Can curiosity save the wild?

How do we inspire people to care about wild animals without disrupting their lives? This hour, two surprising approaches to getting to know wildlife — and rethinking what it means to protect it. Guests include conservationist Maya Higa and computational linguist Jeffery Reed. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current so you can win more deals. Learn more at hubspot.com. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Our job now is to dream big.

• 0:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Delivered at TED conferences.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  To bring about the future we want to see.

• 0:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  Around the world.

• 0:30Speaker 03

  To understand who we are.

• 0:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  You just don't know what you're gonna find.

• 0:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Challenge you.

• 0:40Speaker 04

  We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

• 0:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  And even change you.

• 0:43Speaker 05

  I literally feel like I'm a different person.

• 0:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yes.

• 0:47Speaker 05

  Do you feel that way?

• 0:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, new ideas about understanding wild animals without getting in their way. Starting with the story of an injured hawk who helped a young woman upend how we might think about conservation.

• 1:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, so he was hit by a car and was found by a member of the public. The person who found him called the zoo to see if they could bring him in.

• 1:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Maya Higa.

• 1:24Speaker 06

  I'm a conservationist and I'm a content creator. And I'm the founder of Alvea Sanctuary, which is a wildlife sanctuary and conservation education center in Austin, Texas.

• 1:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  When Maya was in college, she had a job at the local zoo rehabilitating birds of prey. That is where she first met Bean, the red-tailed hawk.

• 1:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was brought into the zoo and the zoo had a number of birds of prey. So they had eagles and owls and other hawks. And because I worked there, he became my project. So he was a younger bird that probably wasn't getting enough food as is because hunting is hard when you're a, you know, a year old as a bird of prey. And so he didn't have enough weight on him. And, you know, he got unlucky by getting hit by that car. Nothing broken, luckily, but did not have the strength that he needed to just take off and fly away.

• 2:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  So what's the prescription for a bird in Bean's condition at that point? What did he need?

• 2:26Speaker 06

  So I would weigh him multiple times a day. And we had a very careful reintroduction of foods. So his diet was kind of a slow reintroduction of a combination of quail and mice and rats, just to put more weight on him.

• 2:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  So why did you bring him home?

• 2:44Speaker 06

  Because he was getting weighed multiple times a day and fed multiple times a day. It was really the only option for us because the zoo was a drive. So I had my falconry license. So I had an enclosure for him in my backyard at my college house. That's a whole process. There's an inspection done by Fish and Wildlife out there. And to get that enclosure approved. And then he was brought home and I had all of the equipment that I needed at my house. And then I started training him to fly to my glove. So I would feed him bits of food on my glove. I would put him on a perch. And then he would fly to me and eat those bits of food. And then eventually I would have him fly from the ground up to my glove to help build muscle as well.

• 3:28Speaker 06

  And over the course of time, I would just move the perch further away from me so he was flying longer distances.

• 3:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, you're an unusual college student to have like a falcon rehab clinic in your backyard, essentially.

• 3:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:46Speaker 06

  That's true. Definitely unusual. And that's why people were so excited about it. So I started, I was live streaming for fun. Had nothing to do with the zookeeping or the falconry.

• 3:57Speaker 05

  I'm a college student. I'm a junior. I go to school in California. I'm sitting.

• 4:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  Maya already had an account on the live streaming platform Twitch, where she liked to sing for people.

• 4:07Speaker 05

  She was here before. Here we go.

• 4:12Speaker 06

  I was just doing covers. So I had nothing to do with conservation. But naturally, on a live stream, you're live. And so there's a lot of air to fill. And so I would talk about work and I would talk about this bird in my backyard.

• 4:25Speaker 05

  I love animals. I am a falconer.

• 4:29Speaker 06

  I guess that's it. And people that were watching that stream at the time, there were, you know, a few dozen of them, maybe. There were some people that didn't believe that I had a hawk in my backyard because it's so unusual and random.

• 4:42Speaker 05

  Should I get him? Do you guys want to meet him? The hawk?

• 4:46Speaker 06

  So I brought him inside and someone made a short video of that.

• 4:52Speaker 05

  This is Bean. His name is Bean. I didn't name him.

• 4:56Speaker 06

  And then that video went viral because people were so confused as to what was going on.

• 5:02Speaker 05

  They're really excited about. He was hit by a car a few months ago.

• 5:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, I watched the video and it's pretty extraordinary. You look like a lovely young woman in your bedroom. And then perched on your hand on a glove is this fierce, like intense-looking bird who trusts you immensely.

• 5:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  And looks so strange like a regular bedroom. The contrast is striking.

