Monkey whispers

Late one night this past summer, while in the NAWAC’s Area X, I was approaching my truck to put away some equipment I had been using in the course of wood ape research. As I approached the vehicle, parked about 100 feet away from the cabin in which most of our team was staying, I heard the distinct sound of a bipedal animal stepping away from me from within a thicket of brush and trees.

CRUNCH, CRUNCH, CRUNCH

Then I heard something I couldn’t really process. I thought maybe I was imagining it because it seemed too odd for me to comprehend.

Whispering.

At least, it sounded like whispering. Not words. More like a very low volume and breathy version of the “Samurai chatter” members of the group have been hearing in the area, off and on, for a couple of years now and has been reported as suspected bigfoot vocalizations. It took me a while to even mention it to my teammates since it was just so freakin’ weird. Luckily for me, Monica Rawlins also heard some similar low volume vocalizations later in the night.

This has been one of those weird-as-hell things people looking for bigfoot sometimes experience and I filed it away as such until today.

The tamarins of New York City’s Central Park Zoo have been caught telling secrets. In the first recorded evidence of whisper-like behavior in non-human primates, the tiny monkeys were observed making very quiet, almost inaudible vocalizations in the presence of zoo supervisor who they found threatening.

That’s from a Popular Science post reporting on a Zoo Biology study that’s recently been published. From the report:

Although it is unclear what the motivational state of the tamarins was when in presence of the supervisor, it appears that they were responding to him as an ambiguous threat and may have been investigating the situation by cautiously approaching him to determine the actual level of threat and communicating to each other the appropriate behavioral response to take.

Remarkable. Based on my own personal experience, I think it’s safe to add whispering to the already long list of analogs between reported wood ape behaviors and those things observed in other primate species.