How do you bring biodiversity to urbanites? Guest host Joan Blaustein of Philadelphia Parks and Recreation joins us to talk about preserving urban parks biodiversity. We also listen to Dr. Nigel Reeve tell us about the effort to save the hedgehogs of London’s Regent Park. We conclude with Billy’s recent trip to NYC to see some monk parakeets and the humpback whales we covered in our very first episode.

Hedgehog seen through thermal imaging (Royal Parks Foundation).

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Sometimes the artificial IS natural. Helena Van Vliet of BioPhilly (of the Biophilic Cities network) joins us as guest host to envision cities as habitat. Of course several species already use cities as habitat:

• We listen to Amnonn Hahn of Friends of the Swifts talk about the swifts of Israel and the Western Wall
• Mauro Ferri talks about efforts to preserve Italian swift architecture/habitat
• Karen Etter Hale of the Wisconsin Bird Conservation Initiative talks North American chimney swift trends and conservation
• Frank Spikmans of RAVON talks about preserving railroad embankment habitat for wall lizards in Maastricht, Netherlands
• And Nicholas Horne tells us about the dolphins of Aberdeen in Scotland and how they use the harbor seawall to hunt salmon.

This was too much for one episode, so split it into two parts.

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Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS

Sometimes the artificial IS natural. Helena Van Vliet of BioPhilly (of the Biophilic Cities network) joins us as guest host to envision cities as habitat. Of course several species already use cities as habitat:

• We listen to Amnonn Hahn of Friends of the Swifts talk about the swifts of Israel and the Western Wall
• Mauro Ferri talks about efforts to preserve Italian swift architecture/habitat
• Karen Etter Hale of the Wisconsin Bird Conservation Initiative talks North American chimney swift trends and conservation
• Frank Spikmans of RAVON talks about preserving railroad embankment habitat for wall lizards in Maastricht, Netherlands
• And Nicholas Horne tells us about the dolphins of Aberdeen in Scotland and how they use the harbor seawall to hunt salmon.

This was too much for one episode, so split it into two parts.

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Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS

Learn more about your cute, furry, smart, and sometimes destructive mesopredator neighbors. Christian Hunold, political scientist and urban wildlife photographer extraordinaire, joins us as guest host has we hear about German (not exactly Nazi) raccoons from researcher Ulf Hohmann, about clever urban raccoons from researcher Susanne MacDonald, and Tokyo’s palm civets and tanuki (a.k.a. raccoon dogs) from Matt Alt. And yes, we talk about the tanuki’s magical scrotums.

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