For once, I grabbed the camera at the right time, while the pack was howling. I shot out the window, and as it was after midnight it wasn't possible to see anything, but the primal sound is plain.
This is another night sound, a familiar one. I love the weird trills and hyena-laughs of the urban pack, but am relieved to be at a distance. So is Bentley, who was not happy while I was making this video. He was glad when I closed the window.
His fur goes up when he hears them. He can't help it. We don't know if it was a dog or a coyote, or even a pack of coyotes, that attacked him before we adopted him. All we know is that he was bald on top where he had been shaved down. There were healed puncture-wounds on his skin, and it takes a lot to puncture the skin of an animal. He had been pretty badly mangled. Though he is completely healed now, when he leans forward a certain way I can see tiny bald patches all over his shoulders, his badge of survival. Probably only his mother can see them.
Does he have a bit of kitty PTSD? He's reserved, but not a scaredy-cat. He stands his ground. He doesn't knock you down with affection, but is extremely loyal and attached to both of us, even protective of us. Not every cat is that way.
I hope to get an owl video some night. Or coyotes and owls at the same time. I am getting very involved with neighborhood noises, and sounds in general. I have the hearing of a dog, which I sometimes wish I didn't have. Maybe it's compensation, because I've never been able to see worth a damn.
I didn't take this video, but I use it here as a sort of example. We hear coyotes all the time around these parts, but late at night when it's hard to capture them. The trilling and "laughing" (hyena-ish) sounds are very weird. The first time I heard them, my hair stood on end. It was a real "WTF??" moment. Combined with the very loud, resonant owl hooting (barred owls) we hear at night, it makes for a weird soundscape.
This is like suburbia with fifty-foot cedar trees in it, and bush only a stone's throw away. There are cougar and bobcat sightings, but mainly because we have raped their territory without a single thought about what they will do and where they will live. Should they just vaporize, or what? Why should they want something so silly as a "home", a place to live, to exist? WE have homes, of course, but that is an entirely different matter because we are entitled to them. These coyotes look prosperous, but ours are scruffy, usually thin, shy during the day, and only bold in packs. I would not fear an attack from them, but pets are another matter. Small mammals are fair game for them.
So add the trills and barks to the hoots, cackles and general jungle hysteria of the owls as they swoop and dive, and you have a sort of urban cacophany. I will admit, the first time I really noticed the owls, I didn't know what they were. I thought they were kids whooping at each other. So I missed seeing one that was likely right in my back yard. Something primitive about that face, like a ceremonial mask.
howls, stick structures, stick knocking, foot print casts, rock clacking, moving stones around, scat, hair, etc. ... where is the DNA? Cant we do better than this? Someone get some good clear photos or videos! Tired of stumpsquatches, blobsquatches and ink blots in nature. BEST VIDEOS? Freeman? Gray Harbor thermal? I Think I Saw a SkunkApe? So few are somewhat convincing. SO many hoaxes. And, PLEASE, no UFO /alien connection or CLOAKING!!! All of these so-called or self-made researchers OUT IN THE FIELD, BOOTS ON THE GROUND and still NO evidence that is truly tangible or worthy. ... get REAL.................. I would sooner believe in shape-shifting demons. In reality, I think it is simply a MANIMAL. Some so-called missing link, but a creation done by fallen angels, alluded to in Genesis, chapter six, not to mention elsewhere in scripture.
You know, I was with this guy right to the last line or two. It's a comment on a YouTube video, one of several thousand that purport to capture Bigfoot howling and screaming at night.
The howls are a damn site more substantial than the visual clues, which seem to include drunk hillbillies, strips of co-ed underwear and slimy beer bottles. But I have to tell you, I've been freaked out by inexplicable sounds all my life, and there's a reason why.
Maybe.
I remember reading that Alfred Hitchcock always included weird and graphic sounds in his movies, but nobody really noticed. Nobody really noticed because the visuals scared the shit out of them, but that's just what they thought.
Watch the shower scene in Psycho. Then watch it with the sound off. With the sound off, it's almost ridiculous, funny, a parody, and certainly not scary.
Listen to it with the sound ON, and you have that agonizing shrieking Bernard Hermann score going EEEEK, EEEEK, EEEEK, EEEEK, EEEEK, not to mention the sound of the knife entering Janet Leigh's flesh: chhhhk, chhhhk, etc. A shoop-shoop sound. Horrific.
Why does the soundtrack "make" the scene without our knowing it? Because sound is primal. Visuals are more mundane, just the thing we use to get around every day, to navigate. Sounds are visceral and instinctive. We hear before we see, in the womb, not just the massive rushing noise of our mother's heartbeat but clangs, beats, rhythms, probably even speech.
My daughter played music to her first child while in the womb. I don't know if this was to make her smarter, or what. I'm sure it didn't hurt, but nothing was needed to make Caitlin any smarter than she turned out to be. But it was an experiment that might have some merit.
I posted earlier - let's see if I can find it, now that I can embed videos in the body of this blog - a whole series of weird noises that were inexplicable. One or two sounded like they might be animal noises of some kind, but extremely loud. But one thing people don't take into account is the fact that wild animals can vocalize in all sorts of bizarre ways. This is how they communicate and mark their territory. As their territory shrinks due to the raping of their environment by humans, they probably have to vocalize more, and louder, to stake out their claim. (Make sense?) It isn't just wolf howls we hear, but cougar shrieks and bobcat screams. Even deer make strange loud chuffing noises, and the bugles of elks sound like harmonic Middle Earth woodwind instruments played by hobbits.
I proved my theory of sound once, very late at night, when I found a YouTube video of the bizarre underground film Eraserhead. This was the whole movie, a surprise to me, though I think it had foreign subtitles of some kind. The next day it had been taken off YouTube, and I never saw a trace of it again except in tiny excerpts. I watched the whole thing with the sound off, and boy was it stupid! When I replayed bits of it with sound, my guts became queasy and I had to turn it off. And that's AFTER I had already seen the whole film and knew what was coming next.
OK, so, Bigfoot. I don't really believe in it, or we would've found some concrete evidence by now. Video after video after video depict men crashing through the underbrush with rifles, saying "holy shit" to each other. Probably corned to the gills, as they used to say back in Arkansas. These often have a Blair Witch quality to them (and just try watching THAT with the sound off - you'll either be in stitches, or bored.) The "sounds" may well be manufactured and spliced in. But this last one, this apocalyptic one, I just don't know. There are so many different ones, in different settings, and no one seems to know what they are.
When you DON'T KNOW the provenance of something. . . it's kind of like the sounds I hear almost continually, if I stop to listen. I can distract myself, and forget they are there. But especially at night, and especially during heavy rain, there is a sort of hum, always on the same tone, sometimes pulsating, and it drives me crazy. When I first wake up in the morning, there is a continuous noise. I call it the "urban sound". It's a bit like a vacuum cleaner noise running at slow speed. There is so much going on now, all the time, construction, cars, Bigfeet on the loose, that it's turning into one big auditory soup that I can't tune out. This is why I'm increasingly turning to white noise and even nature sounds. On the right frequency - and to tell you the truth, I have only ever found one that works - it seems to vibrate at the same level as "the noise", and thus masks it or blocks it out.
I have always had the hearing of a dog, and during the more distressing times of my life it has become agonizingly hypersensitive, to the point that I must go about with earplugs. The sound of traffic is overwhelming. One time I had to take an airplane, five hours each way, right after a death in the family, and when it landed I had a migraine that should have been declared a country in its own right. It was agonizing and didn't go away for a week.
So do I hear things that aren't there?
And if they ARE there. . . what the hell are they?