• 5:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. So someone posted a clip of that on Reddit. And it started getting a lot of attention on Reddit. And then people wanted to see more of what I was doing. And so the more I livestreamed with Bean in particular, the more people would make these videos and post them.

• 5:49Speaker 05

  Don't walk up to him like you're gonna eat him.

• 5:51Speaker 06

  And people were so interested in what was going on, they would come to my livestream to watch the whole process. So his entire rehabilitation process happened on livestream. So he flew past me and he landed on the ground.

• 6:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  What did they say that they were like, why they were into it?

• 6:09Speaker 06

  I think they became interested in the arc of this bird. You know, they knew that there was an injury. They knew he was an underdog at the time. You know, he wasn't doing well. They wanted to see him recover and eventually be released. And so they were really invested in his recovery process. They liked watching him get stronger. They liked watching him hit these milestones and build muscle. And then eventually I recorded the release as well.

• 6:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow.

• 6:35Speaker 06

  They felt like they were a part of that whole story.

• 6:37Speaker 05

  He's pretty angry. So I'm gonna give him a good talk here. Okay, there you go.

• 6:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  Forgive my lack of knowledge, but you did not domesticate Bean. How do you know that you've prepared him to survive in the wild?

• 6:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, so for him, a lot of it was physically feeling his muscle condition. You can feel it around their keel or on their chest. He was feeling really good. His weight was really good. He was flying really strong. I was able to fly him against the wind to pretty significant distances. So I knew that his flight capability was really great. And he also spent a little bit of time at the end of his recovery at the Ojai Raptor Center, which is a fantastic facility that does lots of bird rehab. And they're able to set them up for success out there. And they felt really good about his ability to hunt, too. And so after that, he was ready to go.

• 7:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  So what significance did your relationship with Bean and then the changing relationship with your online audience have? Like, what did that sort of make you think? Like, wait a minute? This could be something else.

• 7:50Speaker 06

  So significant. So as a zookeeper, my job was outreach education. And so I would bring wildlife to schools, to birthday parties, to events in person. And I would teach kids about them. So I was the zookeeper that showed up. And then when I started doing this rehab with Bean on stream, I found myself doing the spiel. You know, the, this is a red-tailed hawk. It's the most common widespread bird of prey in North America. You know, I'm doing the kind of event spiel. But at that time, I was doing it to thousands of people at a time that I knew were all over the world on this livestream instead of in person with maybe 20 kids at a time. And in addition to the reach

• 8:34Speaker 06

  and the global reach of it all, too, Bean didn't have to leave my house at all or be transported to an in-person facility. And so there was a lot less stress on him. And so there was definitely a moment of that clicking of I can do this conservation outreach education work virtually without having to bring the animals anywhere. And they can reach way more people. And that's a win-win.

• 9:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  For centuries, humans have found ways to get close to wild animals by capturing them, studying them, and putting them on display. But now, technology offers different kinds of access. And so today on the show, ideas about understanding wild animals without getting in their way. Two conservationists with radically new approaches to protecting wildlife.

• 9:28Speaker 06

  The people watching my streams started becoming as invested as I was in his recovery. It was like they were doing it with me, sort of, which was the coolest thing that I've ever done.

• 9:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Maya Higa on the TED stage.

• 9:40Speaker 06

  And then eventually, because I was reaching so many people with Bean's story, the zoo that I worked at started allowing me to bring animals like cockatoos and reptiles home to present on my livestream. So suddenly, somehow, I had turned this zoo outreach job that I had into a work-from-home situation, right? Which is awesome. But instead of reaching 20 kids at a time in a classroom, I was reaching thousands of people at a time, all over the world. So this was when it really clicked for me, right? I wanted to do this for the rest of my life, but I wanted to do it at a much, much larger scale. So then, two years later, at 22 years old, I came up with a plan. And the vision was to build an animal sanctuary

• 10:25Speaker 06

  that nobody visits, or at least not in person. So we would rescue animals and build huge animal enclosures. And we would livestream conservation education programs online so people could fall in love with our animals, the way that they fell in love with Bean, that bird. Our animals would be able to reach millions and millions of people. I wrote up this three-year business plan on livestream. This has all happened live on stream. Everybody's been, all of the community that has watched has been very involved. So I'm sitting there in my bedroom on a metal fold-out chair, writing a three-year business plan with them.

• 11:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  Were people chiming in, like in the chat?

• 11:07Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  Real hive mind.

