Jeffrey T Reed | The Cry Wolf Project

Press bio: 150 words

Dr Jeffrey Reed lives his life as a feral linguist, inventing conservation tech in the mountains of Montana. With a doctorate in computational linguistics focused on decoding ancient languages, Reed spent three decades in the world of Silicon Valley building machines that replicate human language before turning his attention to the living voices of the wild—from wolf howls to elk bugles. He co-founded The Cry Wolf Project, the world’s largest database of wild wolf vocalizations, and founded Grizzly Systems, pioneers of low-cost technology for wildlife research and remote security monitoring. A lifelong outdoorsman and conservation advocate, Reed co-founded the Wild Livelihoods Business Coalition, a collaborative effort to protect Montana’s last wild places while sustaining its local economies. His forthcoming book, Howl: The Secret Language of Wolves (Little, Brown) explores the science—and soul—of wolf communication. He lives with his amazing pack—his wife, Robin, and five talkative dogs—Ozzie, Huck, Moose, Shiloh and Guinea Pig—on their farm in southwest Montana.

His work has been featured by HBO, TED, Nvidia, PBS News Hour, NPR, Washington Post, Inc Magazine, Animal Planet, SFGate, Montana Outlaw, Colossal Biosciences (of dire wolf fame), Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and others.

Press bio: 50 words

For three years, Dr. Jeffrey Reed listened to a one-eyed wolf named 907. What he recorded helped become the world’s largest database of wild wolf vocalizations. His book Howl (Little, Brown) asks the question her voice raised: what are wolves actually saying? And what does it reveal about language, dogs and our wild selves?

The Cry Wolf Project

The Cry Wolf Project is a long-term bioacoustics research initiative started by Dr. Jeffrey Reed and Dr. Dan Stahler of Yellowstone’s Wolf Project to build the largest database of wild wolf vocalizations in the world. It draws on the Wolf Project’s long-term data on Yellowstone’s wolves and on recordings from scientists and citizen scientists around the world: over 600,000 hours of raw sound so far. Jeff is an associate researcher with the Wolf Project, focused on technology. Meet the team. The project’s central scientific question is deceptively profound: why do wolves howl, and what are they actually saying? It pairs rigorous field science, carried out with the scientists of Yellowstone’s Wolf Project, with AI and a purpose-built multisensor recording unit, GrizCam, designed for remote, off-grid terrain.

The ambitions reach well beyond the laboratory. A core goal is to incent private land stewardship by reimagining the economics of conservation on private ranches and farms. Existing “payment for presence” models require labor-intensive human review of camera images to verify wildlife activity before ranchers can be compensated. The Cry Wolf Project is working to automate that pipeline, using AI-driven detection and classification to make wildlife stewardship economically viable at scale for the private landowners who control the majority of critical habitat in the American West.

Closely tied to this is the project’s research into predator-livestock conflict mitigation. Working alongside wolf conflict mitigation experts and fifth-generation ranchers, the project is developing the next generation of “rag boxes,” speaker- and light-based devices that play sounds and flash lights to keep wolves away from livestock. Rather than simply blasting rock music or firecrackers, the research suggests that strategically combining unfamiliar chorus howls, growl-howls, guardian dog barks, and human-associated sounds, played at the right times of day and night, can convincingly signal to an intruding wolf that rival wolves and nearby humans pose a genuine threat. This approach is a meaningful step toward reducing the conflicts that too often cost wolves their lives and ranchers their livelihoods.

The project also works to combat wildlife crime. Illegal poaching and wildlife trafficking fund some of the world’s most dangerous criminal networks, and enforcement agencies are chronically under-resourced in remote landscapes. Sensor networks that listen for gunshots and human presence, and estimate the direction a sound came from, give rangers and wildlife officers faster, more actionable information.

Finally, The Cry Wolf Project aims to build the digital wild: immersive, data-rich windows into living ecosystems that can educate, inspire, and connect people to the natural world wherever they live. From interactive sound exhibits and a 3D audio visualizer to a wolf vocalization piano and online Yellowstone courses, the project believes that conservation begins with connection. The moonshot is to decode wolf communication as fully as humanly possible, and in doing so to change how people monitor, protect, and relate to wildlife across the globe.

Media for promotional use

Credit required: Jeffrey T Reed, with a link to www.thecrywolfproject.com wherever media is used.

Use the Download press assets button for images, audio, video and headshots for use in your content. The credits you must give are included in each asset’s file name.

Jeff also maintains a publicly accessible set of wolf audio and video on his YouTube channel. If you see something you like there or in any of his talks, contact him for a copy of the original video file.

Requested acknowledgment

Jeff kindly requests the following acknowledgment for any digital or print use of his work:

Acknowledge and encourage donations to Yellowstone National Park’s Wolf Project via thecrywolfproject.com/donate. (Yellowstone Forever is the official nonprofit partner of Yellowstone National Park.)
Mention Grizzly Systems’ conservation technology via www.grizcam.com/invest-in-the-wild.
Mention that Jeff’s book on the secret language of wolves is forthcoming from Little, Brown and Company.
Mention that Jeff co-founded Wild Livelihoods, a collaborative effort to protect Montana’s last wild places while sustaining its local economies.
Link to Jeff’s social presence: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.
Optional: link to Jeff’s TED talk.

