James McIntyre first heard about the singing dogs of New Guinea in 1996. More than two decades passed before he finally saw one in person. There were near misses before: anecdotal sightings, scatological evidence, camera trap snapshots, and the occasional eerie, prolonged vocalizations that give the animals their name all hinted at their existence. But the breakthrough moment finally came in 2018, when McIntyre’s troupe of field biologists came across the canids at 14,000 feet, sniffing around a high-altitude gold mine on the western side of the island, in the…