• 11:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. They built it with me. So we wrote that business plan. And then it all ended up happening in three months. It was a three-year business plan, and it moved very fast. The reason that it was able to move so fast is because, in addition to that kind of crowdsourced brainstorming, I was able to do crowdsourced fundraising really successfully, because there were so many people invested in this mission. So we did a capital campaign fundraiser in February of 2021. And we raised over $500,000 on a livestream to found the organization. And this is where, this is where I shaved my head. So I, one of the people watching said, "If we raised half a million dollars, would you shave your head live on stream?"

• 11:52Speaker 06

  And I was like, "Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, I would do that. That's, that's nothing for that amount of money." And we did, we raised $573,000. And so I shaved my head on stream.

• 12:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  Holy moly. So you take this, like, over $500,000 and do what? Because there's a difference between one single animal on your, like, you know, laptop camera versus setting up an institute, essentially.

• 12:21Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah. So after that stream, the livestream ended, and I realized this, this $500,000 was $5, $20, $100 donations from an incredible amount of people, right? There were, you know, at the most, like, 90,000 people that were watching the livestream at one time. And so there are so many people that have just contributed these small-dollar donations. And so after the livestream ended, I was sitting there like, "Oh, wow. A lot of people have trusted me with an incredible amount of money, and now I actually have to do it." Which is what I wanted, I just didn't know how.

• 13:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  In a minute, Maya Higa explains how she built the Alvea Sanctuary from the ground up. On the show today, protecting wildlife without getting in their way. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 13:30Speaker 01

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• 13:35Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 14:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamirodi. On the show today, we are talking about new approaches to protecting wildlife by getting out of its way. We were just talking to conservationist Maya Higa about how she founded the Alvea Sanctuary at the ripe age of 22.

• 15:12Speaker 06

  I wanted to have a facility that was never open to the public, where we could build really fantastic animal enclosures and rescue wildlife that didn't have anywhere else to go. So wildlife that cannot be re-released into the wild, these are either confiscations from the pet trade, so they don't know how to take care of themselves, or they're permanently injured wildlife that can't be released. And we would bring these animals to our facility and do the same thing that I was doing with Bean, which is just share their stories. Share their recovery stories, share their personalities, and just teach people about conservation through livestreaming.

• 15:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  So I will never be able to visit Alvea because it is not open to the public. But if I did, could you give me, like, a little tour? Like, what would it be like?

• 16:02Speaker 06

  So it's a 40-acre facility. And we've got a wide range of species in enclosures that are kind of sprawled out across the entire property. So we have wolf dogs, and then foxes are near them. So we have two American red foxes. Their names are Finn and Reed. Past the foxes, we have Push Pop, our Selkata tortoise. And then we've got the crows after Push Pop, and then marmosets, which are these little Brazilian monkeys, little primates. They're so cute. They're like the size of a squirrel. And then we pass the emus, and then we get to the staff offices.

• 16:45Speaker 06

  So that's my morning commute. We've got five full-time animal care staff that are caring for all of our rescued animals. We have videography out there. We have editors out there. We have a nutrition building, a diet and nutrition prep building. And then we have a studio where we do these livestreams and record content in.

• 17:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  And is the idea that each of these are in a, you say an enclosure, but is it like a crate for a dog? Or are you trying to make it more sort of environmentally appropriate?

• 17:16Speaker 06

  No, they all have different enclosures that are built out for their specific needs. So if you go into the marmoset enclosure, for example, there are just ropes everywhere for climbing. And there's platforms, and it's made for little monkeys. It's like the dream habitat for little monkeys that are swinging around everywhere. And then the wolf dog enclosure is massive. It's a huge outdoor space, open air, so there's no top on it. So lots of space to run. They have a pond, they have a running, they have running water in there as well, like a little river set up. They've got dens built out in their enclosure. So all of the enclosures are very different, and they're built specifically for the species that's in them.

• 18:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  And do you live there?

• 18:01Speaker 06

  I do. I have a tiny house out on site at Alvea. And so I live in the corner. My neighbors are the foxes. And we are currently building a serval enclosure next to my house as well.

• 18:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  A what enclosure?

• 18:15Speaker 06

  A serval. It's an African wildcat.

• 18:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh.

• 18:18Speaker 06

  He's our newest rescue. He was purchased at a flea market in Texas to be someone's pet, and that didn't work out because he's a wildcat.

• 18:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  He's, they're beautiful. Wow.

• 18:29Speaker 06

  So beautiful.

• 18:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  Slinky, sort of, light orange with black polka dots all over and big Kit Kat ears.

• 18:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  How on earth would someone get one of these and think that they could have them as a pet?

