20: Wildlife Conservation, Birding, and Finding Hope in Nature with Matt Howard

What if noticing a chickadee, or spending Sunday offline, could change the way you see your neighbourhood — and yourself?

This week, I’m joined by Matt Howard, a wildlife biologist, writer,  and engaging voice on how we connect with the natural world. Matt has worked everywhere from a tiny island in Alaska to California wind farms, and he now brings that deep ecological knowledge into everyday conversations about birds, frogs, and even the gear we think we need to enjoy the outdoors.

We talk about everything from chickadee calls and suburban bird feeders to wildlife road crossings, community science, and why stories matter just as much as data. Matt also shares how his “Log Cabin Sundays” digital detox practice has shifted his perspective, and what it means to navigate being a middle-aged “influencer” in the sustainability space.

This conversation is both funny and hopeful — a reminder that connecting with nature doesn’t have to be complicated, and that the choices we make in our own backyards and communities really do matter.

Takeaways

• Storytelling can help people connect with science and see nature differently
• Bird feeders and native plants can create vital suburban habitats
• Community science projects let anyone contribute to conservation
• Wildlife road crossings save countless animals and need ongoing support
• Noise pollution is a hidden but powerful threat to wildlife
• Log Cabin Sundays show the value of slowing down and unplugging
• Buying outdoor gear second-hand is one way to enjoy nature without feeding consumerism

One Small Shift

Matt suggests making your next outdoor adventure a little greener by choosing secondhand gear. Whether it’s borrowing from a friend, checking a thrift shop, or repurposing what you already have, enjoying nature doesn’t have to come with new stuff.

Connect With Matt

Instagram

TikTok

Threads

Patreon - Howie's Everything Club

Substack - Log Cabin Sundays

YouTube

Resources

Merlin Bird ID (app)

Safe Nesting Materials for Birds (blog post)

Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America - Leila Philip (book)

Silent Spring - Rachel Carson (book)

No New Things - Ashlee Piper (book)

