Where do you live/work currently? I live on a farm just north of Yellowstone National Park, in southwest Montana. I was born and raised here...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, and I prefer feral over fancy. Wolves have not only taught me about how to run a business, but how to live life…wild and free.

What is your TED talk about and how did you get selected to speak? My talk was about the use of AI to decode animal communication, especially wolves, and what it might teach us about our dogs. I had given a talk at another event, and a famous linguist (John McWhorter) heard it and invited me to speak at TED (my PhD was in computational linguistics, a precursor to large language models).

What was the experience like? Surreal. Inspiring. Challenging.

Where can others view the TED talk? The official video will be released in the coming months.

What made you interested in studying wolves particularly? Truth be told, I actually study multiple species in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Other than wolves, I am most passionate about chickadees, bison, and elk (because I, like many hunters, try to imitate bull and cow elk). So, why did I focus my talk on wolves? Where I live, talking about wolves these days is a bit like walking into a bar in 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. Wolves don’t vote, and they don’t care about your bumper sticker. They care about each other. They listen, they warn, they welcome, they grieve. 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. If you were to press me, there is one specific reason I decided to give a TED talk on wolf communication. A female wolf called 907F -- one-eyed, legendary, and among the longest-lived and most prolific wolves in Yellowstone's history. I first really got to know 907F in 2018, roughly half way through her life and at the beginning of her second reign as the alpha female of the Junction Butte pack. I watched pups at the den site all summer, and the regular hunting forays of the pack who would bring back food to the pups via the backpack of their stomachs. That was also the first year I really got serious about passive acoustic monitoring (PAM as it’s called in the industry), focusing on birds and elk on my farm outside of Yellowstone. While watching the wolves that summer, often from a mile or more away through a Swarovski scope, I would hear the occasional morning or evening chorus howl. But I often watched the wolves playing, wrestling, fighting in what is called Little America in Yellowstone…part of the American Serengeti as some call it. Having raised and trained bird hunting dogs myself, I knew the various sounds they made when wresting together in my alfalfa pasture. I wondered what sounds the wolves were making. I knew they had to be making sounds, having visited wolf rescue facilities, but I wanted to know what wild wolves were saying in wild places. Alas, all we could hear at those distances were howls, chorus howls, and the rare bark. Not the close range sounds I knew they had to be making. Even the internet and wolf documentaries were of no help. It was at that time, wanting to know what the wild wolves were saying, that I dreamt up the idea of recording them with an ARU (autonomous recording unit). It would be five years before researchers Dan Stahler, Kira Cassidy and I would put the first ARU in Yellowstone and kick off The Cry Wolf Project. Little did I know that I would eventually get to know 907’s distinctive howl, and the sounds of her pups, and the sounds of her death. You can listen to what I call her "pirate howl" here.

What is your 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. Since 2023, we've gathered over 200,000 hours of sound. 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.

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

What is your next step in your research? We are expanding the area we record to all of Yellowstone. Outside of Yellowstone we are working with citizen scientists and iNaturalist to help people protect and promote the world's remaining wild places, near their towns, counties, states and maybe even their own backyard. We call it the "digital wild".

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 try to model my work after four of my 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.

What drives 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.
























The data undergirding this infographic is here: 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.

What do you think about Colossal Bioscience's bringing back the dire wolf? Dire wolves? Not really, As Colossal has pointed out. And as Klaus-Peter Koepfli (Senior Research Scientist at Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation) outlined on social media. But is "functional" de-extinction useful for conservation biology? Absolutely. I have no doubt that many of today’s critically endangered species will eventually vanish, despite our best efforts. That’s why the tools being developed by Colossal Biosciences matter—not just for resurrecting extinct species, but for potentially preserving the genetic legacy of those on the brink, like the pink pigeon mentioned in Time magazine. Biodiversity is in crisis. It needs every ally it can get—universities, research institutes, NGOs, zoos, governments, and yes, even private companies with the resources to move fast and think big. Colossal’s $10.2 billion valuation allows it to tackle hard problems without flinching at the price tag. They have been instrumental in supporting my own artificial intelligence work. And they’re not going it alone. Their partnerships with the American Wolf Foundation, the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, Save the Elephants, and Conservation Nation show they’re serious about conservation, not just spectacle. Sure, resurrecting dire wolves makes headlines. But the real story is the creation of a powerful toolkit—developed through science and collaboration—that could one day help us hold the line on biodiversity loss. And if a private company wants to be part of that fight, I welcome it. A house divided will not stand. In the meantime, the rest of us can continue putting our money and time where our mouths are and focus on re-wildling our existing planet...especially our own back yards, which we can control. Everyone agrees that this unsexy approach is what makes the biggest difference. We have the will, tenacity, reason (our children) and economics in our favor. For example, the global wildlife tourism industry is $150B compared to the $10B illegal wildlife trade industry (which often is run by sex and drug traffickers). We've got this. Eventually, I'll do a post on the howls of Romulus and Remus and compare them to what we know about gray wolf howling. Stay tuned. In the meantime, you can listen to Jeff's interpretation of what a dire wolf howl may have been like, based on a science coming out of the La Brea tar pits: https://youtu.be/VSnVuHr0izs

How can others support your work? The Cry Wolf Project team is raising $2M to fund its mission to advance field science, combate wildlife crime, and build the digital wild...with KPI's to measure progress. To date, Jeff and two other partners have financed the work for less than $100k, and countless hours of sweat equity. To put that in perspective, Project CETI and Earth Species have garnered tens of millions of dollars. We want to do for terrestrial mammals what they are mostly doing for marine mammals. And Jeff believes Grizzly Systems has a business model that will fund the effort beyond the early days. Ask him why.

How can you contact Jeff? You can email Jeff at jeff@reedfly.com (personal) or jeff@grizcam.com (work)

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