• 18:44Speaker 06

  I think that some people think it would be like having a cat, but just bigger and cooler. But it's not like that at all. They don't act like domestic cats. They, they don't want to live inside. They can be very dangerous. This is a big, I mean, he's 35 pounds. And they can jump meters and meters in the air. I mean, it's just, it's not, it's not something that's literally, literally not something that's made to be in our home or in our possession.

• 19:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  And so the purpose is to give these animals a good life in addition to letting us, regular people, see them living their good life. So how do you have it set up to livestream? Like, can anybody look at these animals living anytime?

• 19:33Speaker 06

  Yes, yes. So we have live cameras in all of these enclosures. So we're livestreaming 24/7 from Alveus Sanctuary. Chuck, you can't tell me that's like not the most beautiful animal on the planet. Isn't that crazy? So those cameras are up on Twitch and on YouTube, and people watch the animals all day long. So they watch them nap, they watch them eat their diets, they watch their training sessions, they watch them play, all the silly things that animals do when we aren't looking.

• 20:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, they're so good.

• 20:04Speaker 06

  Or when they think we're not looking, we can watch on the live cams.

• 20:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  So, OK, so somebody listening might be like, that's cool that you're giving these animals somewhere safe to live and giving them a good life. But how does that relate to conservation? Sort of connect the dots for me.

• 20:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, for sure. So all of the animals have a story about their species, where I can teach people about conservation and the challenges that they're facing. With the foxes, I talk a lot about the fur trade and how foxes are exploited for the fur trade. We have Winnie the Moo, the cow. And so I talk about the agriculture industry and how that impacts our planet. And then our next step for Alveus is joining the efforts that are already happening for endangered species breeding programs. So very soon, we are welcoming Mexican wolves to our facility. There's only about 300 of them left in the wild right now. So they're critically endangered.

• 21:00Speaker 06

  And one of the ways that people in other facilities have been working to save them is breeding them in captivity and reintroducing them into the wild. And so Alveus is joining that safe program. Safe stands for saving animals from extinction. And part of our idea is having live cameras on them in the wild as well. And so we're hoping to make this bridge between the animals at Alveus and them in these wild spaces.

• 21:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  So I'm curious, like, what do you see as what you want your audience to do? Like, is it about them making different choices in their lives? Or is it about something bigger than that?

• 21:43Speaker 06

  I think what Alveus is really good at is reaching people that otherwise aren't necessarily interested in nature and the planet. They are young people that are online chronically, as we all are, and they're consuming livestream content. They're not necessarily the kids that are out there turning over rocks, you know, and being really into nature already. They're just young people that are on social media. We're able to meet them where they already are. And that's a really exciting thing because conservation needs a lot of people involved right now.

• 22:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  Is that hard for some of the people who've maybe been doing conservation for decades to understand? Like, what do you mean? They're like looking on their phones and that's their introduction to conservation? Like, do they get it?

• 22:31Speaker 06

  I think some do, and I think some don't, you know? I also would have said, to be fair, before I founded Alveus, I would have thought that in-person connection is really important, too. And what Alveus has taught me is that's so clearly not the case. I think part of it, too, is the time spent. When, in working at a zoo, even me, who, obviously, I love wildlife, and there are a lot of zoos that I really, really love. But even then, you're walking by enclosures and maybe spending a couple of minutes if you're really enamored by an animal and you want to sit there and watch them. But with our live cams being live 24/7, people are just seeing so much more of these animals' lives, and they have so much more time to build connections to them and feel invested in them.

• 23:13Manoush Zomorodi?

  Where do you stand, then, on zoos, or safaris, or humans having that close-up experience of wild animals?

• 23:21Speaker 06

  I think there are a lot of really fantastic zoos out there. And there are a lot of AZA-accredited zoos within the US that do a ton of really important conservation and do a great job. So I'm definitely not saying that we should boycott zoos. There are also zoos that are doing a really terrible job, right? So it's not so black and white. I would love to see more zoos have live cameras in addition. It makes viewing animals and becoming interested in them financially accessible, physically accessible. But I think there's a place for both models, mine and the traditional zoo model, right now.

• 24:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  How much do people's fascination with the animals on display also have to do with their fascination with you? Because, I mean, there's definitely, you know, the parasocial relationship with you, a content creator.

• 24:14Speaker 06

  Right, yeah. It matters a lot. I am a bridge to these animals and to our planet.

• 24:24Speaker 06

  The difference between reading something educational on a billboard, you know, or in a textbook, and sitting with your friend, you know, at a, at coffee or something, and them telling you something that they're really excited about. You just, you care so much more about the latter. So that connection really, really matters to people.

