How Animals Talk, and Other Pleasant Studies of Birds and Beasts

1. What they did

William J. Long, a naturalist and nature writer, sets out to explain how animals communicate. He starts from a scene he watched as a young man: a little terrier, Nip, seemed to “tell” his old setter, Don, about a woodchuck he had cornered, and Don followed him straight to it.

The book has 15 chapters:

• Chapters 1 and 2. Animal cries, such as the crow’s calls, the deer’s alarm whistle and owl calls, and how he and Indian guides call animals in.
• Chapters 3 to 6. What he calls “chumfo,” a sharpened sense or unity of all the senses, and “natural telepathy,” his idea that animals send feelings and warnings to each other silently over distance. He also looks at flock and herd behaviour (the “swarm spirit”).
• Chapters 7 to 9. Fieldcraft for getting to know wild animals: going without a gun, keeping still, and how sight, wind and scent decide how close an animal will come.
• Chapters 10 to 15. Essays about a small hidden pond in a caribou bog, which he watched over many summers: the trail to it, its deer and salt-lick, a family of black mallards, minks and a bear, and finally the beavers whose dam flooded the pond.

His evidence is his own observation, much of it from following animals’ trails in snow, together with stories from Indian guides, whalers and hunters.

2. What they found

Cries

• He hears three accents in the crow sentinel’s single “haw”: “all’s well,” “watch out” and “be off.” Other birds and animals seem to react to crow alarms too.
• An Indian guide, Tomah, could call a barred owl in to the campfire, and used horned-owl, wolf, beaver and woodpecker “talk” the same way.
• He thinks cries are only a small part of animal communication. The bulk of it, he suggests, is silent.

Silent warnings, as read from the snow

• Wolves. He followed a wounded, limping wolf that left its den and went straight to a deer the pack had killed eight to ten miles away. The pack had killed in silence, and the wind was from the wrong direction for the wolf to smell the meat. From the trails he concluded that the wolf somehow knew where the pack was and what they were doing.
• Caribou. Trailing a herd of about a dozen caribou in New Brunswick, he read from the tracks that one animal was lame in the right forefoot. When he jumped the lame caribou, the rest of the herd, about a mile away and unable to see, hear or smell him, broke away at once and ran to meet it. Backtracking showed no other track of man or animal that could have alarmed them.
• Foxes. After a pregnant vixen was caught and penned in a village, tracks in fresh snow showed a male fox had come straight to her pen. He backtracked the male for about four miles and found that the trail did not follow the route the vixen had been carried, and that the fox ignored the usual runways and left none of the usual signs.
• Whales. When he approached one whale in a boat, other whales of the same kind some distance away seemed to take alarm at the same moment. A whaling captain told him the same of sperm whales.

Keeping still and scent

• Wild animals see a motionless person poorly. Deer, moose, caribou, bear, wolf, fox, lynx and otter came within a few yards of him while he sat still. An otter on a frozen lake in Ontario even rested a paw on his snowshoe.
• Deer smelled him from a quarter mile away in a steady wind over a lake; in a light breeze the distance was 50 to 200 yards.
• A resting person, like a brooding bird or a hidden fawn, gives off little scent. His dogs could not find brooding grouse or a motionless fawn until almost on top of them. Once he trailed a pack of hunting wolves that passed 16 measured feet from two deer sleeping in a hole in the snow without finding them.
• Tracks in the sand showed a bull moose had stepped over his canoe while he slept beneath it, and a fox had passed by, neither apparently alarmed by him.
• He suggests animals may fear the scent of anger or excitement rather than the scent of people as such.

The pond

• Deer used many game-trails around the pond, renewed with fresh footprints almost every morning, and he found that they led to a salt-lick.
• Deer sought day-beds far from where they had fed, and their hours of feeding and rest seemed to follow the moon.
• A pair of black mallards raised a brood on the pond for eight summers in succession.
• Beavers came from a colony 12 to 15 miles away by water, dammed the outlet and flooded the bog. The larches and mosses died, deer began using the top of the dam as a runway, and the game-trails moved.

3. What they concluded

• Animal cries have meaning, but probably no fixed meaning like our words, because animals live mostly in a world of emotion.
• Much of animal communication, he believes, is silent: a sending of feelings, warnings or calls from one animal to another, which he calls natural telepathy. He says plainly that this cannot be proved, and offers it as a working hypothesis that makes sense of what he has seen.
• So-called blind herd panics are not blind: they can usually be traced to one alarmed animal.
• To know animals, observation is not enough: it takes sympathy, and some people have a gift for it. You learn little about living animals with a gun in your hand.

4. How tracking was or was not used

Tracking is central to the evidence. Long read the stories in his chapters from tracks in snow and sand:

• He trailed wolves, caribou and foxes in snow, often for miles, and backtracked trails to find where an animal had come from and what had alarmed it.
• From a caribou trail he read the size of the herd and that one animal was lame; from a fox trail, the sex of the fox and whether it was hunting, roaming or “going somewhere.”
• He trailed many foxes to their day-beds, and found deer and wolf beds in the snow.
• He read moose and fox tracks in the sand around his camp, and deer runways, game-trails and footprints around the pond.

5. Tracker or observer certification

Reported but not validated. Long writes from many years in the woods, and he praises the skill of his guides Simmo and Tomah, but no test or certification of anyone’s skill is given.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• Field-glasses to watch distant animals.
• Snowshoes for winter trailing.
• Testing the wind with a moistened finger.
• Using his dogs’ noses to test how much scent a hidden fawn gave off.
• Calling animals by imitating their cries.

7. Implications for conservation (from the paper)

• Long regrets the destruction left by logging and is glad to see the forest healing.
• He argues that animals are not born afraid of people; their fear comes from persecution.
• He considers crows, in settled regions, too numerous and harmful to other birds, while leaving them in peace in the wilderness.