What do loons have to do with courage and community?  In January, we received a letter from two sisters in Minnesota - Jude and Mo. They wrote to us because their city was experiencing a lot of unrest, with immigration agents arresting members of their community and protests ringing loud in the streets as people tried to protect their neighbors. And in the middle of it all, an unexpected symbol began appearing on storefronts, stickers, and even as tattoos: the black and white, migrating waterbird known as the loon. Jude and Mo were curious: why are loons a good symbol of standing strong in the face of adversity?

Loon expert Dr. Walter Piper breaks down the incredible biology of the loon and helps us decode their mysterious calls; storyteller Hope Flanagan brings us Ojibwe tales of how the loon got its famous red eyes; and biologist Dr. Leonardo Chapa Vargas teaches us about loon migration, helping us expand our definition of home. We learn why these loud and eerie birds came to stand for something very powerful: the scrappy resilience of trying over and over again, no matter how many times you get knocked down.

Huge thanks to Jude, Mo and their mom, Natalie, for writing in about loons. Reminder that you can also write in about any creature you’d like to see an episode on! Email us at [email protected]. 

Listen to “The Going Home Star” on Spotify, Apple Music, and wherever you get your music.

We made special activity sheets for this episode! 

• Coloring Page
• Activity Sheet

We hope they will help you and your friends, family, students, or neighbors dig more deeply into the world of loons. If you want to share what you’ve made, ask an adult to share it on Instagram and make sure to tag @terrestrialspodcast, or email us at [email protected].

Dig Deeper:

• Check out Jude and Mo’s favorite loon sculpture in St. Paul, Minnesota!
• To learn more about Hope Flanagan, check out Dream of Wild Health, a farm and storytelling organization restoring wellbeing in the Native community.
• To see Walter Piper in a cool documentary, check out Loons: A Cry from the Mist.
• Read Shannon Heffernan’s reporting on how kids and adults are being affected by ICE Raids at The Marshall Project 
• Check out how the students of Valley View Elementary are writing letters to ICE agents detaining their friends and families by watching this video.
• We mentioned how loons are generalists - flexible - like our friends from our coyotes episode. Check out The Howler: The Dog Who Joined a Coyote Pack if you want to learn more!
• The Rumble Strip Vermont podcast has a beautiful episode about Hold On, a song that people have been singing at various protests.
• When Liam Conejo Ramos was detained by ICE agents, his classmates started folding origami bunnies in solidarity with Liam and all students who are unsafe. Watch a video of the project here.

Immigration resource links:

Immigration and Families Resources (National Council on Family Relations)

Resource Hub for Undocumented and Immigrant Families (Center for Migration Studies)

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Ana González, with sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick. Sarah Sandbach is our Executive Producer. Our team also includes Alan Goffinski, Tanya Chawla, Joe Plourde and Natalia Ramirez. Factchecking by Angely Mercado.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

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Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

Middle schooler, Aanya, has an up-close encounter with a squirrel in the school yard, which leads her to an obsession with one of North America's most common critters. She tells host Lulu Miller all about the overlooked superpowers of squirrels, including one squirrel who lives way up in the Arctic, where the weather gets so cold the squirrels who live there drop their body temperatures down below freezing and somehow, miraculously, survive.

Host Lulu travels to Alaska to meet one of these squirrels as it sleeps, and Lulu talks with biologists Dr. Kelly Drew and Dr. Brian Barnes about why this humble squirrel holds potential for treating Alzheimers, brain injury, and even helping astronauts hibernate on the long journey to Mars.

Check out the making of this episode here! Video by Amy Pearl. 

This episode features a song with a cameo from Chicago-based musician Tasha. Check out our songs page for 'On The Other Side (ft. Tasha)' and more new singles every week.

