about waist high. I heard the strangest sound coming from above on a ridge or rock outcropping about 100 yards above. It was a "whooping" sound. It was very loud vocalization. Its call was resonating through the whole valley below and carrying very far.
(Plot where I heard the Whooping sound, looking from about the spot where I heard it)
The only sound I could match it to be was a monkey call in a tropical forest (which I have never experienced). But this is what it sounded like at the time.
It was a very alarming call, and I assumed it was some kind of bird that I have never seen or heard before. I scanned the trees, bushes and rocky outcrop for a silhouette of a bird with my binoculars but did not spot anything. The call lasted for about 2 to 3 minutes. The "whooping" was repetitive, about 15 "whoops" and then a pause, and then 10 to 15 more about 4 sets in all. It felt like it lasted a long time. The entire time I was scanning the vegetation looking for a bird. It was so loud and deep I often thought it couldn't be a bird but it was the only correlation my brain came up with at the time.When it stopped I made my way up to the spot where it was coming from. I remember picking out a lone pine tree and making my way towards it. It took me about 5 to 10 minutes to walk along logging trails and through vegetation to get there. Once I got to the summit of this ridge it flatted out. I remember seeing many game trails and beaten paths. This was common in some areas due to heavy use by deer.
I started walking around looking into the trees which consisted of Eastern Hemlock and mixed hardwoods. I heard nothing. It was strangely quiet, like everything was scared off from the call. I traversed the slope very excited that I may see possibly an
invasive species of bird, but when I got to the top of that ridge I felt very uneasy. I can’t explain it. I never wanted to go back up to that spot after this incident. I had visited this ridge top before because there was an active nest that I was monitoring. I remember specifically when I first found that nest about a week prior I was up on the ridge top and thought to my self, something is wrong here, it doesn’t feel right for some reason I started looking around suspiciously thinking I may see something but never did. When I checked that nest this time it was destroyed, something grabbed half of the nest along with the chicks. (finding a predated nest was common but the nest it self was rarely destroyed because most predators were raccoons, or birds.
I wrote down exactly what I heard. When I went back to base camp that evening, I told the ornithologists I worked for what I had heard and they said the only bird that makes such a loud and similar sound as that was a Yellow-billed Cuckoo. I listened to sound recordings of the Yellow-Billed Cuckoo that night and quickly realized that was not the sound I heard. I also called my father, an avid birdwatcher and told him about it because it was so strange.I didn’t know it but wood knocks where heard often. I remember sitting on a high spot just listening to knocks in the distance and thinking, “I wonder why loggers are out there, I thought they were on the other side of the forest right now?”
I had some other strange things happen to me near that site.
