Night Cries

The other night, I was out for a walk when I heard a strange noise - like something between a bark and a screech - coming from one street over. I have mostly lived in more urban or suburban areas, and I hear night cries like this one so infrequently that I always have to do some detective work to figure out what they are, since I've usually forgotten what the last one sounded like and what I finally decided it was. I do know enough, however, to always start my search in the same place, with a species that was probably responsible for most of the strange noises that kept you up at camp or gave you goose bumps while watching a bigfoot hunting reality show. In a suburb like this one, it is almost guaranteed to be the culprit behind any strange cries in the night and indeed, turned out to be source of this one - the red fox. 

One of our neighborhood foxes making a "vixen scream."

Red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) are surprisingly vocal creatures that make a wide variety of barks, yips, screams, and howls. This particular noise is often referred to as a "vixen scream." A vixen is a female fox, and the vixen scream is referred to as such because it was once thought that only female foxes made this noise. In fact, both male and female foxes scream, but the name has stuck nonetheless. 

You are most likely to hear a vixen scream during the mating season in February or March. During this time, the call is used for attracting mates and for advertising an individual fox's territorial boundaries. Given the time of year, it is likely that the scream I heard was for the latter purpose. This year, we've been hearing our local pair of foxes screaming at lot more and a lot later than in previous years and I suspect that this is probably because they have set up a den nearby and are extra defensive of the area around it. Sure enough, about a week after I recorded this call, my dad saw one of the adults trotting down our neighbor's driveway with two kits in tough. A few nights before that, a neighbor took the photograph below of one of the adults carrying a huge cottontail rabbit - a nice dinner for a growing family!

A red fox carrying an eastern cottontail rabbit (Sylvilagus floridanus) home to her kits.

Fishers vs. Foxes

Besides foxes, the other animal that is often blamed for strange cries in the night is the fisher (Pekania pennanti), a species of large weasel from Canada and the northern U.S. Interestingly, there is some debate around whether or not fishers actually scream or make much noise at all. Stories abound about noises coming from the woods that sound like a baby crying or "somebody being murdered" and there are even some videos on YouTube that claim to capture the scream on their audio. The problem is that these videos (at least in my experience) never seem to actually show a fisher making the noise - they are just audio over a dark forest or a picture of a fisher. What's more, the screams that are captured usually sound remarkably like noises that I have seen foxes making, either in person or on video. Massachusetts Audubon, federal Fish and Game biologist Thomas Decker, and New York State Museum mammologist Roland Kays all agree that there isn't much solid evidence that fishers make anything more than a ferret-like squeak, thought Kays does acknowledge that an absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence when it comes to animal vocalizations.

And yet, people continue to insist that fishers scream, and you can find some pretty heated arguments in the comment sections of videos claiming to record the cries of both foxes and fishers in which people passionately correct and recorrect each other's IDs. Personally, if I had to pick a side, I would lean towards saying that most if not all alleged fisher screams are actually foxes. Still, I do find the debate itself to be pretty interesting. For one thing, it's a quintessential example of a common conflict between two different ways of knowing about wild animals, the one rooted in organized, scientific investigation and the other in lived experience and tradition. It's easy, I think, to throw out the latter in favor of the former by default and certainly, after a point, the evidence gathered by scientists can be and often has been enough to overturn what once was considered common sense. Nonetheless, there have been enough times where the reverse has been true that we should at least make a habit of giving these things the benefit of the doubt, especially when a lack of urgency offers us the luxury of keeping things open for a while. 

More than that though, I think that the fox vs. fisher debate says something really important about the actual experience of hearing a strange cry in the night. In most cases, even when we are hearing the sound in person, with our own two ears, the experience is not that different from watching a YouTube video of screams played over a still photograph or a barely lit forest edge. We know that we are hearing a scream and perhaps we even know that we are hearing the scream that we've heard several times before, but in most cases, we don't see the animal making it. So, we do what people have surely been doing for as long as we've had ears and language - we ask others in our community what they make of the sound. From there, whether online or in the village square, it's easy to imagine how wild tales about spirits and monsters and ferocious fisher cats would sprout up to explain that noise in the dark that you always hear, but never actually see the source of. We crave explanations and we love to share them with others. We take those that we can find until better ones come along, or we die stubbornly insisting that the evidence for our favorite bugaboo is there if only you look a little harder.

But there is also a third option: pull up a chair, sit down, and listen for a while. Let the scream chill your bones and tingle your spine. Feel the need to know what is out there and turn it over and savor it for a while. There is value in the search that you may choose to embark on for the source of the scream, though you may not find a solid answer for a while. But in the meantime, that feeling of uncertainty, unease, adrenaline, and excitement is worth something too. It's a feeling that connects you to the oldest hearth and the minds around it, reaching out into the darkness with their stories and ideas. How lucky we are to have animals like the red fox, still delivering that old feeling of standing in a dark wood, even to the modern city.