Media and Events
PRESS BIO - 150 WORDS
Dr Jeffrey Reed lives his life as a feral linguist, inventing conservation tech in the mountains of Montana. With a doctorate in computational linguistics focused on decoding ancient languages, Reed spent three decades in the world of Silicon Valley building machines that replicate human language before turning his attention to the living voices of the wild—from wolf howls to elk bugles. He co-founded The Cry Wolf Project, the world’s largest database of wild wolf vocalizations, and founded Grizzly Systems, pioneers of low-cost technology for wildlife research and remote security monitoring. A lifelong outdoorsman and conservation advocate, Reed co-founded the Wild Livelihoods Business Coalition, a collaborative effort to protect Montana’s last wild places while sustaining its local economies. His forthcoming book, Howl: What Yellowstone's Wolves Reveal About Language, Dogs, and Our Wild Selves (Little, Brown) explores the science—and soul—of wolf communication. He lives with his amazing pack—his wife, Robin, and three talkative dogs—Ozzie, Huck and Shiloh—on their farm in southwest Montana. His work has been featured by HBO, TED, Nvidia, PBS News Hour, NPR, Washington Post, Inc Magazine, Animal Planet, SFGate, Montana Outlaw, Colossal Biosciences (of dire wolf fame), Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and others.
PRESS BIO - 50 Words
For three years, Dr. Jeffrey Reed listened to a one-eyed wolf named 907. What he recorded helped become the world's largest database of wild wolf vocalizations. His book Howl (Little, Brown) asks the question her voice raised: what are wolves actually saying? And what does it reveal about language, dogs and our wild selves.
The Cry Wolf Project is a long-term bioacoustics research initiative rooted in Yellowstone National Park, where it has assembled the largest database of wild wolf vocalizations in the world — over 200,000 hours of recordings spanning 50+ sites across 500,000 acres. The project's central scientific question is deceptively profound: why do wolves howl, and what are they actually saying? By pairing rigorous field science with cutting-edge AI and a purpose-built class of hardware called the Multisensory Recording Unit (MRU), or GrizCam, the project advances field science in ways traditional trail cameras simply cannot — capturing panoramic video, spatial audio, environmental telemetry, and real-time species detection in remote, off-grid terrain where conventional tools routinely fail.
But the ambitions reach well beyond the laboratory. A core goal is to incent private land stewardship by reimagining the economics of conservation on private ranches and farms. Existing "payment for presence" models require labor-intensive human review of camera images to verify wildlife activity before ranchers can be compensated. The Cry Wolf Project is working to automate that pipeline entirely — using AI-driven detection and classification to make wildlife stewardship economically viable at scale for the private landowners who control the majority of critical habitat in the American West. Closely tied to this is the project's active research into predator-livestock conflict mitigation. Working alongside wolf conflict mitigation experts and fifth-generation ranchers, the project is developing the next generation of "rag boxes" — speaker and light-based deterrent devices that play sounds and flash lights to keep wolves away from livestock. Critically, the project's deep knowledge of wolf vocalizations informs what sounds actually work: rather than simply blasting rock music or firecrackers, the research suggests that strategically combining unfamiliar chorus howls, growl-howls, guardian dog barks, and human-associated sounds — played at the right times of day and night — can convincingly signal to an intruding wolf that rival wolves and nearby humans pose a genuine threat. This science-backed approach to deterrence represents a meaningful step toward reducing the conflicts that too often cost wolves their lives and ranchers their livelihoods.
The project also works to combat wildlife crime. Illegal poaching and wildlife trafficking fund some of the world's most dangerous criminal networks, and enforcement agencies are chronically under-resourced in remote landscapes. By deploying sensor networks capable of detecting gunshots, human presence, and suspicious behavioral signatures — and triangulating their locations in real time — the technology gives rangers and wildlife officers faster, more actionable intelligence to disrupt illegal activity before evidence disappears.
