What is new with Encounters?

This year, Encounters Radio travels the far reaches of Alaska, to explore a fascinating array of new subjects. Some of the highlights include stargazing under a winter midnight sky, witnessing one of the world’s greatest concentrations of shorebirds on the Copper River delta, finding wood frogs that survive the boreal forest winter by freezing solid, and hanging out with a mysterious survivor of the Pleistocene—the muskox.

Other shows feature fur seals and Aleut people on the remote Pribilof Islands, the uncertain future for an Inupiaq Eskimo village on an eroding Chukchi Sea coastline, and a look at frontier living among some of Alaska’s most isolated people.

Encounters is funded by a National Science Foundation grant supporting work in the high latitudes of both the northern and southern hemispheres. Richard Nelson again traveled to the outback country of Australia and Tasmania to record new shows for the Encounters Down Under series. This includes programs about some of Australia’s most unusual and iconic wild creatures: wombat, lyrebird, kookaburra and magpie, and the giant goanna lizard.

This summer, Richard Nelson has teamed up with four-time Emmy award wining cinematographer Daniel Zatz to produce short films based on Encounters. Click here to view the segments about brown bears in Katmai National Park, shorebirds along the Copper River, and wood frogs in the Brooks Range.

We are also excited to announce that the North Pacific Research Board (www.nprb.org) is funding Encounters to produce segments about the marine environment.

In early October, Encounters will begin distribution to all public radio and college stations nationwide. Each station makes its own broadcast decisions, so we’ve begun a promotional campaign that involves calling the stations, mailing out sample CDs, and attending public radio conferences.

There’s also something very important that you or your friends can do, because it’s tremendously helpful if people who listen to a particular station call the Program Director and tell them about the show!

If you’d like to order CD copies of the show contact Raven Radio at 907-747-5877 or www.kcaw.org.

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 fourth season, Encounters is heard throughout Alaska and soon to be 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. Recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation’s International Polar Year program, Encounters aims to demonstrate the rewards of experiencing, studying, interpreting and living in the polar world to listeners all over the country. Our program reminds listeners about why the International Polar Year comes at a critical time in this all too globally warm earth we live upon.

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 the KCAW-FM, a station that beats the heart of Sitka, a town of 8,700 people. 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.