Transcript

0:00

best way to support conservation as an average person, be a massive weirdo about the thing you love. Welcome to Sustainable in the Suburbs, a podcast for the eco curious who want to live a greener life and are looking for a place to start. I'm your host, Sarah Robertson Barnes, a soccer mom with a station wagon and a passion for sustainable living. Each week I'll bring you practical tips and honest conversations to help you waste less, save money, and make small doable shifts that actually fit your real life. Because sustainable living doesn't have to be perfect to matter and you don't have to do it all to make a difference. Hello and welcome back to Sustainable in the Suburbs, the podcast where we start where we are, use what we have and live a little greener, one small shift at a time. I'm your host, Sarah Robertson-Barnes. And if you've been enjoying the podcast and want to help grow our little eco community, there are a few quick and easy things you can do. Make sure you're following the show. and leave a rating and review wherever you're listening from today. Definitely come hang out with me on Instagram. You can find me there at Sarah Robertson Barnes and slide into my DMs anytime. I love hearing what's resonating with you or what you might like to hear on the show. And of course, be sure to check out the links in the show notes for the blog, get on my newsletter, all that good stuff. Today I'm joined by Matt Howard, who you might know from social media as Howie's Everything Club. Matt is a wildlife biologist, a writer, and an incredibly thoughtful voice on how we connect with the natural world. Matt has a background in conservation and restoration ecology and has spent nearly 20 years working in some fascinating places from the oil fields of Eastern Utah to a tiny island in Alaska with more bears than people and California wind farms. These days, he's a wildlife biologist with the Department of Transportation, though the views he shares are very much his own. What drew me to Matt's work isn't just his experience, but the way he writes and speaks with humor and honesty about the small wonders of the natural world from chickadees, salamanders, conifer needles, and what they can teach us about resilience, joy, and hope. In this conversation, we'll explore what wildlife can show us about living well and how we can make our own suburban spaces friendlier for the creatures around us and healthier for ourselves too. Here's my conversation with Matt Howard. All right, Matt Howard, welcome to Sustainable in the Suburbs. I'm so glad to have you here. In the bio that you sent me, you called yourself a failed writer and moderately successful ecologist. So can we start there? Just tell us a little bit more about who you are and how that winding path has shaped the work that you do now. So I started out wanting to be a creative writer and initially it was things like novels and I really liked fantasy and science fiction. And then when I got into college, They kind of pound that out of you. They don't want you to be a genre writer. They want you to do something literary. And so I kind of gravitated towards creative nonfiction and nature writing. And so things like Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams, those kinds of authors. And so I started doing a lot of that kind of nature writing and it was really discouraging because it just felt like it was a really angry kind of. complaining or documenting decline, I kind of said that we were uh eulogizing the earth while it still existed. And so I went on a trip for my honeymoon, actually, and we went to Monterey Bay Aquarium and there I saw like they were doing cool, active stuff. And one of the things that really struck me and I've made videos about this is their otter recovery and surrogacy program where they were finding orphaned otters and having um captive otters at the aquarium raise those surrogate otter babies. And then when they released them, the otters weren't trying to go find some new place. They settled in right near the aquarium. And there's some great studies showing that the long-term health of the coastline has improved since those otters have been able to repopulate that area. So things like that started really catching my attention. And I realized that maybe instead of writing about... everything going bad, could maybe try to make things a little better. And so that's where I changed careers. And part of it is also, I had tiny kids and I was on a pathway where I was going to get a degree that didn't have a job attached to it. I was still going to just have to hustle and figure out where paychecks were going to come from. And so that was another sort of motivator. So those two things converged and I realized I needed a career that at least a college degree that had a career attached to it that had things like healthcare and benefits and things like that, which ecology wasn't the best choice for that in retrospect, but it still ended up working for me. There were some big growing pains early on in my career, especially with field work. I was doing 10 days on, six days off. We would try to cram two weeks worth of activities and parenting and all that stuff. I was the only one out there who had small children and people didn't really, weren't very accommodating. about that, especially because I think that people just expect, at least in my culture, a dad to take care of their kids financially, and there's not a lot of expectation for them to be present. And so there was a lot of early push and pull dynamics associated with that. But now I have a very stable kind of nine to five that allows for me to be have a good work life balance. So I think in the long term. paying my dues and going through that really tricky part at the beginning. I don't wish it on everyone, but it ended up working out well for me. and you're still a storyteller now. Yeah, that's it. So with social media, I've been able to start flexing those muscles that I think had atrophied quite a bit. I write scripts for my videos. I've been posting poetry lately. I do have a book proposal out there. The response has been a little lukewarm so far. So we'll see how that goes. But I know it takes longer than than my timeframes. guess my expectation is but. It's kind of an exciting time to be doing that kind of stuff again and writing for fun instead of trying to write for publication in maybe snooty literary magazines that no one reads and trying to be accessible with my writing again. Why do you think that storytelling, whether it's through writing or science communication to the general public, why does that matter so much for how the average person connects with nature? I think about this all the time because when you're making social media videos, you're trying to capture people's attention and you want to make something that's shareable. And so a lot of my posts that don't do as well are me trying to make a study fun, which is the kind of thing that if I was watching it, I would get really excited about, but I don't want to be making content just for, you know, speaking to the choir. And so some of my videos that have been the most successful are finding wonder in very everyday moments. and teaching people about something that they see every day and never really thought about. So my most successful video was just telling people how to tell different conifers apart. And then one of my other most successful videos was talking about black cap chickadees, which is a very common yard bird that's in lots of people's feeders and telling them about how smart they are and what their society is like and how... They're really interesting. I think that when you look out your window and see a bird that you have started creating a relationship with in your head, then you might think about them as something more than just an annoyance during springtime or waking them up early. And you realize that that's language. It's not just uh a noise that you're sick of hearing and something you associate with good times of year, that kind of thing. That's one of the ways I think that's how we first connected actually was on that post about chickadees, black cap chickadees, my personal favorite and best bird of all time. And we all know that chickadees are famous for that chickadee-dee-dee call, but recently on your sub stack, you talked about how the number of Ds is actually dependent on the predator, which I did not know just how many Ds they add to the end. So can you share that story with us? and what it shows about how the birds communicate with each other. Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff going on there. So chickadees live in pretty dense forests. And so they don't get to see each other very much, which means they have to have a very complex language. And so one of the things they'll do is if one of them sees a predator, they will send out an alarm call, which is really common for all kinds of wildlife species. And they've been able to associate the amount of DDDs at the end of the chickadee call, like you said, with uh the threat of the predator. In my first video, people kind of misunderstood that and thought the bigger the predator, the more D's. in reality, chickadees are not much of a meal for the vast majority of birds of prey. The tiny raptors are the ones that scare them the most. And so you hear the most D's when it's something like a northern saw-whet owl or a, uh, I can't, Kestrel, an American Kestrel. So I said, I think in that post that a chickadee is about the same weight as a AAA battery, which is just not very much food for most species. And so what was interesting wasn't that it was just like, the bigger the predator, was they knew very precisely what the threat was. And then there was another study about how they mob and harass predators and they will only mob the ones that are the biggest threat to them, which is pretty brave. uh but it's a good survival tactic. And then one more thing, I could talk about this for a long time, but there was another study that showed that uh nut hatches, which often live in mixed flocks along with chickadees, recognize the chickadees alarm calls and will pass it on to other nut hatches. But the interesting thing is that the nut hatches would pass on a generic alarm call to saying, hey, the chickadees are talking about something. But until one of the nut hatches verified for itself what predator it was, they wouldn't add the additional complexity that says it's this kind of predator until they'd verified it. So in a lot of ways, I think that nut hatches are smarter than we are in the way that we share our social media posts without digging in a little bit and verifying it first. I also did not know that about the nut hatches, but I do frequently see them in the same sort of habitat here on our wooded trails. I have a question though about chickadees. Have you ever heard them be called cheeseburger birds? Yeah, cheeseburgers are really, that's the first time I heard it. And ah I think my personal preference is I like to think that they're saying, Hey sweetie, they're hyping us up when we're going out. But yeah, cheeseburger, I mean, chickadee is a lot of people's spark bird because they're so easily identified. They have such a distinct call. And for me too, my brother-in-law gave us a bird feeder when uh my son was born. And it was before I was getting into uh my career path. And so we just learned the same way most people do. We had a little guidebook and chickadees were the first bird we identified in my son. By the time he was a toddler, he called them David. We don't know why, but we just our inside joke is we always call chickadees David's male or female. They're the first bird that I remember from being at my grandmother's house and being woken up by them. And I remember going downstairs and asking Nana what the cheeseburger birds were. And she didn't know what I meant. And I said, you know, because they say cheeseburger. And it really wasn't until an adult that I figured out. You with that onomatopoeia on yourself. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and I ended up Googling it and I found some guy on YouTube that was like, that's a black cap chickadee that makes this. And that was about 14 minutes before I got into birding, pretty hardcore. Birding is one of those hobbies that is assigned to you in middle age, it feels like, lately, especially in my group. for someone who's curious, but doesn't know where to start, what would be sort of the best way to get into birding, especially if you're in a suburban neighborhood like so many of us are? Yeah, I know that bird feeders are a little bit controversial and I understand where it comes from, but I still encourage people to put up bird feeders as long as they keep them clean and swap them out and keep an eye out if there's things like bird flus in your community, then to just take them down altogether. But I do think that they serve an important piece of replacing some of the lost habitat that our suburban communities have created. And obviously, planting native plants and all that stuff is all better, but it doesn't mean that uh because there's something better out there, you shouldn't start somewhere. So I think putting up some feeders, getting just a little backyard birding book for your region is a really good way to start. And then uh Merlin has been really instrumental in getting people excited about birds in a way that they never have before. And one of the big things I will always encourage people to do is to try to capture even with the naked eye or with binoculars watching a bird singing because that's the best way to create that connection in your brain is to look at the bird, see it open its mouth, hear the sound come out of its mouth, beak I guess. And that's how you create those uh long-term memories. then for college I had to memorize birds and I just use flashcards. And so there's fun games, um there's Sibley flashcards, there's a memory game that we have, there's trivia where you identify the bird and then you answer some questions about it. There's things like that you can do to solidify some of that knowledge. um And I think it's infectious. So if you're excited about it and pass that on, even if you aren't someone with a science background, there's a lot of benefit from that. Yeah, I'm gonna talk about it a little bit later, but I did accidentally join a birding group and that's an 11 out of 10 recommended habit. uh But as far as even just birdsong, my background is in neuroscience and so that's sort of how I read up on the impact of birdsong on just on human happiness because it makes us feel safe. They're singing when they feel safe and when we hear the birds causing a ruckus outside, we know something's going on. And so we are very... attuned to that without maybe being conscious of it. And I find the more I dig into that, the more connected I feel to the green space that's around me. Yeah, that's, mean, that's really interesting, identifying times when you feel at peace, but not really knowing why and digging into it and being able to identify it. think that's really useful. Yeah. And then for folks in suburban areas too, I just wanted to mention as far as bird feeders go, I live in Toronto, so we're like the raccoon capital of the universe. So you want to make sure that the feeder that you're getting is raccoon proof, squirrel proof, whatever it is, just again, to avoid predators. But one thing I did want to touch on really quickly is in the spring folks leave out nesting materials. I don't know if you've seen these sort of posts going around on social media in the spring where people are leaving out like great gobs of dryer lint or cat fur or yarn. And so very quickly, I just wanted to ask you to not do those things. And they're not natural nesting materials and they can be more harmful than helpful. I know the intentions are good, but I'll do a whole thing on that later. Just to make sure that we're, the best thing you can do for birds is protect their habitat. Yeah, and especially like those acrylics and things like that. hear, we're hearing a lot about microplastics and I don't even think we have even the slightest inkling of how that's impacting non-humans. I think putting extra stuff in their nests, especially when they're developing is, uh it sounds like a nice thing to do, but the long-term benefits are not there. Yeah, dryer lint is not moss. Because I do bird box monitoring, I do have a lot of black-capped chickadees. And so they tend to build their nests out of like a moss mattress almost. And then I see bits of pink insulation in there and dryer lint and things like that. And of course, those nest outcomes are impacted by that. So just some things to be aware of. A lot of your work is also about identifying species. And when I say your work, I mean what you're sharing with us on your platforms. And those details do help people tell one bird or plant for another. But what are some other lessons that we can take from just really slowing down and looking at the thing? Like you make a lot of your videos out in the field. And so how does that influence the way that you're teaching and sharing about what you're seeing? Yeah, there's, guess there's an intersection between my interests. So uh I'm professionally a biologist, but I also do a lot of volunteer work for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. And I pay a lot of attention to the way young men are taught and growing up and kind of the cultural milieu around them. And so one of the things that I keep thinking about every time I discover some new bird behavior is, that there's something we can learn from it in the way we interact with each other as people. And so I've made a lot of kind of jokey videos about how birds can tell when they're being creeps, for example, when they're coming on too strong, trying to attract a mate, or that the amount of effort that male birds put into courtship. And then especially the amount of reciprocal effort that females put into courtship that has... only been really examined in the last couple decades as women have been more and more likely to be in the field. And so there's some really interesting stuff where, for