Finally, The Cry Wolf Project aims to build the digital wild — creating immersive, data-rich windows into living ecosystems that can educate, inspire, and connect people to the natural world regardless of where they live. From interactive sound exhibits and a 3D audio visualizer to a wolf vocalization piano and online Yellowstone courses, the project believes that conservation ultimately begins with connection. The moonshot is nothing less than decoding wolf communication as fully as humanly possible — and in doing so, building a conservation technology platform with the potential to transform how humanity monitors, protects, and relates to wildlife across the globe.
MEDIA FOR PROMOTIONAL USE
(Credit Required: Jeffrey T Reed and provide link to www.thecrywolfproject.com wherever media is used)
AUDIO
VIDEO
Video Clips
Jeff also maintains a publicly accessible set of wolf audio and video on his Youtube Channel. If you see something you like from that channel or in any of his talks, contact him to get a copy of the original video file.
Jeff kindly requests the following acknowledgement for any digital or print use of his work
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Donate to Yellowstone National Park's Wolf Project via this link: https://www.thecrywolfproject.com/donate (Yellowstone Forever is the official non-profit partner of Yellowstone National Park.)
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Mention: Grizzly System's conservation technology via this link: https://www.grizcam.com
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Mention: Jeff's book on the secret language of wolves is forthcoming from Little, Brown and Company.
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Mention: Jeff co-founded Wild Livelihoods (https://www.wildlivelihoods.com), a collaborative effort to protect Montana’s last wild places while sustaining its local economies.
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Links to Jeff's social presence: https://www.facebook.com/jefftreed, https://www.instagram.com/thecrywolfproject, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jefftreed, https://www.tiktok.com/@thecrywolfproject and https://www.youtube.com/@crywolfproject
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Optional: Link to Jeff's TED Talk, via this link: https://www.ted.com/talks/jeffrey_t_reed_can_ai_help_us_speak_with_wolves
FAQ
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What's your background? I currently live on a small rural farm just north of Yellowstone National Park, in southwest Montana. My ancestors established farms (and later oil and gas) in the harsh western portion of North Dakota. They were immigrant Norwegians, or Vikings I used to imagine as a child...wild and free like Odin's wolves Geri and Freki. I, however, was born and raised in southwest Montana...before, during and after the re-introduction of wolves in 1995 in Yellowstone. Wolves were exterminated in the 1920's, just when Theodore Roosevelt and others were starting to understand their ecological importance. I continue to hunt, fish, gather and practice paleo skills in the Absaroka mountains of my childhood. I prefer feral over fancy. After a PhD involving computation linguistics and ancient history, I had a 30 year career in technology, involved in the Internet, mobile phone and now Artificial Intelligence waves of innovation. Towards the end of that career, I moved back to my birthplace, and was drawn into the study of animal communication and conservation tech. It was part fascination, part frustration. The tools we were using — GPS collars, trail cameras, acoustic recorders — felt frozen in time compared to the innovations I had seen in Silicon Valley. So, I started Grizzly Systems, devoted to remote surveillance technology that advances field sciences, secures private and public lands, combats wildlife crime, and builds the digital wild. I spend hours in the field watching wild wolves, and even more hours behind a computer screen listening to The Cry Wolf Project vast dataset of their howls. Wolves not only taught me how to run a business, but how to live life…wild and free.
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What made you interested in studying wolves? Truth be told, I actually started with chickadees, bison, and elk. In 2022, 907 and her pups changed that. You can listen to what I call her "pirate howl" here. Wolf packs are like families. They listen, they warn, they welcome, they grieve and they fight. And if we’d stop shouting over each other for a second, we might realize how much we’ve forgotten about how to truly listen—to nature, to each other, and to the wild voices we once depended on to survive. Where I live, talking about wolves is a bit like walking into a bar in hunter's camo and ordering a kale smoothie. Half the room cheers, the other half reaches for something sharp. I’m not here to change anyone’s politics—I don’t have the time or the wardrobe for that. I’m just a naturalist with a hunting license, a fly rod, and a fascination for creatures that still know how to live wild.
