Nerdy About Nature's Ross Reid is out to educate his hundreds of thousands of followers about Canada's flora and fauna through his social media channels.CHAD HIPOLITO/The Globe and Mail
For Ross Reid, even his daily dog walk can lead him smack dab into the astounding activity of Cascadia’s flora and fauna happening underfoot, like a pair of slugs fornicating on a fallen fern.
When the action sports filmmaker turned science communicator sees mating molluscs or other eye-catching natural phenomena, he uses his cellphone to record himself getting “nerdy about nature” in rapid-fire clips that he shares with the more than a quarter-million people following his social media accounts.
With the slugs, he zooms in on the pair of gastropods and explains how they carry both male and female reproductive parts and fertilize each other at the same time by extending their penises from behind their heads to intertwine and transfer sperm.
He concludes, however, this marvel of nature is “actually kind of a bad thing” because they are invasive European brown slugs, which are outbreeding the banana slugs native to the West Coast.
Mr. Reid, who grew up exploring the outdoors across the U.S. border in Washington State, started posting the videos just before the pandemic after friends urged him to channel his blabbering on their backcountry ski trips into this more public forum. Shortly thereafter, protective public-health measures shelved much of his work shooting action sports films around the world, or “ski porn” as he refers to many of these extreme documentaries he’s helped make. So he dove headfirst into this new venture and began racking up millions of views in just a few months.
See Ross Reid in action and hear how he found an outlet for his passion for Canada's plants and animals.
The Globe and Mail
He puts his Nerdy About Nature videos on Instagram and TikTok, and records a regular podcast with guests, all of which are also available on his website.
His posts range from explaining the crucial role salmon play in the health of coastal conifers (the fish accumulate vast amounts of rare nitrogen and carbon isotopes in the ocean and then return upstream where their carcasses redistribute it to the forest floor) to explaining how “bonsai-ed” shore pines eke out an existence on granite cliffs.
But, the 37-year-old whose staccato flow is inspired by 1990s rappers like Jeru the Damaja, finds the most eyeballs have been drawn to his explainers on bear dens, old-growth cedars and pretty much any clip with mushrooms in it.
Ross Reid holds a hedgehog mushroom in Ucluelet, B.C. on Dec. 6, 2022.CHAD HIPOLITO/The Globe and Mail
“People love fungi more than trees for some reason,” says Mr. Reid, who also works part-time filming and doing communications work for the non-profit Redd Fish Restoration Society, which brings back British Columbia’s freshwater habitats damaged by logging to help preserve the wild fish populations.
The episodes where he explains the ways the logging industry obscures its activity have also proven popular, says Mr. Reid, whose great grandfather came to the West to log in southern Oregon. Green veils, for instance, are strips of trees that have been left beside highways since the 1990s after people were outraged at the acres of clear cuts that used to greet motorists travelling the province.
“Even after decades of public protests, regulations were supposed to outlaw the use of these tactics, and here we are in 2021: We’ve got a freshly cut old-growth forest just on the side of the highway, because after all, outta sight, outta mind, right?’” asks Mr. Reid, who studied film at Montana State University while minoring in biology.
Still, he cautions in the caption of his video that it is too easy to cast blame on the forestry companies for swaying the public in this way when government is responsible for setting the rules, which, in turn, are informed by the demands and values of an engaged public.
“It’s up to us, the people, to demand rules and regulations from the government to protect the world we live in from the demands of ourselves so that we cannot only survive as individuals, as families with children, but as a species,” he continues.
Mr. Reid, a long-time supporter of the Greens and New Democrats, is not afraid to get political, often criticizing the provincial government for not doing enough to protect B.C.’s remaining ancient forests from being cut down. Rather than trying to co-opt him and his large platform, he says the ruling party mostly tries to ignore him, as evidenced by former premier John Horgan blocking him on Instagram.
Usnea that's fallen on a Salal bush spotted in Ucluelet, B.C.CHAD HIPOLITO/The Globe and Mail
Indra Hayre, a diversity, equity and inclusion professional who runs the Incluskivity social media page dedicated to bringing marginalized groups into snow sports, says Nerdy About Nature communicates important science that people are absorbing despite their attention spans being shorter than ever. Mr. Reid is also using his privilege and platform to elevate overlooked voices like hers, inviting her on his podcast a year ago.
Perhaps most impressively, Ms. Hayre adds, he is also cramming something else into his short videos that is so rare in the age of algorithms hell-bent on fomenting dissent: nuance.
Like famous popular science communicators “the Daves” (Attenborough and Suzuki) and his main idol Bill Nye the Science Guy, Mr. Reid wants to deepen the public’s understanding of the nature around them so that people are motivated to protect it, he says. To do that full-time and potentially expand his message to longer films, he is trying to add to his roster of 336 monthly online funders, which currently includes the Patagonia brand (”pretty cool”) as well as actor Adrian Grenier (”the guy from that show about Hollywood that was on HBO”).
Until then, he will keep traversing the wilderness with his partner or their dog Pintxo and trying not freeze up or get camera shy when the odd passerby turns a corner and finds him doing one of dozens of takes staring up at his smartphone.
“I’m on my phone, but there’s no service, so they’re like, ‘What is this guy doing?’”