• 24:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  Not a lot of privacy for you. Do you feel like an animal in a zoo?

• 24:48Speaker 06

  That's a good question. Sometimes, yeah. I mean, there's a microscope, for sure. There's, that is part of being a content creator and putting my life online. But it is something I'm more than happy to do. Being a conduit for people to the planet is an honor.

• 25:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was conservationist Maya Higa. She is the founder of the Alveus Sanctuary. You can check out Alveus' livestreams at alveus sanctuary.org. You can also see Maya's TED Talk at ted.com.

• 25:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  Today on the show, protecting wild animals without getting in their way. And now, let's listen to one particular voice from the wild.

• 25:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  A wolf's howl, a primal sound that's been heard and mimicked by humans for thousands of years. People have been howling forever. I'm sure the Clovis people that came here 13,000 years ago were doing it. The mountain Shoshone, who used to live in Yellowstone, they were described by trappers as being the best imitators of animals around. They could howl like wolves, they could neigh like horses, and imitate any bird.

• 26:13Manoush Zomorodi?

  Hunters have used it to draw in wolves and kill them. Some people did it during COVID. They'd go outside their back door on the porch, and they'd howl to prove to the world that they were still alive.

• 26:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  Across cultures, wolves are symbolic. For some indigenous nations, they stand for loyalty and family. In European stories like Little Red Riding Hood, they're a reminder that danger lurks everywhere. And of course, wolves were domesticated, becoming man's best friend and pet. But a century ago in the US, wolves were widely seen as predatory enemies, hunted to near extinction. In places like Yellowstone, they were wiped out entirely. So Jeff Reed, who grew up on the outskirts of the national park, never heard their howls as a child.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  I was born in the late 60s in southwest Montana, which we call the Abzorki Mountains here, just north of Yellowstone National Park, one of the premier ecosystems in the world. And we lived outdoors all the time.

• 27:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  Without wolves, Yellowstone lost its apex predator. The elk population surged, and plant life was devastated. It took several decades until 1995, when conservationists reintroduced wolves in the hopes of restoring the park's delicate ecosystem. By the time Jeff Reed moved back to the area after spending his adult life in Silicon Valley, wolf howls were everywhere. And he wanted to know what the wolves were saying.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  So when I moved back, wolves were back. And I always knew that there's nothing more iconic than a wolf howl to tell you about nature. You know, I was going out and studying them just as a casual observer. And it really dawned on me that wolves are hard to study. Like, you can't walk up with a mic and say, you know, what is... What did you mean by that? And I knew a lot of the biologists who were working in the park. And they're amazing researchers. And I just started talking to a few of them and said, hey, what if we did a large scale bioacoustics project where we put recorders out on the landscape? And then really started studying what the wolves were saying, so to speak.

• 28:40Manoush Zomorodi?

  Jeff's background in tech and linguistics made him the perfect person to build on the work already being done to understand wolves.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Wolves have been researched for their sounds for a long time, and there are captive facilities, often sanctuaries for wolves. And so you can hear them in captive centers. But we were really interested in wild wolves. Like, what are your kids saying when they leave the home and they're with their friends? That's really what we wanted to get after is how are they communicating in their natural soundscapes?

• 29:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  Well, what were the tools that they were using before you got there?

• 29:15Speaker 03

  So wolves in Yellowstone are the most studied wolves in the world. So they already have this huge database, genetics, you name it, observations. They fly planes over, they put GPS collars on. And so we just started to amplify that with an acoustics project.

• 29:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  To do that, Jeff needed to upgrade the technology.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  There was certain acoustic technology that you could record, but it really hadn't been innovated upon from a biologist's perspective on the landscape. And so I was like, of course, we can do this, right? We do this all the time in Silicon Valley. It's just, we're only doing it to make money. And so I was like, OK, let's start reinventing these devices, these camera traps and these acoustic recorders, and have it record for a year.

• 30:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  Do you remember when you first started placing these devices in the park?

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. You know, we're walking out, it's spring, right? Kitten tails are coming up, these beautiful purple flowers. So we put these out there. And I'm thinking to myself, is this gonna work? Right? Is this really gonna work?

• 30:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  What was going through your mind?

• 30:25Speaker 03

  Uh, just so many unknowns. If you think about Yellowstone, it's a big landscape, it's very rugged, it's very remote.

• 30:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  If you wanted to put an acoustic recorder out in the middle of Yellowstone and have it record for a year, it's about three terabytes of data that you have to store for that year.

• 30:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  Uh huh.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  And it's gotta live through temperatures of minus 50 to 100, 110.