Special thanks to Aanya and her mom Roli for bringing us this story, and to Amy Loeffler, Clara Goulet, Loi Goulet, Ellie Bell and Ferris Jabr, the writer who first made the “pop-squirrel" joke. We came across it in a wonderful article he wrote in Scientific American. Also, check out this Wired article by Brendan I. Koerner for more on arctic ground squirrels.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Ana González, Mira Burt-Wintonick, Alan Goffinski, Joe Plourde and Lulu Miller, with help from Tanya Chawla, Sarah Sandback and Valentina Powers. Fact checking by Natalie Middleton. Transcription by Caleb Codding. 

Our advisors are Ana Luz Porzecanski, Andy J. Pizza, Anil Lewis, Dominique Shabazz, Liza Demby, Princess Daazhraii Johnson and Tara Welty.

Learn more about storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, Terrestrialspodcast.org.

Badger us on social media: @radiolab and #TerrestrialsPodcast or by emailing us at [email protected].

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for behind-the-scenes extras and more.

Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

How rested would you feel if you took 10,000 naps a day? Chinstrap Penguins in Antarctica spend their days taking MICRONAPS, each around 4 seconds long. To learn why, Lulu meets one (played by Songbud Alan), who explains how micronaps help them conserve energy and protect their babies from “sky pirates”!  Then, in a badgermania, penguin scientists Dr. Eric Wagner and Dr. Dee Boersma answer your questions! Why are penguins black-and-white? Why is their poop pink? What might they dream about? And we learn that what may look like laziness… turns out to be an evolutionary superpower. 

Don’t sleep on these articles, maybe read them before your next nap:

Read about chinstrap penguin naps here, and here, and here. 

Learn why penguin poop is pink and how it may be helping cool the climate!

Read about how neurons help flush waste out of the brain during sleep.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Ana González, with sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick. Sarah Sandbach is our Executive Producer. Our team also includes Alan Goffinski, Tanya Chawla and Joe Plourde. Factchecking by Sophie Samiee.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation.

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for behind-the-scenes extras and more.

Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

On February 17, in places like China, Malaysia, Korea and Chinatowns across the globe, dragons will rise in the form of massive puppets. Today we bring you a special Terrestrials episode on dragons to understand what they have to do with the New Year, what the dragon myth means, and explore the tiny chance that dragons could have ever been real. 

First, we meet Mr. Lu Dajie, one of China's most renowned dragon dancers, who tells us about the significance of dragons in China. Then producer bud Ana and song bud Alan ask whether there’s any chance that dragons were ever real. And if not, could we make  a dragon out of the things already evolved on Earth? Were there any reptiles as large as and shaped like dragons? Any large reptiles that flew? Any that spat fire? The answers may surprise you.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC studios. This episode was produced by Ana González, Alan Goffinski, Mira Burt-Wintonick, Tanya Chawla, Sarah Sandbach, Joe Plourde, and Lulu Miller. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. 

Learn more about storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, Terrestrialspodcast.org.

Badger us on social media: @radiolab and #TerrestrialsPodcast or by emailing us at [email protected].

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for behind-the-scenes extras and more.

Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

Holes are full of a whole lot of nothin'. Pure, hollow emptiness. At least that’s what Songbud Alan thought before he fell down a rabbit hole of, well, HOLES! In honor of Groundhog Day, he takes Lulu to a fossil-filled pit behind a Chick-fil-A to dig up 66-million-year-old treasure, and deep down to an underwater hole where blobs of colorful microbes reveal a time when Earth’s days were only 6 hours long. We discover eyeless cave fish, fall into a sinkhole of Corvettes, and go house hunting for the perfect animal hole to cozy up in... which leads us to  one of the coziest holes of all: a groundhog’s burrow.

Want to DIG deeper?

• Learn more about Staten Island Chuck, the groundhog with the highest spring prediction accuracy.
• Explore Edelman Fossil Park and dig for real fossils.
• Discover Mammoth Cave.
• Check out eyeless cave fish.
• Read about the Corvette Museum Sinkhole and how sinkholes form.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC. This episode was produced by Alan Goffinski, with sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick. Sarah Sandbach is our Executive Producer. Our team also includes Ana González, Tanya Chawla and Joe Plourde. Factchecking by Sophie Samiee.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation.

