The wolf known as 907 howls in Yellowstone National Park. This wolf, unusually long-lived at 11 years, died in late 2024 after being attacked by a rival pack and was one of Jeff Reed’s favorites. Most wolves don’t live more than four years in the wild. Reed’s autonomous recording units (ARUs) captured 907’s last hours alive. Image by Evan Stout, courtesy of Jeff Reed.

I met the focus of this story, Jeff Reed, on the campus of Wake Forest University in November 2025. He spoke about his work in Yellowstone National Park in trying to decode what he calls “wolfish” — the mythical, hypnotic howls of wolves. Honestly, he had me at Yellowstone. But layer in wolf after that? I told Jeff I planned to get out to Wyoming and the United State’s first and most famous national park so that I could report on his research.

In July 2026, I did, spending more than seven hours with Jeff, in his truck, in Yellowstone, and back in Montana in his home office on the Yellowstone River. It took me a while to fully grasp the magnitude of what Jeff is doing; being there was the only way to do that. A PhD linguist and computer-science savant, Jeff has built large language models to hold hundreds of thousands of hours of ambient sound from the Yellowstone backcountry, He then uses Artificial Intelligence programs he’s written to isolate more than 8,000 continuous hours of wolf vocalizations. It’s the largest data base of its kind in the world. Through painstaking diligence and countless hours, Jeff has identified more than 20 distinct calls that wolves make, suggesting a kind of language in communicating within their packs and to rival packs.

This is as much a technology story as an environmental story. And it’s all incredibly fascinating. Many thanks to my longtime editor Glenn Scherer for his careful edit and making sure the story contains the magical and entrancing video and audio clips of what Jeff is hearing and analyzing.

Jeff Reed, a native Montanan and founder of the Cry Wolf Project, arrives at Yellowstone National Park at dawn in July 2026 to observe a wolfpack on the remote Blacktail Deer Plateau, west of Lamar Valley. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

Jeff Reed in his home office in Emigrant, Montana, 31 miles (50 km) north of Yellowstone. His screen displays a one-hour spectrogram of sound collected in the national park. Thin bars of color represent episodic wolf vocalizations threaded through the hour. Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.