Recent News
2025 Updates
Jack continues to lead walks for various organizations around the Spokane area. Since many of these excursions have a short lead time, the best way to find out about them is to get on our mailing list by sending an email request on the Contact Page.
Jack has also completed a pair of visual essays for HistoryLink.org that explore tribal use of fire on the landscape around the period of contact—one for east of the Cascades, one for the west side.
You can view them at
https://historylink.org/File/23302
https://historylink.org/File/23301
Upcoming dates to note:
Fort Colvile Summit
October 18, 2025: 10AM-3PM
Mistequa Hotel and Casino
Register and learn more here
Jack will moderate a wide-ranging conversation about the impact of Fort Colvile across our region at the Mistequa Hotel in Chewelah. The panel participants will offer a wealth of talent and perspective about thorny issues that still resonate today.
Illuminations: Naturalists & Botanicals with Jack Nisbet
November 13, 2025: 11AM-Noon
Spokane Central Library
Jack will join Dana Bronson and Sharma Shields in the Spokane Public Library’s Northwest Room to page through various published editions of David Douglas’s field journals from the Northwest. Join us to explore these treasures from the Northwest Room vault and learn more about what Douglas saw while he was here in 1826 and 27.
Newly Listed 2024 Speaking Events
WSU Press has just released the first paperback edition of David Douglas: A Naturalist at Work. This highly illustrated collection of essays describes David Douglas’s time in the Pacific Northwest through period artwork, tribal interactions, archival treasures, herbarium specimens, and tracking the trails and waterways that Douglas traveled.
For more information, click here.
Jack will be making presentations about:
- David Douglas’s journeys across the Columbia Plateau at The Sandhill Crane Festival in Othello, Washington, on March 23 at 2:30 p.m.
- Mammoth bone finds around the margins of Ice Age Floods at the Ice Age Flood Institute’s annual Jubilee in Spokane on June 7.
- John and Carrie Leiberg’s homestead site at Farragut State Park on Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho. This presentation will be held at the Athol Community Center on June 15 as part of the Idaho Native Plant Society’s annual meeting.
- Wildfire 1991 in the Dishman Hills at the Spokane Valley Library (details to come).
See UPCOMING EVENTS to check out these events plus other hikes and presentations scheduled for 2024 as they become finalized.
New Edition of Sources of the River
The last scientifically documented sighting of a wild condor in Washington state occurred in 1897. Can they come back?
Jack’s latest article in the Pacific Northwest Inlander discusses the last documented sighting of wild condors in Washington State. Is it possible for them to ever return? What is the current status of the birds, and what future plans exist for them?
The article appears in two parts, both of which are available via the links below.
The status of condors right now and future plans for the big bird
Jack is Returning to the Sandhill Crane Festival in Othello
Jack Returns to Writing for the Pacific Northwest Inlander
Coming Soon: The Many Gardens of John and CARRIE LEIBERG
This event will celebrate the freshly remodeled and re-landscaped Shadle Park branch of the Spokane Public Library
In 1885 Swedish immigrant John Leiberg and his companion Carrie staked out a homestead on the south end of Lake Pend Oreille. Join Jack Nisbet for a slide presentation that follows the Leibergs from their vegetable garden and orchard at the lake through festoons of mosses in the Clark Fork Delta, explosions of spring wildflowers in the shrub-steppe of the Columbia Basin, and old growth forests along the spine of the Rocky Mountains.
Book Recommendations
Here is the URL: https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-interwoven-lifeways-of-plants-and-people
I would be grateful if you share your list with friends or on social media. You can find Shepherd on Twitter and Facebook if you want to tag them.
New Events!
Yakima Audubon Society talk on condors date change
Sorry to say that Covid has delayed the Yakima Audubon Society talk on condors scheduled for Thursday February 25th.
This event will now take place on Thursday, April 22.
We will put a zoom link up on the web site shortly before the new April date.