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for behind-the-scenes extras and more.

Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

Where do animals come from? That's something people have been trying to explain for thousands of years. And for a while, scientists and philosophers believed that any ol' person could create creatures if they just had the right recipe. A touch of sand, maybe a drop of blood and POOF: you could create life. That idea was believed to be true for generations until one brave scientist decided to look more closely at an unlikely bug and change the course of science forever. Lulu calls up our biology correspondent, Dr. Avir Mitra, to solve this ancient mystery.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC. This episode was produced by Ana González and Alan Goffinski, with sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick. Sarah Sandbach is our Executive Producer. Our team also includes Tanya Chawla and Joe Plourde. Factchecking by Diane Kelly.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation.

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for behind-the-scenes extras and more.

Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

To celebrate New Year’s Day, there are all kinds of traditions. Some people eat black eyed peas for good luck, some list out resolutions. But here at Terrestrials, we are taking a cue from the wisdom of pets, who are so, so, so good at sleeping. After a short preamble from Lulu, we’ll turn the microphone over to listeners’ furry friends snoring and snoozing in various positions, places, and locations. The piece will be largely wordless, with some narration from listeners describing their pets, and sound designed as a sort of meditation to rest.

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for behind-the-scenes extras and more.

Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

Sloths are the slowest mammals on Earth. How can a creature that moves so slowly survive in a world that moves so fast? Zoologist Lucy Cooke helps us rethink everything we know about sloths and their slowness. We follow a sloth named Nacho from a rainforest to a nightclub, trek deep into mangrove swamps to find a rare pygmy sloth and uncover the secret that allows sloths to evade even the deadliest predators. Hint: it has to do with a special kind of invisibility. 

For more, check out Lucy’s A Little Book of Sloth and her sloth calendar!

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC. This episode was reported and produced by Alan Goffinski, with sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick. Sarah Sandbach is our Executive Producer. Our team also includes Ana González, Tanya Chawla and Joe Plourde. Factchecking by Natalie Middleton.

Our advisors for this show were Liza Demby, Ana Luz Porzecanski, Nicole Depalma and Carly Ciarrocchi.

Special thanks to José Pablo Guzmán García, Dr. Sammy Ramsey and Lucy Cooke.

In more exciting news, we just created the first ever Terrestrials Jigsaw Puzzle! It’s a scene of all the creatures we’ve featured on Terrestrials so far, made by artist Arthur Jones. It can be yours for the simple price of supporting Terrestrials by joining our brand new Explorers Club! You get all types of perks like extra Alan songs, ad-free listening and this puzzle for the month of December! Visit TerrestrialsPodcast.org/donate. Thank you for all your support. 

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation.

A reminder that Terrestrials also makes original music! You can find ‘Gotta Slow It Down’ and all other music from the show here.

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for behind-the-scenes extras and more.

Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

What is a rainbow? An optical illusion? Or a thing out there in the world? For centuries, cultures around the world believed that rainbows were bridges - pathways to gods and to the afterlife. Then in 1665, during a plague, a young Isaac Newton made a discovery that changed everything :  sunlight is made of many colors. He counted 7. But artists, poets and curious children weren’t convinced. How could a rainbow only have seven colors? Their skepticism led to a far stranger discovery that would revolutionize how we understand the universe. - In the end, we learn that rainbows are kind of a bridge - between our outer and inner worlds. 

Science writer Philip Ball helps us follow the rainbow’s story, plus Songbud and the Youth Pride Chorus of New York City turn it all into a magical musical. 

To learn more about the history of color, read Dr. Ball’s book Bright Earth. 

Special thanks to Philip Ball, the Youth Pride Chorus of NYC, Nicholas Sienkiewicz and Rashad Chambers. 

