The yowling wilderness
By Ed Kanze
One black moonless night, snug in warm sleeping bags, the brave young woman who would become my wife and I were falling asleep when shocking things began to happen in the woods. We couldn't see a thing. The experience was purely aural. First there was silence. Then came a long, loud, mournful wail that took our romantic serenity and ripped it to pieces.
Screams followed the wail. They came from several directions. I doubt our blood curdled, as the saying goes, yet the sounds had a human quality, and they gave us the creeps. Some sounded like the cries of a baby, a very unhappy baby, a baby in terrible distress. Others seemed to come from an adult in great pain.
"What on earth?" said Debbie, or something to that effect. Many of us react this way. We step out the door on an Adirondack winter night, or go for a cross-country ski by moonlight, or huddle in a tent or lean-to, and wonder: who or what makes those horrible noises?
As Debbie sat up, now on a state of high alert, I started to laugh.
"Barred owls," I said. So they were. The birds—there were at least two of them—ceased screaming and proceeded to hoo-hoo-hee-hee like chimpanzees. Then they delivered their trademark "Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?" This assured me that laughter was justified. Instead of psychopaths in the nearby woods, there were birds with versatile throats.
Julio de la Torre, author of the excellent Owls: Their Life and Behavior, gives a particularly vivid sense of the barred owl's unsettling utterances. "Starting out from a complete standstill, bioacoustically speaking," he writes, "the barred owl will utter a long, loud, blood-curdling scream that sounds as if a human were being skewered with a red-hot iron."
There is another source of gruesome, agonized sounds that is not a bird. This animal tends to breed in the dead of winter and send shivers down our spines in the night. Its voice, writes D. Andrew Saunders in Adirondack Mammals, includes "squeals, screams, howls, yowls, hisses, and spits."
If you've ever heard hormone-inflamed tomcats squabbling over an ovulating female, the hisses and spits Saunders describes point you in the right direction. The beast making the broadcast is a widespread but rarely seen prowler of our woods and fields, the bobcat.
Thoreau in his journal gives a good secondhand report of bobcat vocalizations. As luck has it, there's an Adirondack Mountain connection. A neighbor of Thoreau's, a man named Skinner, was "going down to Walden in the evening" with a companion "when they heard this sound, which his companion at first thought [was] made by a coon.
But S. said no, it was a wildcat. He says he has heard them often in the Adirondack region." Skinner told Thoreau the bobcat sounded "somewhat like the domestic cat, a low sort of growling and then a sudden quick-repeated caterwaul, or yow yow yow or yang yang yang." As far as we can tell, Thoreau never heard the sound himself.
A perplexing thing about terrifying sounds heard in the woods at night is that often we have no chance to see the creature that's making them.
The night Debbie and I heard the barred owls, we were lucky. I called them into flashlight range with a crude imitation and got a reassuring look. But that kind of good fortune is the exception, not the rule.
More typical are occasions like the one on which I heard screams coming from right outside the house. Of all the night sounds I've heard, these were the most unnerving. It was as if something were being eaten alive, something that was gargling its own blood in its last futile attempts to breathe.
I ran outside with a flashlight. The sounds stopped. I could see nothing. I looped the house in widening circles but found no predator, no prey, no lovesick bobcats, no owls, no blood and entrails, no anything. If a murder had been committed, the culprit left no trace. This was February, as I recall, prime breeding time for bobcats. That's probably what I heard. The sounds seemed terrestrial in origin, not coming from a tree. But who knows?
Even more mysterious than the "whats" of such nocturnal performances are the "whys." Why are bobcats driven to shrill heights of cacophony when reproductive hormones spike in their bloodstreams? Are screams a turn-on for prospective mates, or are they aimed at intimidating rival suitors? The evidence seems inconclusive, partly because bobcats are elusive and difficult to observe going about their business.
As for barred owls, their high-volume, high-energy-cost campaigns of terror likely have adaptive value. Loud cries may serve to repel rival owls and help resident birds defend a breeding and feeding territory. They may also disorient prey. The first time I heard a barred owl at its terrifying best, I was alone and felt like running. If a mouse, vole, or squirrel had the same reaction, the owl might have flown back to its roost that night with a reward for its performance. ■