• 30:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  You don't want birds to fly away with it, all sorts of things, right? You know, we leave it near a wolf den site and we come back home and we wait a couple months. I bring the recorders home, I pull the SD cards, and we've recorded over 200,000 hours, which would take me roughly 50 years to listen to.

• 31:13Manoush Zomorodi?

  OK, so the recordings worked, which was great. But then you had so much data to use. What do you do with all these hours, years worth of audio?

• 31:24Speaker 03

  What you do is they're recorded in one hour chunks. So you get this WAV file. And I pull it up on this huge monitor and it turns into a spectrogram.

• 31:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  A spectrogram is a visualization of sounds, showing how pitch and volume change over time. Waves go up and down, loud sounds show up brightly, while quieter ones are more faint.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  A good linguist can take human speech, turn it into a spectrogram, and tell you what they said without hearing it.

• 31:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  Huh.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  So the same is true for all animal communication. We're animals, too. So I'm going through these one hour files. And I pull them up one by one, and I think I was two days in. And I pull them up on a big screen and I look at them.

• 32:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  And Jeff sees?

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Nothing.

• 32:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  Spectrogram after spectrogram.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  We're not seeing anything. And I'm like, oh, man.

• 32:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  But then something big and bright and spiky appears.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Finally, I saw this beautiful chorus howl.

• 32:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  He sees another chorus howl. And another one. And another one.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  So that was kind of the first time I said, OK, we've got something.

• 32:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  The Griz Cam gave scientists a way to eavesdrop on wolves. But what to do with those hours and hours of howls? How to make sense of them? When we come back, crunching the data with the help of AI. Today on the show, new approaches to understanding the wild. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stick around.

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• 34:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, new ways of understanding wild animals without getting in their way. And we were just hearing how wolf researcher Jeff Reed built new technology to capture the sounds of wolves communicating in Yellowstone Park.

• 35:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  I love it so much. There's so much going on.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  What is happening? Like, so I hear the like, oh, but then there's like also a little one who seems to be like telling somebody like a story as well. I don't know. What were we listening to?

• 35:26Speaker 03

  When you first start hearing these chorus howls, they kind of sound like a cocktail party. And when you first walk in, you kind of hear all this chatter, right? And you're not necessarily listening to any one person, you're just hearing this noise. Humans and other animals are really good at isolating sound in this kind of chorus. And so we can pick out a person in a room and focus on their voice. And so with some time, you start being able to pick out individual voices. And the easy one is the howl, right? You heard the howl that started at the beginning.

• 35:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  And then you start hearing these other sounds, right? And that's what we were interested in is what are these other sounds and who makes them? Why are they making them? And these are all the questions we're just starting to raise. And we're figuring out a few things, but I'll be dead by the time the younger biologists really start decoding all of this information.

• 36:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  To move way faster, Jeff and Yellowstone biologists turned to, yes, you guessed it, AI. They had to begin by training a new model.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  The first thing we built were some AI tools to go find the howls in all of these recordings so that we can gather more data. I did it manually for 200,000 of them.

• 36:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  And then built an AI model from that so that now as we're recording across half of Yellowstone, we can more easily go get their voices, so to speak.

• 36:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  The tool can quickly find and classify different howls collected over months. It also picks up on things that Jeff and the biologists might never notice.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  There are clustering tools and other tools that are machine learning based that allow us to use software to say, what are we missing? As humans, what might be another way to look at this howl? The AI is seeing patterns in it that there might be some functional behavior associated with it. These battery operated devices use AI to record only the sound and motion that matters to the scientists, saving them time and money.

• 37:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  Jeff Reed explains more from the TED stage.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  And researchers have already determined that wolves can identify one another just from their howls, but we do not know yet if they have names like Teddy or Rachel, or if it's more like you picking up the phone and recognizing that person's voice. Now, this is where it gets interesting to me. A chorus howl is when a pack or family of wolves communicate as a group, often to signal that this is their territory. And in this video, a wolf from the pack is off camera howling, but being totally ignored by his packmates until something happens.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  As soon as the alpha female howled, the rest of the wolves looked at her and the chorus began.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  And as it kicks off, the wolves come together in this mosh pit of dancing bodies, making different types of calls. The entire event lasts about 60 seconds and then everybody goes about their business.

• 38:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  So taking this example of the chorus howl, like break it down for me. How AI helps you understand what the wolves are doing and saying to each other?