In more exciting news, we just created the first ever Terrestrials Jigsaw Puzzle! It’s a scene of all the creatures we’ve featured on Terrestrials so far, made by artist Arthur Jones. It can be yours for the simple price of supporting Terrestrials by joining our brand new Explorers Club! You get all types of perks like extra Alan songs, ad-free listening and this puzzle for the month of December! Visit TerrestrialsPodcast.org/donate. Thank you for all your support. 

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC. This episode was produced by Tanya Chawla and Ana González, with technicolor sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick. Sarah Sandbach is our Executive Producer. Our team also includes Alan Goffinski and Joe Plourde. Factchecking by Diane Kelly.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation.

A reminder that Terrestrials also makes original music! You can find ‘Rainbows! The Bridge EP’ and all other music from the show here.

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for behind-the-scenes extras and more.

Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

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 composite organism, a mixture of two species — algae and fungi — working together to live. This idea originally challenged evolutionary theory so much that scientists didn’t believe it. But lichen had much more to teach us. 

Chef Prashanta Khanal fills us in on the food science of lichen, and how its collaborative powers also extend to making certain foods healthier! Learning that lichen draws its strength from collaboration eventually encouraged Ash to break out of their shell and reconnect to the world, where they would find not just friends and collaborators, but their true love.

Since the release of this podcast, artist Ash Eliza Williams goes by Ash and uses they/them pronouns.

Check out Ash Eliza Williams’s beautiful paintings.

Visit chef Prashanta's cooking blog, the Gundruk, for more on Nepali food history and recipes.

This episode features punk rock legend Laura Jane Grace, who makes a musical cameo on the song The Fuzzy Ruckus. Watch the music video and find the link to stream on our songs page.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC studios. This episode was produced by Brenna Farrel, Mira Burt-Wintonick, Alan Goffinski, Ana González, Tanya Chawla, Joe Plourde, Sarah Sandbach, Valentina Powers and Lulu Miller. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Transcription by Caleb Codding. 

Special thanks to Siya Sharma-Gaines, Niran Bhatt Scharpf, Scott LaGreca, and Sarita Bhatt.

Our advisors are Ana Luz Porzecanski, Andy J. Pizza, Anil Lewis, Dominique Shabazz, Liza Demby, Princess Daazhraii Johnson and Tara Welty.

Learn more about storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, 

Terrestrialspodcast.org.

Badger us on social media: @radiolab  and #TerrestrialsPodcast or by emailing us at [email protected].

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for behind-the-scenes extras and more.

Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

Lulu is hosting a holiday meal. She’s invited the characters from her extended kids podcast family - Wow in the World and Circle Round - for an epic kids podcast crossover special. It’s a potluck of stories and on the table is a turducken. Yes, a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken. Each show brings a wild  story about one of these creatures. We learn about a chicken’s unexpected journey back home, a duck mystery in the middle of the Arctic Ocean and an indigenous folktale about how the turkey got its gobble, culminating in a giant singalong. 

Keep learning!

Check out Inge the chicken’s route back home.

Read about the mysterious ocean quack sound. 

Learn about the turkey’s role in Cherokee culture. 

This episode was a huge collaboration between our team and the teams at Tinkercast’s Wow in the World and WBUR’s Circle Round, including Mindy Thomas, Guy Raz, Rebecca Sheir, Eric Shimelonis, Tom van Kalken, Steph Sosa and Anna Zagorski. 

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC. This episode was reported and produced by Lulu Miller, Alan Goffinski, Ana González and Tanya Chawla. Beautiful sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick and Joe Plourde. Engineering by Joe Plourde. Our Executive Producer is Sarah Sandbach. Factchecking by Anna Pujol-Mazzini. 

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation.

A reminder that Terrestrials also makes original music! You can find the single from this episode Turducken Dreams and all of our other music here.

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for behind-the-scenes extras and more.

Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!