drawing on over 30 years of experience in ecology, natural resource management, and environmental advocacy. He seeks to develop wildlife-friendly national, regional, and state-based policies, and test their effectiveness at the landscape level.

Rob is a founding board member of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, former board member of the Wildlands Network and served on two policy groups for the Western Governors’ Association’s Wildlife Corridors Initiative. He is an active member of IUCN’s International Connectivity Conservation Network where he is co-authoring a policy paper on connectivity conservation areas. Rob is also the Road Ecology Program Manager for the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University.

To balance his professional endeavors, Rob has served as a volunteer for such causes as wildlife rescue, child advocacy, women’s shelters, and immigrant education. Like every good Montanan, he likes to get outdoors whenever it is sunny, cloudy, snowing, or raining.

Jay is joined by Rick McIntyre, a Wolf Researcher in Yellowstone National Park. No one has spent more time observing and documenting wild wolves than retired National Park Ranger Rick McIntyre, who has watched wolves in America’s national parks for more than forty years—twenty-six of those years in Yellowstone, where he has accumulated over 100,000 sightings. McIntyre is the author of the ongoing “Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone” series, including The Rise of Wolf 8, The Reign of Wolf 21, The Redemption of Wolf 302, and the just published Alpha Female Wolf. He is currently at work on a fifth book titled Thinking Like A Wolf, due out in October 2024. He is the recipient of numerous book awards, including an Amazon Best Science Book of the Year. He lives in Silver Gate, Montana, just outside of the NE Park entrance.

This is a two-part interview.

Jay talks to Jessica Karjala about Footloose Montana and her efforts to end trapping in Montana. Mrs. Karjala served in the Montana Legislature in the House of Representatives for 8 years. The first bill she sponsored defined capture, spay/neuter, return programs from trapping, and Footloose Montana supported the bill. She fought alongside other Democrats against legislation to increase wolf quotas, bills to allow silencers on rifles when hunting, spotlight hunting, hound hunting, to name a few. At the end of her first term, Jessica was selected by House leadership to represent Montana at the National Conference of State Legislatures at a National Summit. In her 3rd session, Jessica passed legislation to appropriate millions of dollars to provide grant funding for suicide prevention for which she was honored alongside Senator Tester with the Impact Award by the Montana Conference on Suicide Prevention. Jessica was also selected as one of 20 lawmakers nationwide to participate in a fellowship with The Lawmaker Network. Prior to serving in the Legislature Jessica worked in the finance and investment industry, as a small business owner, and in the nonprofit sector. Jessica has a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Montana with minor studies in Spanish and Nonprofit Administration. She resides in the Bitterroot Valley with her husband and 2 dogs who all hope to live within the city of Missoula within the next year. Jessica enjoys spending time with her daughters, stepsons, and grandson and enjoys hiking, camping, floating and skiing.

Jay is joined by Michael Kellett, the co-founder and Executive Director of RESTORE: The North Woods. Michael has over 35 years of experience in the land conservation movement. In 1994, he wrote the first white paper proposing a 3.2 million-acre Maine Woods National Park & Preserve, and has been actively involved in efforts to restore the endangered wildlife such as the eastern wolf, Atlantic salmon, and Canada lynx; to protect federal and state public lands from unsustainable logging and development; and to revive the national parks movement. From 1986 to 1992, he was the Northeast Director and Michigan Representative of The Wilderness Society, where he helped to pass national forest wilderness and national recreation area legislation and developed a proposal for a Maine Woods National Reserve. Michael has served on the board of American Lands Alliance, Thoreau Country Conservation Alliance, Thoreau Farm Trust, and Walden Forever Wild. He has visited 258 National Park System units across America. He lives in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

This is a two-part interview.

Jay interviews Amy Lewis, Chief Executive Officer of the WILD Foundation. For more than two decades Amy has worked as a social movement scholar and practitioner in the environmental and human rights sectors. In 2015, she brought a unique, social science approach to the WILD Foundation, first as its development officer, and later as its vice president of policy and communications, adding to her existing knowledge and insights about building effective social movements while working on wilderness policy processes in places as far-flung as India and China and as close-to-home as the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Amy is committed to building global support for the protection of Half of Earth’s lands and seas while also strengthening and expanding the land tenure of Indigenous Peoples, nature’s best guardians.

The interview is in two parts.

Jay conducts a two-part interview with Erin Gless, executive director of the Pacific Whale Watch Association, about whale watching in the waters off the west coast.

Jay is joined by Maureen McGee-Bollinger and Blake McGann, officials at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. They discuss the park, its features, and its management.