• 38:47Speaker 03

  So there are two things the researchers are really looking at with chorus howls. The first is a chorus howl will start where one wolf is howling and then the rest of them will join in. But when a wolf's howling, it doesn't always turn into a chorus howl. So the question is, who's deciding? Like, we all need to chorus howl together. And we've got a little bit of evidence that suggests it's the dominant wolves. Once they join into a howling event, then the rest of the pack joins in. So we're very interested in who decides that this whole territorial chorus howl is going to start? The other thing is

• 39:29Speaker 03

  we're working with Google DeepMind to see if we can count wolves just from their chorus howl. And can we just use audio recordings to know how many wolves were in that pack chorus howl? And what one researcher, Kira Cassidy, figured out was that wolves can counterestimate the number of wolves howling in a rival pack. And they make a decision. If they're outnumbered, you wouldn't want to get killed, you leave the area. If you're not outnumbered, the wolves often approach that rival pack because they know they're outnumbering the rival pack. Now, wolves also bark like your dog.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  But unlike most dogs, wolves combine barks with other sounds into sentence-like structures. And in this video, a female wolf uses a bark howl after being chased and nearly killed by a rival pack.

• 40:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  There's real range in that one.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you hear two things in there. You hear a bark and you hear a howl, but the howl is highly modulated at the end. And so what I was trying to get people to think about was, is this a form of combining two different sounds together to form some new function? Like, if you take the word cry and you take the word wolf separately, you combine it together, cry wolf. They slightly change their meaning when they're brought together. We've known about this bark howl forever. The bark is an alarm and the howl is here I am, at least is basic function. And they'll make this when there's a serious threat.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  That one you just heard was a particular female wolf that was just chased by another pack and was about to get killed. And she got away and she started bark howling. And the idea I'm throwing out there for us to think about is the bark is an alarm, like there's a threat. And the howl is trying to get attention of your packmates and say, here I am. So come help me.

• 41:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  So she was in distress.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Well, for sure she was in distress, but was she trying to communicate something more than just distress? Come help me.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  I'm not saying that's exactly what wolves are doing, but I am saying these are two different sounds they make. They combine them together. Is this a basic form of recursion or combinatorial meaning? And recursion is what most linguists would say today is what's unique about human languages.

• 42:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  I want to talk about a wolf who sounds rather special, 907.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  907 is definitely a special wolf. She lived 11 years and the average age of a wolf in Yellowstone National Park is about three and a half years.

• 42:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, that's it?

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, they would live as long as a dog, but the wild is a different place, right? So your lifespan's shorter. She lost one of her eyes when she was about four. Later in life, she had a limp, she surely had arthritis, broken bones and whatnot, but she lived to 11 and she holds the record in Yellowstone National Park for the most puppy litters.

• 42:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, wow.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  She always had puppies every year. She's kind of what got me into this project. I'd listened to her howls a lot and just fell in love with her.

• 42:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  You fell in love with her. What was it about her?

• 43:03Speaker 03

  These wild animals who we pretty much exterminated from the lower 48 with poison and you name it. They earn a lot of respect with hunters like me because they're surviving on the landscape. The number one cause of a death in Yellowstone is another wolf. Outside of Yellowstone, in non-protected areas, it's humans. You see how they take care of their pups, how they take care of family members. And you can't help but look at your own family structure and realize that there are personalities. Black sheep in the family, they're the high achievers. And she was just like, I called her the queen of Slough Creek,

• 43:47Speaker 03

  which is where her natal den was.

• 43:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay, let's listen to 907.

• 44:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  It is soulful and mournful. That's what it sounds like to me, but what do you hear?

• 44:13Speaker 03

  What else did you hear besides the howl? The howl was easy.

• 44:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  She's crunching around and then I liked how there was like a I see like a bridge sort of action. There's a tempo to it.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. So those vertical bars you're seeing after the first howl was her walking around on shale rocks right next to a fir tree that had the recorder in it. And then what was the sound at the end that you heard?

• 44:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  Baby wolves?

• 44:45Speaker 03

  That was her breathing into the recorder. So she was so close to the recorder. Yeah. If you imagine yourself sitting there, she'd be breathing on your cheek. So her howl was very flat. We call it a flat howl. But there's still, you know, it rises and falls. The typical wolf howl in Yellowstone is 350 hertz, which is about middle F on your piano keyboard. 907 was a stout girl, bigger than your average female wolf. And her pitch was about 320 hertz, where the average wolf would have been a little higher than that.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  And then other wolves will do a

• 45:27Speaker 03

  will rise and then fall. And research has shown that wolves can identify one another from their howls. And there's at least two ways they do that. One is where the pitch ends at the end of the howl. So where it tails off, that lower pitch is a good way for another wolf to know, oh, I know who that is. And the other is how loud it gets throughout the howl.