example, sage-grouse, they're a legging species. All the females and males will congregate in the same area. they basically, the males do dances and they puff out their chest. then everyone just thought that the females just picked the best one at puffing their chest out. But there was a study where the researchers created a robot female sage-grouse and they started using cues, just a handful of really simple cues, and then watched how the males responded. And what they found out was that there's a conversation happening between those males sage-grouse and the females, and the males are adjusting their dancing and their behavior to match what the females are telling them. And so it really flies in the face of kind of this alpha male thing where all you have to be is a successful male. who's strong looking and women will flock to you and emphasizes more that there has to be a two-way communication for courtship among humans just as much as there are wildlife. So there's things like that where I know that anthropomorphizing animals is not the best scientific way to go about things. But when I'm just making social media videos for fun and trying to find an angle to make it interesting beyond just. hey, did you know this about sage-raus? Because then only people who care about sage-raus would tune in. Hopefully I can find something that's like, hey, this is also a thing I've learned from being married for decades, from being a listener, from sitting in on uh conversations with victims of domestic violence and sexual assault that I can maybe pass on to, I mean, I don't have a huge male following, but I do have a lot of passionate guys who will. participate and they seem to be learning from the things that I'm saying. So that's heartening to me. Gosh, that's way more important than I would have even thought about because from my perspective, I'm not even thinking about those things necessarily because like you said, you have a small male following. I have almost a non-existent one. And so I'm not making content really with that in mind, how it might appeal to that audience. And that is so appreciated. There was, I guess it was a big turning point for me and it's because of good feminist women creators who are saying, hey guys, we have heard these messages before. And so a man can really get a long ways on social media, kind of preaching to the choir and saying, hey women, I get you, I understand you. But that's not helping very much other than maybe giving someone comfort that there are guys out here who think like that. But what I think really helped me is I shifted from talking about my volunteering primarily to talking about my job and started attracting people who are just nature loving kind of, they could be hunters, they could be birders, people who like men who like getting out in nature. And then I could sort of sneak in some messages about relationships and respect and boundaries and things like that. And so that's been kind of a conscious pivot of trying not to just tell people what they want to hear, but maybe luring people in with some fun wildlife facts and then slipping in some of the other interests that I have and things that I've learned through volunteering. Yeah, that's really interesting. That's something that I'm trying to do here as well as to sort of not Jedi mind trick people, but just sort of like bring you in with what is your interest and what are you good at? And hey, did you know that this is the work that needs doing and there's something here for all of us to do our own little piece. So you also write about something called Log Cabin Sundays on your sub stack, which everyone needs to subscribe to immediately. But can you tell us about what a Log Cabin Sunday is and what this practice has given to you? Yeah, it's funny because it's so little for a lot of people to unplug, but it was a big deal for me. And it was basically, I was getting overwhelmed, especially going into this next, like going into the 2025 presidential administration. I was really distraught about it. And I was having a hard time with the firehose of information before anything had even started. And so it was around the time of New Year's resolutions and I almost never make New Year's resolutions, but I thought maybe this is a good time to scale things back. And so my idea was that I would treat Sundays like I was in a log cabin that I didn't have any cell service. But I did have like a TV with some physical media and a classic video game console. So that's kind of how I figured out how I would make it work. And so I listened to records and I play video games before the PlayStation era, things like that, and read a lot. But I don't, I just leave my phone on my head, my nightstand, and I just don't touch it. And part of it is I can get away with it little bit because if there was an emergency, someone would text my wife and she would tell me or, you know, it's not strict, but it's been super helpful. And so I started writing about some of the things I would think about. And I think because of Log Heaven Sundays, I... started writing poems again and I started doing sketches and I have been cooking these big elaborate Sunday dinners. So a lot of things that I enjoy but didn't have spaces in my life, it forced me to create that space and it also made me realize how much time I spend looking at social media. And then there's another aspect which is I started getting a lot of anxiety about my social media performing well, my videos doing well. ah sometimes I'll post something that hits the wrong way and I start getting a lot of negative comments and people who are angry with me. And so being able to disconnect for 24 hours, it really puts into context how little that stuff really matters and how there's news out there that the entirety of our human ancestry would have never been exposed to that we're seeing on a minute by minute basis. You could live in a village thousands of years ago and you would be up to date on maybe what's going on in your immediate community. Sometimes you would hear on a sporadic basis what was going on in the surrounding area, but you were never exposed to tragedies that were happening across the world. You were never exposed to the newest hot takes. Sometimes I guess you would get like a passing caravan that would do a play about something that might be happening somewhere else, but. We just aren't built for that. We haven't experienced it. Our genetics and our ancestors were not built around it. And you probably know better than anybody, or at least me, how uh badly we seem to be coping with that kind of information. Today's episode is sponsored by TD. Since 2010, TD Friends of the Environment Foundation's flagship program, TD Tree Days, has helped Canadians plant more than 550,000 native trees and shrubs with the support of over 44,000 volunteers, local groups, municipalities, and Indigenous communities. Greenspaces do so much for us. They support our mental and physical wellbeing, provide vital habitat for wildlife like birds and pollinators, and make our neighborhoods more resilient in the face of climate change. There are also places for us to gather, slow down, and feel more connected to each other and the natural world around us. Greener, healthier communities begin with small local actions, and you don't have to go far to make a difference. TDTreeDay events are happening across Canada right now. Join an event near you at tdtreedays.com. Yeah, not great. uh I absolutely noticed that where the... So I have to delete all my social media platforms. I have started doing that on Sundays because you have influenced me to do that simply because it's just horror shooting into my brain at all times interrupted by um a very funny post about an elevator, for example. um But I just feel my heart rate just going through the roof within about five minutes. And I'm just not able to. to parse any of it, same thing I get really into my analytics or my account's not growing or all of these things that just really don't actually matter and really impact my ability to even finish a thought, let alone create anything new or have anything else to talk about beyond, saw a post that blah, blah, blah, blah. And my husband barely has an email address despite being a software engineer. He doesn't have social media. He doesn't do any of that. And he can't relate to me on that level at all. But when we unplug and we say, hey, let's go to Cold Creek, which is a really cool conservation area near us, has so many different biomes, all of that falls away very quickly. As soon as we get out onto the trails, all of that, I know there's a ton of science behind that and that it, I call them our stupid mental health walks, but it actually is. just to slow down and breathe and listen to the wind and the trees and the birds and all of that. Yeah, one of the things I often go on a long hike on a Sunday morning or a long walk, and it frustrates me because often I make content on walks and hikes. And so not being able to make content makes it so that I have to just like bear the boredom of a walk or a hike. and soak things in in ways that I probably