Outdoors with Coggin Heeringa
Every Wednesday on Classical IPR, Coggin Heeringa takes us into the great outdoors.
She served as the program director and interpretive naturalist at Crossroads at Big Creek Learning Center/Nature Preserve in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin until her retirement in 2026. She's taught environmental studies at Interlochen Arts Camp since 1971.
Latest Episodes
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November's beauty is easier to appreciate when we understand what is happening beneath those heavy skies. -
Ghost flowers lack chlorophyll. Instead of green leaves and stems, almost the entire plant is a waxy, translucent white, sometimes tinged with pale pink. -
What looks like a massive forest of thousands of individual aspen trees is often just a few massive interconnected organisms called clones. -
On some maples, leaves on the sun-facing shoulder may be brilliant red, while those on the shaded side are still yellow or even green. And that isn’t an illusion. -
In England autumn colors tend to be muted yellows and browns, but here in the Northern United States and parts of Canada we get bright red autumnal leaves. -
If a mother bear fails to accumulate roughly 30 to 35 percent body fat, her body simply reabsorbs the embryos. -
Deep in December, it's nice to remember where your food is cached - if you're a chickadee. -
The tree lets the leaves go, not because they are useless, but because they have another purpose waiting on the forest floor. -
When the days grow short and the birds stop singing, our resident mammals prepare to survive until spring. -
Individual notes become music. Individual dots become art.