• 45:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  Is it ridiculous to think that she's saying, I'm here? I, like the I, they're like, oh yeah, it's 907. Or that she's calling her own name, that she's telling people that she's there?

• 46:07Speaker 03

  Context always means something to language, right? You don't know what someone said unless you know the context often. What had happened a half hour before this recording is a herd of elk came running right by this recorder and they were being chased by the pack. She was very old at this time and for some reason, like, I don't want to keep going. She stopped and the rest of the pack chased the elk and they were about a mile away. And then she howled. And so I think your intuition is getting close. She's letting them know, here I am. This is me, right? 907. They're like, okay, 907 is back over there. We're up here. And what happened after this set of howls, she howled like this for half an hour.

• 46:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, wow.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  But in that, on the spectrogram, I noticed a distant faint line and that was one of the other wolves howling back at her. So she knew where they were. They knew where she was. And that was the communication.

• 47:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  So it's like getting lost in the grocery store and you're like, yo, where are you guys? I'm over here. And they're like, yeah, we're in aisle 11, kind of thing.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 47:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  I love that.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  Where are you, mom, dad?

• 47:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  I do want to just pull back. You know, there's a lot of talk about AI, AI for good, AI for nature. Do you get excited when you talk about the artificial intelligence aspect of being able to analyze all these hours of wolf calls that you have? Or do you think, ugh, people just want to talk about the hot new thing and that's why they insist on this part of the project?

• 47:45Speaker 03

  It's both. I think AI is a tool that can help us understand animal behavior. But it's not the end all. I don't foresee a Google Translate for wolfish, right? Because what you're really trying to do is get in the mind of a wolf. And that's different than just transcribing their different types of howls into the basic functional units.

• 48:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  And to what end? Is this conservation? Is this simply expanding human knowledge of other species?

• 48:19Speaker 03

  These devices that we're building can do a lot of things. A lot of people don't know that poaching happens all across America, across the world, but even within our national parks.

• 48:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  Still?

• 48:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, still to this day. Like, two wolves were poached last year on the northern border of Yellowstone. Why can't we solve for poaching? Because this is a national heritage, right? It's everybody's national park. And so one of the reasons we're building these devices is to locate gunshots on the landscape and help law enforcement protect these resources for the public. But then there are a lot of other reasons that tie to conservation. One of them is simply building the digital wild. Human language across the globe is losing its words and grammar for nature.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  And it's slowly going away because as we move to the cities and we don't experience the wild kingdom, we're seeing changes in our lexicon, so to speak. There's no turning back the digital age. And so one of the things we can do with these camera traps and these sound recorders is bring this digital wild and storytelling to people, kids who are sitting at home, and bring them a little closer to nature. You tend to protect what you love, and you only love what you understand. Now, look, I don't know if AI will ultimately decode animal communication, but I do know this, there has to be animals to decode.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  If your body represented the total weight of all the world's land mammals today, your right forearm would be what's left of the wild ones. The rest of your body is us, our livestock, and our pets. As for carnivores, things like lions, tigers, and wolves, it's less than my pinky. The challenge we collectively face as real humans, not artificial ones, goes far beyond individual opinions on wild wolves. It's about the future of wildness itself.

• 50:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  Do you have a name in wolf? I don't know, Jeffrey, if that's a ridiculous question.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  For me?

• 50:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yes, like, if you were to go out into the field and you were to say, like, hey, wolves, it's me, Jeff.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 50:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  I'm collecting the spectrograms and the recordings.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, what I do, I howl. And I've gotten good at imitating 907's howl, so I howl like her.

• 51:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  Why don't you do it with me? So just try to keep it flat.

• 51:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  And then try to get your pitch around 320 Hz.

• 51:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm going to count to three, and then we're both going to do it. One, two, three.

• 51:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ooh.

• 51:24Speaker 03

  Perfect.

• 51:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  That felt good.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  I feel like I'm a member of your pack now, Jeff. Thank you.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Yep, or I'm a member of yours. Thank you.

• 51:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Jeffrey T. Reed. He's a computational linguist and the founder of Grizzly Systems and the Cry Wolf Project. You can see the wolf howl spectrograms and hear more sounds from Yellowstone at the crywolfproject.com. Jeff's full talk is at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening. This episode was produced by Katie Monteleone, Phoebe Lett, and Phoeu Guerin, with help from Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour and me. Our production staff also includes Rachel Faulkner White. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineer was Carly Strange. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei.

• 52:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  Our partners at TED are Sal Khan, Logan MacLeod Dauda, Helen Walters, Roxane Highlash, and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 52:33Speaker 05

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