What’s new with Encounters?

Wild Explorer! An exciting new section for students, teachers, and anyone interested in learning more about subjects covered on Encounters Radio programs—like polar bears, caribou, boreal forests, and moose. Visit wild explorer.

Encounters is blogging! Follow the adventures of host Richard Nelson and the Encounters team in the remote North Country of Alaska and the wilds of Australia. It's easy--just click on the "blog" button above. You can even subscribe!

Encounters in The New York Review of Books!  Noted author Bill McKibben, praising the best of public radio, says “…from Alaska comes the remarkable Encounters, which is mostly just nature writer Richard Nelson out in the Alaskan wild with a microphone.” Read the article.

Our CD gift set, Encounters: Radio Experiences in the North, includes 12 of the most popular Encounters episodes from the first four seasons. Purchase cd's.

What's Up with Wild Explorer?

Featured topic:

Humpback Whale

As whales go, humpbacks aren't the biggest—a "mere" 40-45 feet long compared to 60 foot sperm whales and 100 foot blue whales—the biggest animal that has ever lived. But humpbacks are arguably the best loved and they're definitely the biggest show offs of all the cetaceans.
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What's this about?

Where else on public radio programming can you hear polar bears growl, peregrine falcons cry and killer whales splash? In an ever increasingly urban world, Encounters: Experiences in the North brings the sounds of the northern wild to the radio for a rare, entertaining and informative weekly program. Now in its sixth season, Encounters is heard throughout Alaska and around the nation. Alaska’s acclaimed cultural anthropologist and award winning nature writer, Richard Nelson is the host of Encounters. Each 29- minute segment contains a tight weave of scientific and indigenous perspectives as Nelson bubbles over with boundless enthusiasm for all things wild. Because it is recorded live to tape, Encounters has a refreshing immediacy that makes for exciting and entertaining listening.

The carefully researched material draws information from the best scientific investigations, from discussions with scientists about their work, from accurate interpretation of conclusions in a wide range of studies, and from direct experience in the field. The programs are recorded live in the field during close contact with the subject. Whether high atop a 65 foot tree to record a program on wind, kayaking along side a pod of sea lions or getting curiously close to a grizzly bear, Nelson engages the listener in feeling the place as well as the subject.

Dr. Nelson has spent forty years in the north living with indigenous people and writing extensively about human relationships to the natural world. He began Encounters as a volunteer for KCAW-FM, the voice and heartbeat of Sitka, a small island town on Alaska's north Pacific coast. Encouraged by its popularity among Sitkans, Nelson began to work with KCAW program director Ken Fate who edited the program and found distribution statewide. Today the show is still distributed by KCAW, Raven Radio.