Mar 30

Listen: Unidentified Vocalizations

These were recorded in East Texas by Texla Research near the Neches River in the early morning hours of October 27th, 2010. A three man team setup a listening post along a hunting lease road where they hung up a recorder which would be retrieved the next morning. Over the next 90 minutes they performed several manual whoops while listening for return vocals before moving to another research location. The vocals in this recording were captured at 1:50AM, about 15 minutes after the research team cleared the area. This includes many vocals covering a span of about 3 minutes, some of the distant howls are definite coyotes. The three close whoop/howls are what we consider to be interesting. There was not a repeat of the close vocals you will hear during the remainder of the night. The spectrograph below represents the span from just before the first close vocal to just after the second. These have a definite human quality to them and humans would be a possible candidate for this, however, no human presence was detected in the area by the team during the time of their visit and no human activity is detectable during the interim from the time the team left and the occurrence of the vocals. Both the raw recording and a filtered/shortened (to tone down the local cricket) version can be listened to from the links below.

 

Here is the original recording:

 

Here is the filtered version:

 

vocals_10-27-10

Credit:http://www.texlaresearch.com/unknownrecordings.htm

12 Responses to “Listen: Unidentified Vocalizations”

  1. Travis L

    Gabriel, if you’re talking about the filtered audio then the “space invader” noise is the result of the filtering process, not the subject of the recording.

  2. jamie smith

    Man that sounds like they are getting all excited about something., maybe they know that someone has entered their area and they are displaying their dominance by making these sounds, the aboriginal people say “stop and turn around and go back where you came from” . Great audio , it must have taken a lot of courage to stay !!!

  3. Theodore G

    Definitely interesting. It sounds like the coyotes were stirred up by the earlier vocals and then everyone joined in at the end. I can not recall what I was watching, but an audio expert was saying that if you take two audio recording devices into an area, separate them and have an accurate measurement of the distance between the devices or more accurately their microphones, and have them record the same vocalizations that they could accurately tell you how far the source of the sound is from the devices. If this really works for those researchers that have repeated behavior in an area you could more accurately pin point where the creatures hold up when vocalizing. I don’t know what parameters you have to control for, such as do the devices need to be exactly the same? Do they have to be set at the same height?

    • Stacy F

      Recorders do not have to be exactly the same, but it does help to have them at roughly the same height. What works even better is to run a pair of external mics out from each recorder and clip them to low branches, pointed 60-67 degrees in different directions. Then when you listen back, if a vocal came from the right mic of one recorder but the left mic of another, it gives you a pretty good idea of the yeller’s exact location. This also works well without the external mics, if your recorders come with build-in dual mics, but it does make positioning/camouflaging them much trickier.

  4. Melanie W

    Mel the open minded skeptic here… Why could this not be just coyotes, or red wolves stirring up coyotes?
    I’m not saying there isn’t something else in there… There could. But it could also just be canine noises… Yes?

Leave a Reply