Monongahela

A site dedicated to the review and analysis of potential sasquatch vocalizations, Sasquatch Bioacoustic combines techniques from the domains of intelligence collection, audio analysis and bioacoustic studies to examine the evidence of sasquatch through their vocalizations. ~Monongahela

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Ascending Vocals from Pendleton County, WV

On August 13, 2011 I dropped off a new "long duration audio recorder" in my  Pendleton County research area. This was to be the recorder's first field trial and I had high hopes that it would perform well. I also hoped the vocalizers I'd recorded in the area previously would be frequently active and vocal.

I chose to place the recorder in a dense patch of mountain laurel, close to a place I've nick named the Piney Woods. It was at this location that I was growled at in 2010, and where I recorded loud vocalizations from during the Spring of that year. The mountain laurel was thick enough to hide the recorder from anyone who might happen by (although not a likely event, I have lost recorders that weren't well hidden).

The recorder captured 9 hours of audio each night, from 9 p.m. till 6 a.m., for 32 nights in a row. The 16 GB memory card finally reached capacity and recording ceased. Happily there was plenty of battery power remaining, so longer deployments are possible in the future with a larger memory card.

I picked up the recorder on the evening of October 7th, as I was driving through Pendleton County on my way to another destination. And since then have used Audacity's spectrographic tool to review the audio visually and watch for the tell-tale signature of potential sasquatch vocals. Unluckily, the recorder picked up a good deal of human traffic in the area while it operated. And that may have put down some of the activity in the area. But to be fair, the summer months have never been terribly productive in that location.

However, on the 31st of August, and 10:50 p.m., the recorder did capture a series of vocals that begin with two faint whoops, and then evolve into four ascending vocals, each louder than the one before. These "ascending" vocals have a strange, siren-like quality to them.

I've put together this short video of the spectrographic playback of these vocals. It plays through twice. The first run is very close to what the original recording sounds like, with only mild filtering and amplification applied. The initial whoops are so faint that they can't be heard without headphones. The second play through in the video includes an enhanced version of the clip where a spectral editor has been applied to enhance the amplitude of the vocals themselves. The howls are louder, and the initial whoops are clearly heard.