Animals: Animal Language

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Little scientific work has been done on the "language" of animals. Partly because most animals are not very gabby, partly because they are shy, until lately the only available collections of animal noises have been the dubious data supplied by bird-and-barnyard imitators.

In London recently a book was published which went a long way toward filling the gap.* Written by Popularizer-Professor Julian Sorell Huxley, and containing two discs (four sides) recorded by Ludwig Koch, the book shows that a greater variety of animal sounds exists than most scientists ever suspected.

To get his records Koch needed patience, ingenuity and a complicated apparatus. For a year an enormous van had to be moved back & forth between two big British zoos to catch the llama's hollow mating cry, the spotted hyena's angry laugh, the binturong's exhibitionist catcall. Koch spent some sleepless nights.

He recorded not only exotic sounds which the average zoo-goer never hears in a hundred visits but also such familiar noises as the rhythmic bleating of sea lions, broken by short, harsh, discordant barks, which sound like a few bars from Ravel's Valse. More sophisticated listeners preferred the grotesque beauty of the West African red river hog's grunt, the resonant, whuffing snort of the white-tailed gnu, the whistling whinny of the panda.

Most of this animal language has a surprising range. The lion alone makes six distinct sounds, all the way from a hunting call to a grumble of satisfaction after the kill, when it roars "as gently as any sucking dove."