wouldn't have. And it reminds me that even when I am quote unquote getting out of nature, I would be listening to podcasts, I would be listening to music. I'd be constantly trying to think of new angles or I would be doing dozens of takes of my idea while hiking, trying to capture the right bird in the background and then trying to do another take because it didn't sing. that kind of thing was really impacting my hikes and I still would to come home thinking, that was really satisfying, but not realizing that I was letting uh technology and social media and all that stuff even invade what I consider kind of my most sacred time. And so that was another good byproduct of this. And it was all coming from, we'd go on an annual camping trip and I would be forced to be away from social media and from internet. And then coming back, I would almost dread opening all maps and. I get to that point now where, especially because I've started incorporating Saturdays too, where I am taking Saturdays off from social media. And the idea of opening it up and catching up on Mondays sometimes is not appealing to me at all. it helps me realize that there are aspects of what I think is a fun and successful social media hobby that are draining me in ways that I don't. consciously recognize unless I step away from it. Yeah, leaving the phone behind is so difficult. Yeah, especially because I want to take pictures and I want to take videos. But if I bring it with me, then it's too big of a temptation to be like, well, if I'm taking a video of this little stream, I could take a video of me making a joke in front of it. And then it's out the window. Yeah, even leaving the phone behind for, like you said, when you go for a walk, even when I'm going for a walk around the neighborhood, I always have a podcast in my ears. Like that's not unplugging at all. So for people in the suburbs, like where things are pretty manicured, they're pretty set up to be sterile. What are some ways that we can still find connections with the natural world away from our phones? One of the big things I talk about a lot, and it's kind of the introductory chapter in that the book proposal I wrote is about day lighting streams. So most of our communities, because we're humans and we build around bodies of water, we're built around streams and rivers. But one of the very first things that a lot of uh industrialized communities, industrialized is the wrong word, but developed communities do was uh pipe. their streams and put it underwater or underground. And so there was a movement starting around the 70s where they started opening up those canals. And one of the first ones was in Berkeley, California. And it was just a 300 foot section of stream that they daylighted and built a park around. And it's gotten a lot of momentum over the years. There's a project in Baltimore where an artist painted lines on the roads to show where all of the old rivers were. I think in Detroit there's hundreds of miles underground. And so just opening up those streams and the associated riparian vegetation that comes alongside them and then the birds that show up is a huge way that people can have wild communities right near where they live, they can walk to. We had a family of Cooper's hawks in this one tiny section of riparian area by the baseball field. And we watched the pair pair off. We saw them find their nest. And then we watched the three young try to figure out how to fly and catch prey just over a few weeks. And so it didn't even take very much. And then we had a pretty wild situation where if you were in the middle of it, you wouldn't know you were surrounded by suburbia. It just felt like you were on a hike. watching hawks. So that's a big one. And the biggest one that I think that would be a huge undertaking is noise. And the way that I have that have had that stick with me personally is I'll go out in my backyard to make a social media video and I can't because there's motorcycles racing up and down or there's a backup beep from a construction project a mile away or there's a dog barking constantly. We're a lawnmower. If I can't even make a social media video that's two minutes long, it's no wonder that our birds are suffering because there was a great study where they put, they called it a phantom road through a national forest in Idaho where they put a bunch of speakers on trees and played road noise. And then they monitored the body condition of the birds and the birds near the road noise, they still foraged. If you were driving along and looking out your window, you would see birds just hopping around and you would think they were doing fine. But what they found was that those birds, because they couldn't passively listen for predators, had to constantly have their head on a swivel, which meant they got to eat less, which meant that they didn't have as much body fat going into the winter, which meant that they weren't as successful raising young. So we were seeing generational drawbacks to just having some speakers in the middle of the woods. And the road that they used as an example is one that goes through a national park. And so they recorded that national park road and then put it in the middle of the woods and showed how badly it affected the birds. And so that's a big one is how do we figure out ways to reduce just ambient noise in our communities to make them more amenable and helpful for wildlife to be able to find places to live in and thrive? It's interesting how everything can come back to fewer cars. As a big public transit bicycling girl, yeah, it's interesting how that, especially in suburban areas, we're all cars all the time. Everything. Because they're quieter when they're driving around, you think that it's less. But em once you get over 35 miles per hour, the biggest noise associated with the car is their tires, that popping. even EVs, once they're over 30 miles per hour, are just as loud as cars with an internal combustion engine. And they're just sort of different loud to me. Like, I don't know if I'm just sensitive to it, but I hear the whirring. It's very, the high pitched whirring. that's just a different type of noise. Yeah, and the shedding of the tires gets into water sources and there's, I mean, there's just so much associated with it. And I think all the time for the vast majority of the world, they look at us having individual cars as the peak of obscene luxury. And I just think like when I drive to the grocery store to get two bell peppers for a recipe, because I forgot to plan ahead and it's a mile away and I drive my car, I just think of someone in my... back of my head saying, did you know Americans drive a mile to the grocery store? And our combined impacts doing just those little trips outweighs any private flight or whatever that we like to get angry at billionaires for. Yeah. We have what we call the three kilometer rule. So I guess that's about a mile and a half ish, which is if something's within three kilometers of our house, we take our bike. We're a one car family here in the suburbs. We still have to drive a car. It is what it is, but we went down to one car. Gosh, our car's probably 10 or 11 years old now. So whenever we got that. Now, of course, we both work from home. So that's an added bonus, but we have the three kilometer rule. So if you forgot those bell peppers and the store's a mile away, you're taking your bike. Yeah, and I think that probably is helpful to be like, well, do I really need them? Is there some kind of alternative I can use to get something similar? Because things are sometimes too easy. uh Or it just makes me makes you really think hard about your grocery list. I think that's a good way to go. Yeah, it's planning, it's meal planning, planning your trips, planning how far away things are, having an errand day, all of those kinds of things are habits that we can shift to lessen the impact of the drive to the store, for example. I've even started doing errands with a friend sometimes because it's so hard to see your friends as an adult, know, like, let's hang out sometime and then it's six months later. So we've done that before too, like, let's just all go to the farmer's market together and we carpool. doesn't have to be part of pulling this from practice. of years and one of the things I thought was really interesting was that um on every street corner almost there was someone running a little shop out of their their house or just it was almost like lemonade stands except they would sell tortillas and veggies and staples and coke things like that and if we did not have the luxury of all congregating in the same big box store several times a day then it could create a smaller network of locally run businesses. I mean, I really liked it. I liked being able to get French tortillas every day instead of something that was shipped over several days and is already 10 days old by the time I get them from the grocery store. We pick them frozen off the shelf. It's just such a disconnected experience. So far we've talked a lot about the ways that every day we can connect with nature in our everyday lives. But