As a procrastinator extroardinaire, I present you with the video below. This is edited down from about 20 minutes of video I took on the first night of a trip in the Wind River Range in August 2018.
Not much to see, was just trying to capture the sounds. The clearest, multi-voiced singing starts at around the 2:00 mark, which is after we'd walked down to the lake shore, out of the trees and away from the fire.
I wonder how long before someone posts a similar video from right here in WA?
Thanks! It was a pretty neat experience. It was pretty faint at first and I thought it was some kind of owl when I first heard it, but didn't take long to realize what it really was. They moved a little closer to us after a few minutes but were never really that close (guessing about a mile up the valley based on the terrain) and their singing was pretty faint the whole time. I really boosted the volume in the clips I used and had to run the audio through a de-hiss filter to make it listenable.
Pyrites wrote:
Who’s dog started howling along with? Or sought shelter in your lap?
Best.
LOL. I had both my dogs with me. Oddly, neither reacted much. At one point in the video you can hear me talk to Jack and mention that his ears are up, but that was about it. I think Clyde slept through the whole thing.
This is upper Sweeney Lake, which is where I'm thinking they were at. We were camped at Lower Sweeney.
Me my wife and a friend are probably some of the only people to have heard a wild wolf in California in the past hundred years. We were out camping several years ago at a lake we backpacked into near Lassen in northern CA. We were gathered around the campfire at night when we heard a mournful deep howling. I said "that's no dog", it sounds like a wolf (or at least what I've heard of wolves in documentaries, movies, etc) but that's impossible, there's no wolves in California. So we heard the howling at intervals several times over the next half hour to hour. I kept saying this is weird, I swear that should be a wolf but it can't be. And there were no other people around; we were the only people camping at the lake and hadn't encountered anybody on the hike; so no dogs and it didn't sound like a dog anyway.
Well, the following Monday I called up the Forest Service for that area and I told them about it. They said "hang on a second while we look something up." Well, it turns out that OR-7 was in our vicinity where we camped that weekend, and that's the wolf we heard.
So, yeah, we actually a heard a wolf in the wild in California and there's undoubtedly very few people who can say that. It would have been so much cooler if it had ocurred to me to record it with my phone. Alas it didn't cuz my stupid friend kept going on about "big foot" and crap.
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