Mississippi Outdoors Podcast

Have you noticed it's a little harder to see the stars at night lately? That's light pollution, and it turns out it's doing a lot more than dimming the night sky. In this episode of the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast, Matt Wyatt sits down with Murray Burgess, ornithologist at Mississippi State University, to talk about how artificial light is affecting migratory birds.

Mississippi is the Hospitality State — and few people have done more to prove it than Robert St. John. In this episode of the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast, Matt Wyatt sits down with the Hattiesburg restaurateur, author, and travel host to talk about food, Mississippi, and a career that started because he flunked out of college.Mississippi Outdoors is produced by the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks.

If you've got a pond on your property — or you're about to dig one — this episode is for you. In this episode of the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast, Matt Wyatt sits down with Larry Bull, retired MDWFP fisheries biologist, to walk through exactly how to stock a pond and get it right the first time.

If you've driven the Natchez Trace on a rainy night south of I-20 and seen someone out there with a safety vest and a flashlight, that's zoologist Tom Mann — and he's been out there for over a decade studying Webster's salamanders.Tom joins the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast to explain what Webster salamanders are, why scientists thought they didn't migrate, and how he and his wife Deb proved them wrong by spending years watching what the animals actually did instead of what the textbooks said.

Mike Strickland from the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources joins the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast to talk about what marine patrol actually does — and it's a lot more than checking fishing licenses.

When you buy a hunting or fishing license in Mississippi, where does that money actually go? Russ Walsh, Director of Conservation at the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks, breaks down why your license isn't just "permission to hunt" — it's a direct investment in the conservation work that brought deer, turkey, and other species back from near extinction.