your real work, your day job, is also part of some really big systems from either community level projects to the policies that shape the landscape. So let's talk about community science projects first. Even from nest box monitoring, things like bird counts. That gives everyday people a chance to contribute to research. So from your perspective, why are those types of projects really valuable? I think that people having a connection through citizen science makes them more passionate about that resource. And so if a lot of people, I guess one of the big things that I keep trying to hammer is that we need to specialize, especially in the face of institutional breakdown. We need to pick our thing and stick to it. And that means that when everyone is all talking about one subject that is the big topic on social media that day, you're still plugging along at the thing you have expertise in. And so for me, I have my professional expertise as an ecologist, and then I have my volunteer expertise from volunteering for almost 15 years at this point. And so those are the things that I can comfortably talk about, and I'll talk about them every day. And then something will come up where I'm like, I do really care about, say, immigration or the treatment of... of immigrants and I want to be like, I need to do something about that too. And so I might dash off a social media post or see if there's something I can be doing in my community. But I can't let it make me waiver from the thing that I've spent a decade getting good at where I can actually benefit a lot of people. One of the dangers I think is that we get people who will get really worked up about something that day and try to fix something without realizing that there's already people who've been doing this for a long time. They've made it their profession. They're experts at it. They know the legal landscape. They know how to fix the problem. They just need resources. And instead of you going out on the street and trying to figure out your own way to do it, you could empower these groups who have been working at this for a really long time and who know what to do. just need maybe some extra hands or some dollars usually. And so I think that's a big thing we can do. for citizen science, it's a similar thing where if I've been monitoring, well, and I have, I've been doing a breeding bird survey for 10 years now where I go out and count the birds once a year. And I've been watching how the landscape has changed over that time and seeing how it impacts the way that my data comes out. And so that kind of thing makes it so people... can't ignore major changes that otherwise you wouldn't know. I'll give an anecdote. I was talking to a coworker here in Utah. We've had the driest summer, spring and summer in 150 years. We had a really big rainstorm in some parts that kind of lifted us out a little bit. we were talking about summer coming to an end and someone was like, I really. hate to see summer go. And I was like, I'm ready for this summer to be over. And he's like, why? And I'm like, well, it's been so dry. And he had no idea that it hadn't rained since May. And so if we are that disconnected from probably the most fundamental weather cycle that our entire species has revolved around, it makes me really worry about other things that are not so apparent that we're not paying attention to. So that's another reason why I really encourage people to. pick one thing they're passionate about that's not their job and spend four to 10 hours a week or month even pursuing that. This is the story of how I accidentally joined a birding group. So when we first moved to our suburb, we had been living in downtown Toronto. And then when we found out we were having another kid, surprise, we were like, God, we panicked and moved to the suburbs. Not my favorite, but I saw a flyer that there was going to be a talk by a local biologist at the library. And I was like, yeah, that's kind of my jam. I'm going to go to that. And it ended up being this gentleman who had immigrated to Canada from the UK. He's been birding since he was a wee lad, as he would say. And he's out at 5 a.m. every morning doing the breeding bird of Aurora. He published this whole study himself. He had been working with the town since 1991-ish, I want to say, on creating a nature reserve in an undeveloped part of town where this woman who owned a farm was going to donate it half in part to Ducks Unlimited. I don't know if you know them. They're a conservation group here in Canada and the other half to the town of Aurora. Now the town of Aurora has chopped up their bit a little bit and continued to sell little parcels to the developers. uh But anyhow, I'm sitting here and I'm listening to him talk about creating this nature reserve. So this is back in 2012, I guess, ah and saying, you know, if you want to stay on our newsletter, you know, sign up on the form. I sign up on the form. Next thing you know, I'm at the meeting at the community center and I have been assigned a route to do the nest box monitoring. And so we have these little, they're made out of recycled Tetra packs. They're all along the trails, all around Aurora, again, which were built around a stream, a water system that they couldn't build houses on in the ravine. So we're lucky to have these trails. We have over 250 boxes around town now. We're the largest group in Canada that does this. And we submit data to Birds Canada, which is like the Audubon Society equivalent. And the years that I've been doing it, I have seen my I call them my birds, I've seen my population decline over time. We also have an invasive species here called the ash borer beetle, an emerald ash borer beetle. And so we're losing a lot of mature trees here in town and they keep cutting them and chipping them the second week of May. We're like, guys, this is nesting season. And so one year I had no birds because of this. But what we're able to do with that data is yes, we share it with. It gets made available to academics for their studies, but we can also take our local level data to town council and lobby for things like, can we be cutting at a different time, different noise impact, you mentioned earlier about noise pollution, like all of this woodshipping is affecting every single bird that is trying to breed, whether they're in my boxes or not. people draining their pools into the back, into the trails, all of this kind of thing. We can take this data that we collected, that we've seen with our own eyes to town council and passionately lobby to protect green space in town. And in 2022, that nature reserve that I described was incorporated and named the David Tomlinson Nature Reserve shortly before he passed. So your citizen science efforts. If that's something that you're interested in, is a group doing it in your town, join them and become a part of it. And it really does make a difference. Yeah, and if there isn't a group, you can make one. We just had a meeting, me and another biologist in our community with one of our city council members. We sat there and looked at a map. We identified areas where we could maybe do pollinator gardens. We identified areas where we could do beaver dam analogs. And we talked about having an official working group um and inviting some of the expertise in our community, but also having a community advocacy group. And I said, I would like to be a part of the community advocacy group, but I can't be in charge of it because I work in government and I want them to be pills. And so it's good to have a group of people who are working from within who are bureaucrats and. know who to talk to, but you also need some people on the outside who are making people a little bit uncomfortable. I think you need that push and pull and people who are gathering data and not liking the answers and passing that uh sometimes unwelcome message. We need those just as much as we need people who are kind of celebrating what's already happening or talking about. These are some cool projects we've proposed. I think we need both, both things. Sometimes you can be both. That's me. Our group also does frog logging. And so recently you wrote about wildlife road crossings, the amphibian road crossing with the slippery little homies, which sent me to the moon. But so everything from frog crossing to long-term studies that show how effective these wildlife road crossing structures can be. So can you tell us about those and why they're so important? Yeah, this is probably my main part of expertise. That's what I've been working on the most in my career is wildlife crossings. I work for Department of Transportation. I don't speak for them. I'm speaking for myself, but I've been really integral. Well, that sounds I've been a big I don't want to say I've been integral in them happening. That sounds like I'm really tooting my own horn, but I've been involved in every step of it. So I know what it all entails. And some of these structures are incredibly expensive. So on the one hand, we can talk about being a small group of people who are doing some nest boxes and making a huge impact for a small