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What is the process in doing your research? My colleagues and I at Grizzly Systems build the iPhone of rugged, battery-operated camera traps that take 360 degree video and record sound 24x7. Wolves are loud when they howl, the equivalent of you standing 10 feet in front of car while someone honks the horn. I've personally witnessed howls that were recorded at 8 miles away. Biologists and I place these devices out on the landscape of the Greater Yellowstone and record wolves in their element. The amount of sound data we collect is immense. We now collect over 200,000 hours of sound each year. Modern hardware can now handle that amount of data. But processing it requires the use of artificial intelligence to find the needles in the haystack of data. Once we separate the wolf vocalizations, we analyze it with what we know about their location (via GPS collars on the wolves) and thousands of hours of field observations, genetics, and life histories of Yellowstone wolves. With all of that knowledge, we use good old science (including but not limited to machine learning) and the neurons between our ears to try and understand why wolves howl. AI is a powerful tool, but it’s not a magic wand. It won’t suddenly decode animal communication for us. The real path to understanding how animals speak is the old one: time, patience, and being out in the world, watching and listening—just as Indigenous peoples have done for thousands of years. The same holds true for human languages. You can’t truly learn one from the outside. You have to live in the culture that speaks it. Language only reveals its meaning when rooted in its place.
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How does your art connect with wolf communication? I've listened to and studied hundreds of thousands of hours of sound recordings from remote, wild places in Yellowstone. Everyone loves the sounds of nature, including the dawn chorus of birds. No one likes the sounds of the city, jack-hammers and blaring vehicles. But it is hard to explain what a wild soundscape is like to those who don't experience it daily like I do. In addition, humans are very visual creatures. We love our mobile screens. So, I decided to turn the sounds in to art by using spectrograms. Spectrograms are a way of visualizing sound. You can learn about them here: https://www.thelanguagesoflife.com/spectrogram. I use software to turn long-term recordings of wild soundscapes in to visual art, that people can see and listen to. You can learn more about my art here: https://www.thecrywolfproject.com/art
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What is the most rewarding part of your work and research? Conservation. But, more specifically, helping people who have never experienced true wildness "find it" again. I model my work after four heroes: Theodore Roosevelt, Rachel Carson, Steve Jobs, and Dietrich Bonhoffer. My life mirrored their work (if not their accomplishments) in that I grew up hunting, became a naturalist, spent a career in technology, and have always been a theologian. In the modern world, we need conservation more than ever...and these four people left legacies on how to get there.
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What motivates you? In my TED talk, I presented a simple infographic about the planet me and what my generation is leaving to our children and grandchildren. If your body represented the total weight of all the world’s land mammals. Your right forearm would represent what’s left of the wild ones. The rest of your body? That’s us, our livestock and our pets. Your right forearm represents all of the domestic dogs on the planet. That's right. Dogs are equivalent to all of the wild mammals left on the planet. In some ways, wolves are having the last laugh. We pamper, protect, and take outside to go poop...the very dogs who evolved from wolves. As for carnivores—lions, tigers and wolves, it’s less than my pinky. The challenge we collectively face as real humans, not artificial ones, goes far beyond individual opinions on wild wolves (who are demonized and politicized)—it's about the future of wildness itself, for hunter (like me) and non-hunter alike.
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How does your work on wolf communication help with conservation? Our moonshot is to decode wolf communication as fully as humanly possible. But in the process, we’re building something with the potential to transform global conservation, all rooted in the incredible research happening right here in Yellowstone. Through our technology and research, we aim to...
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Enhance wildlife population monitoring with greater accuracy
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Reduce conflicts between wildlife and livestock through better understanding and prediction of behavior
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Lower government wildlife management costs using advanced Artificial Intelligence
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Create markets that compensate ranchers and farmers for their ecosystem services
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Highlight tourism businesses that invest in wildlife, and those that do not
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Inspire future generations to appreciate both the economic and intrinsic value of wildlife
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And perhaps, along the way, help you understand your own pet just a little bit better
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The data behind this infographic is: Greenspoon, L., Krieger, E., Sender, R., Rosenberg, Y., Bar-On, Y. M., Moran, U., Antman, T., Meiri, S., Roll, U., Noor, E., & Milo, R. (2023). The global biomass of wild mammals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(10), e2204892120.
Some of Jeff's Work
