The follwing recordings and report submitted by Texas BFRO Investigator Sybilla Irwin

Colorado Recordings by Texas BFRO Investigator Sybilla Irwin: July, 2009

Dave Petti, BFRO Colorado, invited me and another Colorado BFRO investigator  to visit his primary research area this summer. We arrived in the research area at 2:30 PM and spent the afternoon setting up our camp, gathering firewood and exploring the area east of our camp. We were acting like regular campers, we did not do anything unusual to provoke or arouse interest.

I began recording at 8:00 PM. We lit our campfire forty five minutes later, just before dark, and were enjoying the beautiful silence of this remote location when abruptly the first vocalization began.

First Vocalization occurred at 9:50 PM Tuesday. An unknown animal vocalized 8 times from an approximate distance of 1/3 a mile west of base camp. All remained quiet for the minutes immediately after these vocals.

Second vocalization occurred ten minutes later at 10:00 PM from a location of approximately 150 to 200 yards south of our camp, across a meadow. A lone coyote began the vocals and was answered by the unknown animal, which had apparently moved within ¼ mile of our camp location. The coyote and the unknown continued to vocalize back and forth to each other as the coyote crossed the meadow moving west.  The participants seemingly met, and then everything went silent.

Dave Petti arrived in the research area Thursday at 6:30PM and experienced these morning vocalizations.

Third Vocalization occurred at 8:45 AM Friday. Unknown animal begins vocals then is answered by coyotes. It is the same vocal pattern experienced at night. Unfortunately a jet airplane interrupts this recording.

Fourth Vocalization occurred at 5:55 AM Saturday. Unknown animal begins vocals, there is a pause, a second unknown vocalization then the coyotes join in. Identical vocal patterns experienced on all recordings.

from Stan Courtney

I was recently on the 2009 Colorado BFRO Expedition with Sybilla Irwin. She was excited about some sounds she had recently recorded and wanted my opinion. When I listened to them I was immediately struck by the fact that they reminded me of the Illinois Howl in the fact that the harmonics seemed strange. When I returned home I sent the sound clips to DB Donlon, The Blogsquatcher and asked him to do a sound analysis.

I just checked the file with no coyotes in it. It does exhibit the feature that I find interesting in suspected sasquatch calls. Note that I don’t know that this isn’t something coyotes do, but it is odd that we don’t get recordings of coyotes clearly doing this when we know that they are coyotes. I’ll attach some pictures and if you look at the third window, with the frequency spikes, you’ll see that at the beginnings of the calls there’s an extra frequency in the call that is not related to the fundamental.

I know that coyotes and wolves can make a sound very like this, but in those cases, the extra frequencies are produced at a fraction of the fundamental (1/2 the value of the fundamental, I’m pretty sure.) So this is something different from that and so far I’ve not run across anyone who talks about this non-harmonic frequency spike in canine calls.

So to the pics:

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3