FAQ

Your website calls you a feral linguist. Explain yourself.

It’s basically a linguist who slipped his collar.

The feral part came first. I grew up in the Absarokas, just north of Yellowstone. There’s a grainy photograph of me at five, standing on a boulder, staring at bison and grizzlies, having peed my pants in awe.

The linguist part is my passion. I earned a PhD using computers to try to decode ancient languages, mostly koine Greek, the Greek of the New Testament.

Now I study living critters instead. Which mostly means standing in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley at four in the morning, in a cold so hard it rings, because that’s when our recorders say wolves howl the most. That, and strangely, 1 a.m.

Linguists are trained to assume an unfamiliar sound may carry meaning before dismissing it as noise. I just brought that habit to wolves.

What drew you back home to apply your talents to the environment?

I went from the bison jams of Yellowstone to the traffic jams of California.

After my PhD, dead languages didn’t pay the bills, so I spent thirty years in Silicon Valley building technology. Then I read a line from my neighbor, the writer Jim Harrison: “The danger of civilization is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.” So I packed up and moved back home.

By then I was working on AI and, frankly, a little bored with human communication. My grandfather always said animals are not stupid. So I started a company to help scientists use technology to listen to animals, for conservation. For me, that wonder became listening. The world hadn’t grown louder. I had grown quieter.

How did your interest in wolves develop, and what have you learned about them in ten words or less?

They’re complicated, intelligent, social, dangerous, affectionate, and we underestimate them. That’s ten. I counted.

I grew up on the old stories: wolves as livestock killers, wolves as thieves, wolves as the reason a winter went bad. What changed me was one wolf: a one-eyed matriarch called 907, the Queen of Slough Creek, who raised a park-record ten litters. I learned her voice the way I know my children’s.

That’s what my book, Howl: The Secret Language of Wolves, is about. When Grandpa asked, “Can you pass the salt?”, only a fool, or a smart-ass, answered “Yes.” Unless we wanted a swat, my siblings and I handed him the salt. Linguists call that pragmatics: language lives in what it makes happen. So the book asks: what does a howl actually do?

What do you say to people who still believe wolves are a threat to local ranchers?

I tell them they’re right. Wolves kill livestock. If you’ve just lost a calf, a lecture on biodiversity doesn’t bring it back.

Where I part ways is the jump from “wolves sometimes kill livestock” to “wolves shouldn’t be here.” Living here before, during and after reintroduction taught me that facts rarely settle this argument. Underneath it is something older: fear of loss.

People who love wolves waited decades for them to come back. To them, every dead wolf feels like theft. A rancher who loses calves is counting animals they raised by hand. Both are guarding something they believe is theirs. That isn’t hypocrisy. It’s human nature.

Psychologists call it loss aversion. Offer people a coin flip: lose a hundred dollars, or win two hundred. The math says take the bet. Most people won’t. Losing hurts more than winning feels good.

So both sides dig in, and the bigger question gets lost. Not “What am I losing?” but “What are we all about to lose together?” The wild country we share.

That’s why several of us started Wild Livelihoods, a coalition of local businesses that earn a living from wild country and put their weight behind conserving it. If society wants wolves on the landscape, the rancher shouldn’t be the only one paying the bill.

Several of us are also backing a bill to increase compensation for livestock lost to predators. But we’ll be reminding our legislators of something too. In Park County, just north of Yellowstone, ranching is about a tenth the size of our dominant economy, tourism, which brings in about half a billion dollars a year. Roughly eight million dollars in lodging tax goes to the state. None of it comes back to the communities that generated it, to fix the roads tourists drive on, or to invest in the very product that pays our bills: wildlife.

How has involving locals benefited the project and the community?

One thing I learned in Silicon Valley: the person with the fanciest technology is often not the person who understands the problem.

A rancher who’s watched the same creek for forty years knows things my computer doesn’t. Hunters know where animals move. The wolf watchers, the wolfies, know who’s courting whom and which uncle got booted from the den. The scientists of Yellowstone’s Wolf Project bring decades of careful science. I bring microphones and a slightly unhealthy obsession with this thing we call language, and whether humans are the only ones who possess it.

Put us together and everybody gets smarter. That’s the conservation I believe in. Not imposed on rural communities. Built with them.

What technology do you use to record these animals?

The technology is wonderfully boring.

We hide autonomous recording units in the woods. That’s a fancy name for a very good microphone in a weatherproof box. Wolf howls, elk bugles and gunshots carry three to six miles, so a few recorders cover a lot of country, far more cheaply than camera traps or flight surveys. That could give wildlife agencies better estimates of how many wolves are out there. Only when we know how many there are should we start the never-ending debate over too many or too few.

Then AI sorts the mountain of sound. But AI is an instrument, not an oracle. AI does the listening. I still have to do the thinking.

Is the technology getting more precise?

It is.

GrizCams carry six-microphone arrays and very precise clocks, so they can work out where a sound came from. One texted my phone the location of a bull elk bugling.