Jay does a two-part interview with Myles Traphagen, the Borderlands Program Coordinator for the Wildlands Network. Myles keeps tabs on the Border Wall that has been partially completed along the 1954 border with Mexico. In these two interviews, he talks about the consequences in the region of the Border Wall and its effects on wildlife and plant life all along the border – and the efforts of Wildlands Network and other allied NGOs, tribal groups and communities to reverse these effects.

Jay has a two-part interview with Sean O’Brien, the CEO of NatureServe, based in Arlington, VA.

Jay interviews Scott Anderson, a ranger in Rainier National Park. Scott is one of the park’s biological science technicians. He graduated from the University of Washington and has since worked for the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service, the University of Washington, and the University of Oregon.

Jay is joined by George Nickas, policy coordinator for Wilderness Watch. George joined the organization in 1996. Prior to Wilderness Watch, George served 11 years as a natural resource specialist and assistant coordinator for the Utah Wilderness Association. George is regularly invited to make presentations at national wilderness conferences, agency training sessions, and other gatherings where wilderness protection is discussed.

This interview is in two parts, aired on successive weeks.

Jay talks today with Marianna Trevino Wright, Executive Director of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas. Marianna Wright grew up at a time when Cabbage Whites and Coral snakes were commonplace in south Texas. She is fervent in her desire to protect the special creatures and features peculiar to that area near the Rio Grande. As executive director of the National Butterfly Center, on the U.S.-Mexico border, she currently manages almost 500 acres of land in restoration and preservation on behalf of the North American Butterfly Association. Her fierce determination to protect access to a once-vibrant recreational waterway and the only source of freshwater for 6 million people, along with public and private green space, threatened and endangered species, and the integrity of a critical migration corridor were recognized by the Defenders of Wildlife with their Spirit of Defenders Award for Conservation Advocacy. A graduate of Columbia University and mother of six, she seeks to preserve the beauty and diversity of this land for generations to come. .

George Wuerthner, ecologist, writer and photographer, and former hunting guide, has just returned from an exploratory trip to Alaska, checking out a proposed mining development project and road near the Kobuk River in the north part of the state. George has previously been a guest on Wilderness & Wildlife. He writes frequently about wildlife, deforestation and wildfire.

Jay interviews Bob DeGross, Superintendent of Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota. Bob studied forestry and natural resource management at Fox Valley College in Appleton, Wisconsin and has been a Park Service Ranger at Mammoth Cave, Everglades and Big Cypress National Parks and came to Voyageurs in 2016. In this interview, he talks about the wolves, moose, lynx and beaver that can be found at Voyageurs and the great campgrounds that are enjoyed by campers when not paddling across the many lakes in the Park.

Jay’s guest for this episode is Ron Sutherland, the Chief Scientist for Wildlands Network. Ron lives in Durham, N. C. and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. He holds a Ph.D. in Wildlife Biology from Duke University’s School of the Environment. He has been on the staff of Wildlands Network since 2010.

Jay interviews Jerry Emory. Following research and work based out of both Latin America and the Western U.S. in the 1980s, Jerry spent a year at the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galápagos Islands and an equivalent amount of time in the Brazilian Pantanal for grad work. He became a professional writer and communications consultant. Jerry worked at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in San Francisco in the early 2000s followed by 10 years at the California State Parks Foundation. A graduate of Stanford and U.C. Berkeley, he lives with his family in Mill Valley, California.

Jerry has written dozens of magazine articles on the environment, conservation and science with a focus on Latin America and the Western U.S. He is the author of 5 books, including the San Francisco Bay Shoreline Guide and the Monterey Bay Shoreline Guide, and has served twice as a board member of The George Wright Society. His latest book is about George Meléndez Melendez Wright, the first wildlife biologist for the National Park Service in the 1930s.

Jay’s guest is George Wuerthner, an ecologist, writer, photographer who has studied, written about, and photographed natural habitats in many American locales, especially the mountains of the eastern U.S., the lake region of Minnesota, the Sierras, the Cascades, and the Rocky Mountains of the west. Holds degrees from the University of Montana and University of California Santa Cruz, and graduate work at MSU and U of Oregon. He’s worked in many places in the U.S., border to border, and he specializes in studying predators. He is the author of 38 books and innumerable articles. He recently published an article about the need to expand Yellowstone National Park to embrace the much larger Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

The interview is in two parts.

Jay interviews Jenny Waddell, Research Coordinator at Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, from her office in Port Angeles, Washington. Jenny has been with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) since 2001 and with Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary since 2016. Her background is in marine conservation science, and she holds a Master’s degree from the University of Washington in Seattle.

This interview is in two parts.