Cellphone users dial up call of wild

Starting this week, visitors to the Franklin Park and Stone Zoos who want to hear the call of the wild can make a call on their cellphone.

The Dorchester and Stoneham zoos are joining a growing national movement of public attractions offering audio tours by wireless phone. After dialing a phone number, cellphone users enter digits corresponding to the attraction they want to learn more about, with a premium fee added to their monthly bill.

Locally, cellphone owners can already take a 17-stop tour of downtown Boston narrated by Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler for $6, or a tour of the Minute Man National Historical Park in Lexington and Concord that works the same way for the same price.

The Franklin Park cellphone tour offers sound clips with professional zoo staff explaining 37 different attractions there. The tour at its sister Stone Zoo has 22 elements. Screeching cockatoos, barking prairie dogs, quacking ducks, and other noisy creatures accompany human narrators. Each segment is usually 30 to 90 seconds.

At Franklin Park, for example, users pressing 10# to learn more about the lions will hear a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer-quality lion roar, which the narrator explains can be heard up to five miles away in the wild, and learn that the Boston lions eat the equivalent of 40 hamburgers a day and get to sleep on a heated rock in winter.

''Cellphones have become ubiquitous in our daily lives," said Marshall Judges, executive vice president of Zoo New England, which runs the two facilities. Besides offering ''easy, ready access to educational information," Judges said, the service can generate some small but sorely needed new revenues for the zoos. Users will pay $4 per 24-hour period to hear as many audio clips as they want, plus whatever they pay their phone company for airtime. Judges said the zoo hopes to add tours in languages other than English in coming months.

Museums and historical sites eager to get rid of the headache of maintaining and renting personal tape players for people taking tours have been embracing wireless phones as, for them, a much more convenient and cost-effective alternative. For many wireless subscribers, a helpful coincidence is the time they might be most likely to visit -- on the weekend -- is when carriers offer unlimited free minutes anyway, so using the phone for an audio tour won't run up their bill.

Michael Giniger, chief technology officer of Spatial Adventures Inc., an Ashburn, Va., company that provides the underlying telecommunications technology for Franklin Park and Stone tour services, said the zoo in Sacramento is the only other one he knows of to offer a similar service.

''This really puts them at the forefront of US zoos," Giniger said.

Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.