Floridaman on the trail of wild singing dogs
Up at 14,000 feet in the central mountain spine of New Guinea, it’s usuallywet, foggy andmuddy, with bone-chilling cold. That high, that parched of oxygen, you need to plan out each step you take; you might keel over just bending to tie the laces of your boots.
James “Mac” McIntyre, an intrepid 66-year-old grandfather and retired teacher from sea-level Fernandina Beach, can’t wait to get back there for a fourth trip.
He wants to again find the elusive, shy wild dogs that live in that rugged, challenging land — a hardy groupof animals, one of the rarest dogs in the world, once thought by many to be extinct in the wild. NewGuinea singingdogs. They’re a di stinc t , ancient breed, “frozen in time,” saysMcIntyre says. He is director of the New Guinea HighlandWild Dog Foundation, which calls the animal a “living fossil,” a missing link in the evolution of dogs: “It represents canids in a pristine, prototype state before and as canids began being domesticated.”
They’re called singing dogs because of their characteristic howl, which ricochets around the mountains. And if you’re lucky and adventurous enough to hear several dogs singing together in harmony, it’s as if you were in attendance at an eerie, mysterious canine choir, unlike any other sound in the world.
“It almost sounds like each dog has a different part,” he said. “It’s kind of beautifulwhen you hear that at 14,000 feet, in the middle of nowhere, echoing off thosemountains. It’s almost magical to hear it.”
McIntyre was raised in New Jersey, with a love for animals and a hankering for exploratory exploits — “this unquenchable thirst for science and adventure and all that,” he says, semitongue in cheek.
Dreaming of adventure
After high school, he went west, to the University of Idaho, where he got a degree in zoology and later one in education.
He worked for veterinarians, on an Idaho ranch, as a logger, at the Bronx Zoo, at a private breeding center for endangered species. He later taught biology at Callahan Middle School and Fernandina Beach High before retiring four years ago.
He lives in a 950-squarefoot house, built in the 1850s and complete with mice in the attic, in Fernandina’s Old Town neighborhood in Florida.
He says he never stopped dreaming of adventure. One grand journey began while just leafing through travel guides at a library. That’swhere he read about hermaphroditic pigs that live on remote islands in Vanuatu, in the southwest Pacific.
That got his curiosity. So he reached out to the author, who gave him the name of a manwho’d been director of a cultural center in Vanuatu. In 1994, that led to an unpaid, several months-long leave from work and a solo trip to those islands, where he landed with no real idea of what he would do next.
He traveled from one island to another, asking anyone he met about the pigs: Had they heard of
them, these animals with the characteristics of both male and female sexual organs? Did they know where they were?
Six weeks went by, and no one seemed to know what he was talking about.
Eventually, he got a tip and, after some tough traveling, made it to an isolated, traditional village where hewas told he might find those pigs.
First, though, he had to earn the islanders’ trust, so he learned some of their language, played with the children, went to the gardens with the women, drank kava at night with the men.
A publishing feat
Finally, he was shown the pigs, which had been all around him the whole time.
Pigs are the currency there, he said, and none was more valuable than the intersex pigs, which had been selectively bred and were symbols of status and power. McIntyre drewblood fromseveral of those pigs, and shared his samples with a Penn State professor; the two men later returned to Vanuatu together for more study of the pigs.
A paper that included their research on the pigs was later published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This fall, McIntyre was co-author on another paper published by the same group, this time about the wild singing dogs of New Guinea.
That’s an astounding feat for anyone — especially for someone without an advanced degree, says McIntyre’s mentor and friend, I. Lehr Brisbin, a senior research ecologist emeritus fromthe University of Georgia.
“If you have a paper once in thePNAS, you don’t need to publish another thing,” he said. “And here’s a guy without a PhD who’s been published twice.”
In 1996 Brisbin encouragedMcIntyre to search for the wild dogs of the New Guinea highlands after a trip to Vanuatu wrapped up. McIntyre was happy to go, to find an answer to the mystery: Did wild singing dogs still live up in the isolated high country?
Some singing dogs had been taken into captivity decades ago, in the 1950s and 1970s. About 200 or more are known to be in existence. AndNewGuinea villagers seemed to have dogs descended from the wild ones, though many had been bred with other types of dogs.
But for many years there had been no scientific proof of the wild highland dogs, though anecdotes and a couple of intriguing photos seemed promising.
Onhis 1996 trip, McIntyre didn’t find any dogs in person, though he heard howling fromafar and collected some fecal samples and plaster casts of footprints.
He found more success on a return trip in 2016, which began in frustration and ended in triumph.
Out in the wild
He had searched for almost a month, and had found no dogs. None answered the coyote calls he broadcast into the wilderness. Nonewas tempted by the stinky traps the set in cages, aromatic treats that included crushed coyote glands, skunk essence, beaver glands and urine from captive singing dogs in heat.
With three days left, he finally got evidence: fresh dog prints in the mud.
Then the real reward: Trail cameras they had set up captured 149 pictures of singing dogs, out in the wild.
They are sturdy dogs, with yellowish fur, pointy ears and tails that curve up like a fish hook. Theywere lean, but looked healthy.
Those pictures gave him encouragement to return in 2018. That trip was a big success, as McIntyre and crew, which included a veterinarian and researchers from a New Guinea university, observed 18 dogs.
They managed to trap and release two dogs, which were given GPS collars to track their movements. They collectedDNA from those dogs, aswell as fromanother that had been found dead. Upon analysis, that gave researchers crucial evidence.
Genetically, the wild highland singing dog, the captive singing dogs and the Australian dingo are nearly identical, the study found.
They’re all descended from dogs that traveled through the region at 3,500 to 6,000 years ago, a link McIntyre says between modern domesticated dogs and the ancient wolves that evolved to bond with humans.
Ancient dog
Picture, he says, a family tree of dogs between those two points, from ancient wolf-dogs to modern family pets. Then picture a separate branch coming far off that tree, a “random, rogue branch.” That’s where you’ll find the singing dogs of New Guinea, on a twig next to the Australian dingo.
“They are separated from every other dog on the planet. Ancient dogs. They have survived. They are untouched, frozen in time, in a protected environment,” McIntyre said.
His last two trips were sponsored and fully funded by the world’s largest gold mine, which granted him access to the vast, unpeopled property it worked in the mountains.
“This mine had inadvertently created a safe zone, a refuge for probably the rarest dogs on the planet,” he said.
The global pandemic forced McIntyre to abandon a trip toNewGuinea in May. He’s hoping to return this nextMay, with the plan to gather semen from captured dogs to help improve the stock of captive singing dogs, which came from a limited gene pool.
He’s eager to return: Rather than spending his retirement lounging on a beach back home, he’d rather bemucking around in the oxygen-deprived highlands of New Guinea.
“I’m a prisoner of adventure. I’m a prisoner of science,” he said. “I’m drawn to this — I appreciate a challenge. And that’s why I’m still doing this, as long as I can. It’s something that gets my blood flowing.”