When Bill Feeney stood out under the full moon on a frigid early April night in Northern Wisconsin in 1944 and gave a deep, full-throated howl, he was not expecting what he received: an equally deep, full-throated response from a wolf he and his colleagues from the Wisconsin Conservation Department had been tracking. Rather than calling out the names of fellow researchers whom he believed to be nearby, Feeney had howled as a bit of a joke.
Mimicking calls has spread far beyond wolves, however, and beyond voice to new devices and digital recordings, as researchers now use vocalizations to get a peek into many corners of the animal kingdom. Feeney reportedly howled just that one time. This was likely because he was leading the wolf study in secret and felt nightly howling sessions would not be a good way to keep the research clandestine.
In fact, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan now each have wolf hunting seasons and cull quotas. Officially, Feeney was conducting a major deer study, but the secret wolf study was an offshoot. He focused on counting and better understanding wolves’ social and hunting habits – knowledge he knew might be unattainable in the future, given that the state was paying a bounty of 20 dollars for a dead adult wolf and 10 dollars for a pup.
Feeney and the biologists who worked for him disagreed with the bounty and hoped the species would persist, and Feeney even told the famed ecologist Aldo Leopold that he would publish the wolf study findings, which showed that wolves did not significantly affect deer population.
Indeed, they did. That planted the seed, and he and his colleagues began howling as a means of locating wolves during late summer, when lack of snow and thick foliage prevents conventional surveys, which are done mostly by tracking paw prints and conducting visual surveys during the winter. After testing out their voices, they realized their own howls were as convincing to the wolves as the recordings of real wolves.
Then, he waits and listens. If there is no response, he will repeat the four-howl sequence, at the same cadence but louder. If this fails to elicit a response the howler might try a third time or move to a different location before howling again. Biologists have long been using vocalizations not just to locate animals but also to better understand animal communication and social structure.
‘With digital files we can manipulate them. You can take a single note and change its frequency and do playbacks right away and see how the animal we are studying responds. With tape, you have to splice and it takes hours on end.’ Webster says vocalizations let researchers start to unlock animal language, which is especially important with birds because they use sound to identify species and find mates and rivals.
‘Birds in cities sing differently than those in the country, because we humans make a hell of a lot of noise, so they shift the way they sing to make it louder.’ Animal vocalization has a considerably longer history in hunting than it does in wildlife research. In both applications, vocalizing is the art of fooling wild animals by imitating their ilk, but the motivations are vastly different. For wildlife biologists and other researchers, vocalization is a tool for conserving or arguably, saving wildlife. Hunters use vocalizations, as well as decoys and olfactory attractants – smells, to lure animals to within their gun or bow range.