Alberta - Secret of the Elk Bugle
Today we investigate the origins of one of the oddest sounds in the mammal kingdom.
episode notes
I ended up in Alberta with the ability to shoot these episodes kind of accidentally, which meant I had not done my due diligence with research beforehand. So I can actually say I had a very organic experience with the elk bugle. I kept hearing the sound on my first day in Canmore and could not for the life of me place it. It took a lot of googling on the first night to figure it out.
My lack of preparedness also meant that I pretty much missed the larches, though a few people I talked to tried very hard to help me out and point me to where I could see them.
On my first evening in Canmore I was at a bridge in town doing a time lapse of the sunset, and was very focused on that, when after about an hour, by total chance I just happened to glance down the other side of the river and saw there was a big harem of elk with a male on the riverbank who had been there for god knows how long. I frantically packed up the time lapse and moved downriver to catch them - they’re the ones who appear in this video. You can see I was losing the light fast. If only I’d noticed them sooner!
Predictably, someone did seem to get genuinely upset with my laboured joke about Americans at the end of the episode.
transcript
Canmore is surrounded by towering forests of mostly lodgepole pine and Engelmann spruce, which are in turn towered over by the Canadian Rockies.
And if you show up in Canmore at the right time of year, you can experience two pretty special phenomena in those woods.
For one, the seasonal colour change of the leaves, especially in stands of vibrant larches. Unlike most coniferous trees like pine and cedar, larches actually lose their needles in the winter, but not before they turn a brilliant gold in the fall.
And as you admire the larches, you might hear a haunting sound echoing through the trees and between the peaks:
It’s the bizarre vocalization known as an elk bugle.
Elk are maybe the most iconic animal in Canmore. Their size, abundance and relative ease around people have made them a symbol of the town, and of the Banff and Kananaskis regions in general. They’re the second biggest mammal in the Cervidae family, only outsized by moose. And in the breeding season, they’re definitely the loudest.
It’s a cutthroat time for elk. Males work hard to assemble a ‘harem’ of females. And those females can be picky. Researchers have shown that, when presented with one male with nine points on his antlers and another with ten points, that one point makes all the difference to her.
So naturally it pays to be able to attract as many females from as great a distance as they can. The louder the better. And males’ bugling can hit 90 decibels, about the volume of a lawnmower or power tool.
And it turns out the bugle of a male elk isn’t just a weird and unique sound, it’s also been a bit of a mystery.
One of the things that makes the bugles so effective is their wide frequency range, from a low grunt or roar that builds to a shrill, high pitched tone before coming back down again. There’s just one issue here. When scientists took a look at the elk’s voice box, they had to conclude that biologically, it simply couldn’t produce sounds that high up. Elk should not be physically capable of bugling in the way we hear it.
Except, of course, they do.
It took until 2016 for a definitive answer to be found. By closely observing the elk when they make the noise, researchers were able to figure out that it’s a lot more complex than they thought. There is a simultaneous use of the nose and mouth.
They make that lower pitched roar with their voice box, but the higher pitched shriek is added by whistling through their nose at the same time. It’s a parallel, simultaneous and perfectly timed action to produce one of the most bizarre calls in the mammal world.
The elk in Canmore - in fact all the elk in Alberta - aren’t actually descended from Canadians. Overhunting pushed them to extinction in Alberta in 1917. The only reason we have elk now is because we got 235 of them shipped up from Yellowstone between 1918 and 1920. And I know this seems like a tangent, but it’s all gonna be worth it when I get to say that they represent just one more example of Americans being the loudest animals in whatever environment they’re in.