It was early Sunday morning, about 2:30 am. I was having trouble falling asleep, so I got up and brewed some rooibos tea and sat down to do some quiet reading. My attention was caught by what at first sounded like a somewhat wonky fire truck siren, and as I strained to listen, I realised that it was actually a coyote yipping away in the school field across from our house.
I rushed to get my recorder and a pair of microphones, and quickly set them up outside on an old rattan chair and began recording. The resonance you hear with the coyote’s call is as recorded; the only processing I did was to run a high-pass filter at 200 Hz to decrease the background traffic rumble, and then I normalised the volume to -3 dB. The neighbourhood dogs are sounding off as well, but they were no match for the volume and carrying power of their wild calling cousin.
Image is cropped, from USFWS Mountain-Prairie.