amount of birds. Or we can talk about landscape level changes. And that's where you have to really leverage the entirety of our societal structures to get big things to happen. And so a wildlife crossing on the level that we do here in Utah, where we have big charismatic animals like deer and elk and moose and bears. Those are multimillion dollar efforts. Sometimes we'll put them on a calendar 10 years in advance, which makes people a little bit frustrated because they don't really think on the same level that government works. But that's the kind of planning you have to put in place to get something like that on the landscape. And then the ones you mentioned, still structures that I want to say cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. were just small tunnels for frogs to use. And so it's easier to sell something like a wildlife crossing where there is a public safety angle to it. You have moose crossing the road and a moose collision is catastrophic. And whitetail deer are the number one killers in America when it comes to wildlife, the most dangerous wildlife in North America, and it's not even close. And so something like that, there's a public safety angle that makes the numbers add up. but it doesn't mean that we can forget about our slippery homies, I think, like I said in the post, that are getting hit, that are declining. Some of them live their entire life between two ponds and there's a road between them. And so right now people are hauling them across the road in buckets and that's not a long-term solution. And so we need to be thinking about these long-term solutions. And what it would take is a lot of people caring about one thing. and spending years doing it. So that kind of goes back to the specialization. And I think a lot of us would kind of laugh at someone who is maybe like a middle-aged mom or dad who cares about one kind of salamander. And you'd be like, wow, he turns every conversation into that salamander. But that's the kind of personalities we need. And you can live a normal life and be a normal person, but then just keep hammering away at one little thing that is your passion. And that kind of thing has long-term results. But I think a lot of us aren't built to stick with something like that. There's a, in Ben Goldfarb's book, Eager About Beavers, he talks about a woman who has just become one of the most passionate beaver advocates in the world. And it all started because there was a couple of beavers in a pond near her community in California. And now she's been connecting people and putting together all these networks. And so I really want to encourage people, especially if you have that kind of gene, I think I have it, the hyper-focused gene, to pick something. And even if people laugh at you, just keep plugging away at it and keep bringing it up. Make sure it's scientifically sound, because I think sometimes people will espouse something like that based on bad science or even because of something like a conspiracy theory. But if you've got something that holds up to scrutiny, and you've got experts who are on your side. They just need someone out there advocating and pestering and sending out the newsletters and making the phone calls. That's the kind of person we need, especially right now when you're not gonna get that kind of advocacy on a leadership level from some of these agencies that we have depended on forever to do. And so it's gonna need some heroes. um I've talked about some of them in the past. There's one I really love, Harriet Hemingway, who fought against the feather hats and basically started or restarted the Audubon Society. And she just did that with tea parties. There was another woman who had a bird preserve in her backyard, basically. It was a large property and she saw that the birds were declining. And so she wrote a friend and asked a question. And that friend was Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring and probably kickstarted the modern environmental movement. And it just started because someone was looking out her window and didn't see as many birds as she used to. So I think that times like these bring out uh that kind of person. And I'm excited to see who's out there getting that kind of stuff started that we haven't even heard of yet. Yeah. I mean, we all know, yeah, call your representative and all that kind of stuff, but be a massive weirdo is really underrated advice. And as soon as anyone asks me a bird question, like you're really in for it. And I'm here for it. When I'm out monitoring and people ask me what I'm doing, I've had some of the best conversations with people in my town since I've lived here. It's really wonderful. It really activates people. Yeah, just be a massive weirdo. So one more thing that runs through your work is how we experience the outdoors. And because we are on the internet and we are constantly marketed to, it's really easy to get caught up and like you need the latest and greatest, the gear, the gadgets to do it all right. And that that's like, it's almost like you have to buy your way. into the outdoors. So like, what's your take on that? How do you personally navigate that as someone who has to be outside a lot? Yeah, I kind of have a running joke I've made on social media where I say that the reason why wildlife biologists don't get sponsored like hikers do or backpackers do is because we buy one thing and we'll use it for the rest of our lives. You can tell you're looking at a biologist by that exactly what he's wearing because it's exactly what he wore in his first year uni class. And it's exactly what he's wearing to teach ecology 30 years later. you got when you got out there still works. Yeah, I'm still rocking my field bag from 1998. And so in that way, we should be poster children for that industry. Because what we're saying is, you build something so indestructible that a biologist or an ecologist, a field ecologist uses gear in a way that is well beyond even a backpacker, probably on par with uh a very dedicated hunter, but we do it all year round. And so the kind of stress we put this, put onto this gear, they should be clamoring for us to represent their stuff. I think one of the reasons they don't is because I'm not going to say, hey, this new zipper here in the 2025 version makes it worth repurchasing. Because what I would say is if it's still working, if your 1994 jacket is still waterproof with some treatment, then run with it because that's what we all do. None of us get paid enough to replace our stuff until it's absolutely necessary. It is a little bit antithetical to the need to post. a profit every year. I do think there are some good companies that really, they just want to sell you something once, but they probably weren't acquired by an investment firm. They weren't sold to uh one of the major corporations. And so they don't have to keep posting a higher stock price. They're happy to just keep their folks busy and every once in a while unveil something new and their fans will run out and grab it because they know it's going to be good. so I do. find that kind of stuff new, but for the most part, I am a real heavy yard sale and thrift store user when it comes to refreshing my outdoor gear. Yeah, there's a great secondhand market out there for outdoor gear. Forever. Yeah. There's no reason why you would ever have to, I mean, the best thing you can do is say you upgrade something because your family gets a little bigger or you've got something good on sale. Then you find a new home for, for your old stuff and it's going to make someone else really happy. Lend your things out. You are not camping 365. Lend your gear out to the people in your life because we don't all need to own everything. Yeah, I wish I could remember where I saw this, but it basically said that one of the signs of the breakdown of the American society is that everyone has their own lawnmower. So if we did have a more, I guess, friendly relationship with our neighbors, we should only have a lawnmower for every five people because no one is mowing every single day or all day. And so you should be able to create networks where you can. stop by and pick up a kayak and they understand that they can stop by and pick up a mountain bike. And everyone realizes that if you take good care of your stuff, that'll all be there for everybody. So again, I think that's a great point and it's something we don't really talk about enough. Yeah. So both of us are in our forties ish, that sort of middle age range. So, and we're both out here on our, on our social media trying to be, we're influencers, we're de-influencers. I don't really know what the term would be, but like, what's it been like for you to navigate that at our advanced age? It is interesting because I always feel like my social media has an expiration date attached to it because I can't imagine myself being 55 or 60 and still like making jokes online. But I don't know why that is other than we don't have a lot of people who do that unless they adopted it later in life because most people didn't grow up with this kind of stuff. And so we are kind of the first