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<\/a>Jeff Reed wasn\u2019t raised to hate wolves. But as a child he bought into the Little Red Riding Hood myth regarding their villainous nature. You see one, you shoot it.<\/p>\n
But not on a night on his Montana farm some five years ago, a night that proved life-changing not only for Reed, but perhaps for the study and conservation of wolves.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought it was a large coyote,\u201d Reed recalls. \u201cIt was standing broadside in my [pickup truck] headlights, like 10 yards away, this big, beautiful gray wolf. And he\u2019s just looking at me. I open the door, grab my rifle, and he\u2019s standing there \u2026 I\u2019m pointing my barrel, looking at it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen all of a sudden \u2014 you can call it an Apostle Paul sees Jesus for the first time and goes blind moment \u2014 and I just go, \u2018What the hell am I doing? Why am I doing this?\u2019 So I shot over its back, like way high. It didn\u2019t bolt. It just trotted right beside me \u2026 and kept going.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reed heeded that night\u2019s sacred call. It wasn\u2019t long before wolf indifference morphed into obsession, and led to his linking up with the world\u2019s leading long-term wolf research effort. Which may seem like an odd fit, Reed being a Ph.D. linguist who spent much of his career up to that point leading software engineering for Silicon Valley firms.<\/p>\n
But all that knowledge has intertwined perfectly: The Cry Wolf Project is grounded in bioacoustics and artificial intelligence and based in Yellowstone National Park, just 30-some miles (about 50 kilometers) south of Reed\u2019s rural Montana home; he helped launch the project in 2023 within the framework of the acclaimed Yellowstone Wolf Project.<\/p>\n
A lover of language origins, a computer science savant, a self-trained naturalist, a citizen scientist, Reed is a guy with a bottomless curiosity for animal communication, from the chickadees chirping on his feeder to his own rambunctious pack of canine mutts. His eclectic background is guiding him to study the mysterious language of wolves.<\/p>\n Today, some 50 Reed-devised automated recording units, or ARUs, are scattered across the Yellowstone backcountry. These bioacoustic devices accumulate 500,000 hours of soundscape data a year, a compendium of ambient sound. And from that staggering mass of data, Reed has engineered AI programs to pluck out more than 8,000 hours of continuous wolf vocalizations, the largest database of its kind in the world.<\/p>\n \u201cWolves have over 20 call types,\u201d Reed told listeners in a 2025 mainstage TED talk that has garnered 63,600 views. \u201cBarks, whimpers, whines, woahs, howls, yelps, yips, moans, even teeth clacking. And they are one of the few species that communicate in what\u2019s called a chorus howl,\u201d an entire wolf pack letting loose skyward in unison.<\/p>\n Reed now spends long hours not tracking wolves afoot through the Absaroka Mountains, but staring at the computer screen in his home office on the Yellowstone River. The AI models he\u2019s training enable him to turn separate wolf vocalizations into spectrograms \u2014 colorful graphs that chart the jagged rising and falling, mystifying and tantalizing, sound frequencies for Reed to pull apart and analyze.<\/p>\n Over and over, he listens to what he calls \u201cwolfish,\u201d the presumed language of these gorgeous, family-oriented, loved-as-much-as-they-are-hated apex predators.<\/p>\n The questions he poses through the Cry Wolf Project are those asked by wolf lovers for generations: Why do wolves howl? What might they be \u201csaying\u201d? And how can a deeper understanding of wolfish contribute in new ways to a greater appreciation for and conservation of this important species not just in Yellowstone, but around the world?<\/p>\nGroundbreaking work in wolf linguistics<\/strong><\/h2>\n