Ryan Wilkes

Nearly 150 North American bird names have not aged well, ruffling feathers in the ornithological world and revealing deep roots in colonial legacies. Keen birders explore what's really in a name?

Three million years ago, camels roamed through Greenland’s endless forests and our ancestors lived in the trees. It all came to an end with the Ice Ages. What died and what survived, as natural selection shaped the evolutionary tree during this epochal shift from hot to cold? Until now, scientists have known less about the natural world before the Ice Age than they did about the age of dinosaurs, which ended 64 million years ago. A new discovery is set to reveal this lost world, species by species. Led by Danish gene-hunter Eske Willerslev, a team of scientists for the first time in history is sequencing DNA from before the Ice Age. The picture that emerges is of a hot planet, when forests blanketed the Arctic and carbon levels matched those in our atmosphere today. Is this a portrait of our own climate future?

In an urban backyard on Canada’s West Coast, a window salesman has created a living laboratory for investigating hummingbird behaviour. The Bird in My Backyard follows citizen scientist, Eric Pittman, as he documents the journeys of two female Anna’s hummingbirds as they attempt to raise their young in his urban garden. It’s a story about the childlike curiosity in all of us, the wonders it can reveal and the doors it can open if we just lean in a bit closer.

One of British Columbia’s last remaining fire lookouts, 72-year-old Bart Vanderlinde, scans horizons and distills life lessons during what may be his final fire season in the watchtower.

Sandpipers' Last Supper tells the story of the western sandpiper’s long-distance migration and the biofilm in the mud that supports the species’ survival. The documentary highlights the ecological value of intertidal mudflats and the urgency to save these vital habitats for shorebirds, one of the fastest disappearing groups of birds in the world.

Award-winning Canadian anthropologist and filmmaker Niobe Thompson brings usFrozen in Time, his newest film exploring the mysteries of evolution through the story of Natalia Rybczynski. A star in the field of paleontology, a traumatic brain injury stopped the scientist in her tracks. Before her injury, Natalia made fascinating discoveries in the Arctic, including the land-walking ancestor of seals, the first appearance of dam-building beavers, even the evolutionary origins of desert camels in Arctic snows. Her work suggests the Arctic was once a kind of evolutionary hub for species we now associate with much warmer climates. Despite her damaged brain, Natalia has never lost her curiosity and continues to study the high Arctic, once a rich forest world full of surprising creatures that thrived there before the Ice Age.