generation, especially us, we're the first generation that didn't have internet. Now we have internet. We've embraced uh almost every aspect of it. I've decided that AI is where I draw the line and I just won't, I won't keep progressing if that's where it goes. I'll be, that's where I'll be drawing my line. Also, I won't have a smart watch. I like automatic watches too much. That's a little hobby of mine. And so there are a couple of things where I'm finally like, okay, this piece of technology I'm finally opting out on. But as long as there's people who are engaging with it and I don't know, I kind of think uh maybe this is a tangent, but I saw They Might Be Giants a little while ago and they were my favorite band when I was a senior in high school. Still one of my favorite bands and there were all generations there. They've been able to reach children through some of their kids music and now we are getting to the point where those kids who were first exposed to They Might Be Giants are adults now. And so I don't know if... We have to think that much about generations because the internet has democratized stuff so much that if a message is appealing, it's appealing whether you're 45 or you're 15. But I do wonder if there's a point where um maybe it's not grown up to be talking on the internet anymore. And I worry about that with my volunteering too, that there will be a point where maybe a bald middle-aged man isn't the right person to be in that room. just based on feedback from my colleagues and from our responses. It sounds like it hasn't happened yet. So I guess I'll just keep plugging along. Please do. I'm obsessed with you. oh Everyone please go follow Howie's Everything Club. um It's a journey and it's my favorite. You're gonna learn something every day and you're gonna feel good about it. Well, one of the big things about social media that I even experience is I'll see a really interesting video and then I'll go and be like, oh, they're not doing that every time and I won't follow because I want more of that thing. But when you're a creator, you don't want to do the same thing over and over. And so it has become a pretty wild mishmash. And you kind of just have to be on board with me as a person and not. any one aspect of my message or it probably isn't going to work. And I think that's kind of how social media is going to have to get because you can't always be the, I can't even think of some of the niches, but a specific kind of dance or uh a gimmick because not only will you get bored and burned out, but also the world will move on and you just won't have anything new to say. So. uh It is a tricky transition from having a very specific thing that you talk about every time to just being like, Hey, this, I'm just going to talk about everything that is me. And if you're on board, you're welcome. And if not, there's other people out there for you. Yeah, that's really where I've landed. Like I can't just talk about silly little daily sustainability things you can do because A, I forget that I'm doing them and I can't film everything and I'm just tired. You know, like I'm tired of chasing metrics and trying to grow and all of that. And as soon as I let that go, everything stayed pretty steady. And I mean, come for the tips and stay for my deranged stories. Because it's just whatever pops into my head at the time. That's just who I am as a person. And we can vibe or not. And that's cool. And I hope that you find something that you like and that adds to your life. And if that's not me, that's OK. you have too narrow a niche, then you are also very easily duplicated. And so one of the big things going on in social media and AI and all that stuff is if something is pretty simple, then it's going to be copied. And so I think the only thing you can do is the thing that, well, this is going to sound redundant. I guess I should say it better. Do something that only you can do. And if that means that there's a certain amount of personality that you're injecting, you've got a voice, you have a take, you have a sense of humor, that's where you're going to have long-term success. em And if you start out just happening on something that a lot of people are really interested in, I think that you find a way to ride that out and then inject your personality so that somebody else can't just come along and copy it or just put it into a computer and have it spit out something that's so similar that... em It can they can create 100 videos a day where you would never be able to keep up with that. So I think that is kind of the balance, I guess. going viral over confer needles is probably the best place to start with that. would say if you're Matt Howard. Duplicate it. I've tried so many times to be like, okay, I'm going to start with a joke and then how do I identify this? it's just that there's a certain magical sauce to that video that I've never been able to make again. And so I've just had to be grateful that it happened once. Yeah, this was me, the story of me crushing eggshells in a jar. Like, I don't even know why that took off, but it did, and it brought me nothing. And you know what? It's fine. So just save your eggshells for your compost, So Matt, as we start to wrap up, I like to ask all my guests this little question. So I call this one small shift, and it's just what's like one small doable thing that someone could start doing today that might feel meaningful for them? in your own life? What's a tip you could give someone? I think. I think what we were talking about about getting your outdoor gear secondhand, I think that's a good one. Make a list of what you're out there looking for and then just keep your eyes out. And then another thing, let people know that you're looking for it. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a very avid hiker and I was complaining about how on my hike down, uh I really hurt my ankles and I should get some trekking poles. And she was like, my husband won trekking poles, we don't need them. And so she brought them the next day. And so even saying, hey anybody out there have a Coleman stove? That was the first thing that sort of started me on this is I wanted a white gas Coleman stove for camping and for emergencies. And that's why we started going to yard sales and why we started being able to find fishing poles and fishing gear and all sorts of stuff. We've been able to expand our gear selection um at a dollar to five dollars at a time and so I think that's a good one. That's perfect. Secondhand first. Yeah. And also, find meaningful places you can get rid of your stuff. um Donating stuff, feels good if you take it to a thrift store, but most stuff at thrift stores never gets sold. And so if you can find someone who is the right person for it and let them know that you're giving it away, I think that's another thing that we don't spend a lot of time doing that we could really be a part of our community being thoughtful about how we get rid of our old stuff. Yeah, look into your local buy nothing group. I really can't stress this enough. Our local one is phenomenal. And I've met just the loveliest people, leave you a little note or I've had someone leave me cookies after they came to pick something up. I, you can't, that's something you can't buy. So, well, Matt, thank you so much for being here today and for your time and your wisdom. And this has been just my favorite conversation. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. And so for folks who want to find you or follow along with your work, where can they find you? It's Howie's underscore everything club on Instagram and tick tock. I also have a YouTube video or YouTube account that I'm not very good at keeping up to date on. And I think that one is called Howie's optimism club. And I think that there is a well, I know there's a blue sky account that is also at Howie's optimism. So those are the main things. And then I'm also on Substack and I have a Patreon where everything is free if you want to. pay to subscribe, that's just voluntary, but there's no paywalls on anything. Thanks again to Matt for coming on today and all of the wisdom and anecdotes that he shared with us about how we can protect wildlife and naturalization in our everyday lives. And be sure to go follow him at Howie's Everything Club. He'll become your favorite too. And thanks for listening to Sustainable in the Suburbs. Don't forget to check out the show notes for all the links of everything we mentioned today, along with resources on how you can start making your own suburban spaces a little friendlier for wildlife. Until next time. Start where you are, use what you have, and live a little greener. Thanks for tuning in to Sustainable in the Suburbs. Every small step adds up and I'm so glad we're doing this together. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to follow the show, share it with a friend and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. You can find me at sustainableinthesuburbs.com or at Sarah Robertson Barnes on all the things. Until next time, start where you are, use what you have and live a little greener.