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Terrestrials

Terrestrials

WNYC 62 Episodes Oct 8, 2026

Terrestrials is a family-friendly podcast that explores the wonders of nature, hosted by Lulu Miller. Every other week, listeners are taken on a nature walk to discover surprising behaviors of plants and animals, such as squirrels that can regrow their brains and octopuses that outsmart humans. The podcast features original songs by Alan Goffinski and selects the best Radiolab episodes about nature. It aims to transport audiences into the beyond-human world, from oceans to forests, with vivid storytelling.

Episodes

The Goths: Befriending Clever Crows
The Goths: Befriending Clever Crows Oct 8, 2026 00:31:15 Spooky season is upon us and so we are bringing you a tale of Halloween’s eeriest avian mascot.Emma Terry is friends with basically everyone in her town. She personifies a rainbow—she has bouncy blonde hair, sparkly cat-eye glasses, and a closet full of bright colors. But for the last decade, she's been trying to befriend the one creature that seems like the opposite of her vibe: the cemetery-lurk
The Hideout: A Monarch Butterfly Mystery
The Hideout: A Monarch Butterfly Mystery Sep 24, 2026 00:34:21 As the leaves begin to change and the air cools, monarch butterflies disappear from our skies and journey …where?  The mysterious migration of this iconic butterfly stumped scientists for decades. Until an intercepted message on a butterfly wing led them to the isolated mountains of central Mexico to find the ancient monarch oasis where these butterflies  cluster by the millions. It’s he
The Snow Beast: A Mystery Animal (Replay)
The Snow Beast: A Mystery Animal (Replay) Sep 10, 2026 00:30:18 Today we bring you a story stranger than fiction. In 2006, paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski took a helicopter to a remote Arctic island near the North Pole, spending her afternoons scavenging for ancient treasures on the ground. One day, she found something the size of a potato chip. Turns out, it was a three and a half million year old chunk of bone. SPOILER ALERT BELOW.Keep reading if you’re ok
The Wallowers: A Buffalo Comeback Story
The Wallowers: A Buffalo Comeback Story Aug 27, 2026 00:32:30 Ervin Carlson grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana hearing stories about buffalo (aka American bison) who once roamed the land by the hundreds of thousands. These giant beasts weighed up to 2000 pounds, were almost 7 feet tall, and had two curved horns so sharp they could even buck away grizzly bears. And they were ecosystem engineers! Just by grazing and rolling in the dirt, they broug
Celestials: A Bedtime Snail Story Experiment
Celestials: A Bedtime Snail Story Experiment Aug 20, 2026 00:14:04 Meet François Tranquille. He's a snail. He's French. And this is the first episode of a little experiment we're calling Celestials: Bedtime Stories from Terrestrials. Restful tales, bedtime meditations, and the occasional lullaby, designed to help you drift off to sleep. Like Terrestrials, it's about a creature here on Earth. Unlike Terrestrials, it wanders away from the world of facts, towards so
The Fuzzy Ruckus: The Power of Lichen (Replay)
The Fuzzy Ruckus: The Power of Lichen (Replay) Aug 13, 2026 00:28:49 Artist Ashley (Ash) Eliza Williams was so shy growing up that they found it hard to speak to people.  Instead, they withdrew from the world of humans and found comfort in the forest, where they spent hours exploring, scavenging, and collecting — eventually discovering lichen. They began painting portraits of lichen’s wild, colorful, and fuzzy shapes. In time, Ash learned that lichen is actually a
The Jimothy: Seattle Raccoon Steals Hearts
The Jimothy: Seattle Raccoon Steals Hearts Aug 6, 2026 00:29:33 If you’ve been on the internet recently, you might’ve heard of Jimothy—a raccoon from Seattle who went viral. Jimothy t-shirts, murals, tattoos, and tribute songs popped up across the country. We wanted to understand why this raccoon had captured so many hearts, so we spoke to one of the first people who spotted him: Ben Trammell. One night in Seattle, Ben was watching a raccoon family walk along
Dung Beetles from Just the Zoo of Us
Dung Beetles from Just the Zoo of Us Jul 30, 2026 00:34:35 It’s summer break! So, while Terrestrials takes a summer breather,, we’re bringing you a show that we really love. It’s called Just the Zoo of Us, and it’s produced by Ellen and Christian Weatherford, a married couple with a shared love of telling stories about this wonderful planet!In every episode, they rate a different animal on three qualities - effectiveness, ingenuity, and aesthetics. In thi
The Charmer: King Cobras' FANGtastic Powers
The Charmer: King Cobras' FANGtastic Powers Jul 16, 2026 00:35:31 Lulu has been terrified of snakes all her life. But strangely, her oldest son  has been obsessed with them since he was two. So to understand his fascination, she called a snake expert who might also be one of the least afraid people on Earth: Gowri Shankar Pogiri.  As a kid in Bangalore, India, Gowri was his neighborhood's resident snake-catcher — wrangling seven-foot snakes and motorcycling into
The Travelers Update: A Moon Tree Grows in New York
The Travelers Update: A Moon Tree Grows in New York Jul 2, 2026 00:40:28 The director of horticulture at Madison Square Park, Stephanie Lucas, spends her days caring for over 300 trees in the heart of New York City. One day in 2022, she saw a callout from NASA giving away seeds that had traveled to the moon. This would be the crown jewel of the park! She and her team worked hard on their application, submitted it, and then waited for two years. Eventually they gave up.
The DADventure: Wild Animal Dads from Owl Monkeys to Seahorses
The DADventure: Wild Animal Dads from Owl Monkeys to Seahorses Jun 18, 2026 00:33:45 What does it really mean to be a dad? In the animal world, fathers have long been painted as aggressive or absent. At best providers and protectors, but certainly not caregivers. And yet for every tale of a lion or chimp dad eating its own young (yikes!), there’s another creature who tells a sweeter story.  Two HUMAN dads bring us on this DADventure: Dr. Eduardo Fernandez-Duque, who has spent deca
BIG CATS 2: Leopards & Jaguars (2 Fast, 2 FURious)
BIG CATS 2: Leopards & Jaguars (2 Fast, 2 FURious) Jun 4, 2026 00:30:30 We're back with PURR-T TWO of our big cats journey, and this time, we’re heading even deeper into the cat-iverse.  We travel to India, where conservationist Shatrunjay Pratap Singh introduces us to leopards that live among shepherds and ancient temples. Then we head to Colombia, where biologist Laura Lisbeth Jaimes Rodriguez helps us track one of the most mysterious cats on Earth: the jaguar. We m

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