I’m a hunter, and I’ll say it: we’re going to have to wrestle with the fair-chase ethics of that, the hunter’s code of giving an animal a sporting chance. More and more technology is listening to animals. Including us.

How have you used these recordings to create art?

At some point I realized I had more than scientific data. I had the soundtrack of wildness.

One of my favorite pieces is called One Month of Sound. It’s a false-color spectrogram, a picture of sound, of a full month of listening at the Rescue Creek pack’s den, painted in color so you can see who was talking. You can see it, and hear it, at the Yellowstone Gateway Museum in Livingston and at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

I try not to turn the animal into a special effect. The wolf is the musician. I’m mostly the guy at the mixing board. Like any good linguist, what I’m really trying to do is listen to them better.

How did wolf reintroduction affect the whole wildlife environment?

For about seventy years, Yellowstone was missing its wolves.

Two of the last ones, killed in 1926, still stand mounted in the park’s research center. One of them is black, and that black coat came from dogs. Thousands of years ago, wolves in the far north, likely the Yukon, bred with Indigenous people’s dogs, and the gene walked south. When wolves came back in 1995, they reshuffled what ecologists call trophic interactions.

But wolves didn’t fix Yellowstone. Nature isn’t a Disney movie. Willows, beavers, bears, climate and human hunting are all in that story too.

They didn’t restore some magic balance of nature. They restored a missing relationship. Predator and prey. Rival and rival. Carcass and scavenger.

So who is the predator?

Predator is a complicated word. It invokes emotion more than it explains reality.

If you’ve watched The Last of Us, you’ve met Cordyceps. The real thing doesn’t bother with people. It hijacks an ant’s brain, marches it up a plant stem, clamps its jaws onto a leaf, and then sprouts out of its head. Hollywood toned it down.

Now we’re asking whether AI could become a predator of the apex predator: us.

So I chuckle when talking heads on social media demonize the wolf in the name of ranchers. Where I live, elk are the ranchers’ number one enemy, not wolves. They flatten fences. Hunters love elk, ranchers often don’t, and that’s an uneasy divide. It’s easier to gang up on wolves. We rarely gang up on ourselves, or on the subdivisions sprawling across Montana.

Why does this matter?

The challenge we face has little to do with our individual opinions on wolves. It’s about the future of wildness itself.

Henry David Thoreau saw it happen in New England in the 1850s. The cougar, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose and beaver were gone around him, and he wrote that he felt he lived in “a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.”

Montana is right in the middle of that change. The American West is becoming the American East.

What is your ultimate goal with the Cry Wolf Project, and what do you need?

The crazy version? I want to understand what wolves are saying.

But the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak, we could not understand him. If a wolf could describe its nose to us, it would need what AI folks call latent space, a whole inner map of meaning we don’t have. So the responsible version, as a linguist would put it, is function, not translation. What do their sounds do? Who’s calling, who answers, and what happens next? Can listening tell us where wolves are, and someday how many?

I want the most complete archive of wild wolf voices ever assembled, and to make it useful to scientists, wildlife managers and ranchers. What do we need? More ears on the landscape, more years, and yes, more money. Apparently wolves refuse to fund their own research.

Whales seem to get most of the money in animal communication these days. We’re pretty Western in the way we work: frugal, but hard-working. Right now we’re working with Montana State University and the University of Montana to compete for a $10 million XPRIZE on animal communication. I think Montana ingenuity can bring that prize home to the Big Sky State.

But the real prize isn’t decoding wolves. It’s making sure there are still wild wolves left to listen to.

What else would you like people to know about your work?

This isn’t really a project about wolves. Wolves just got me started.

Most people will never hear a wild wolf. But about a billion of their descendants live with us: dogs, domesticated alongside us some fifteen to forty thousand years ago. A border collie named Chaser learned more than a thousand words of English. Most of us haven’t learned one word of dog. They try harder with our language than we do with theirs.

The point is to pay attention, to tune back into our wild senses.

I love my bird dogs. I respect wolves. But more and more, I want to be less like the domesticated, technology-dependent creatures we’ve become, and more like the wolf. Wild and free.

Are there different kinds of howls?

Yes. Several.

My basic translation of a howl is “Here I am.” It’s a bit like “Hey.” You say it one way to a friend across the street and another way to someone keying your car. Same word. The meaning is in how you say it, and where.

Sit at a bar and listen. People don’t say much. How they say it tells you what they’re really after.

Wolves seem to work the same way, without words like ours. They use prosody, the music of the voice: pitch, loudness, rhythm. It’s the ancient layer of language, and our brains still run on it.

My favorite is the wavy howl. Its pitch ripples like my grandmother singing in her later years, and wolves seem to use it under pressure. The other kinds? You’ll have to read the book.

There are a few howls I think very few people in the world have ever heard. Wolves aren’t easy interview subjects. You can’t walk up with a mic and ask, “What did you mean by that?” That’s why we put 74 recordings in the book, so you can hear them for yourself, and the stories behind them. Hear more. Assume less. Leave a little room for silence.