Wolves howl to communicate with other group members, as a form of socializing that helps to maintain important bonds, to express a range of emotions, and to advertise their territorial boundaries.  To me, a chorus of wolf howls is one of the most beautiful sounds in nature.  It thrills and spellbinds me just as much each additional time that I hear it as it did the first.  There certainly isn’t any longer a rational basis for humans to feel shivers of fear, contrary to one of the most persistent of all the many nonsensical characterizations and myths about wolves.

 

When individuals become separated, such as while chasing caribou, mountain sheep, or moose, they often get back together by howling as well as scenting each other’s trails.  

 

Cooperative breeding and cooperative hunting, the two major underpinnings of wolf social systems, involve sophisticated bonds among group members.  These bonds are maintained by chorus howling, play, dominance interactions, and other common forms of socializing that have additional adaptive values and often appear in close sequences.  Especially rich, intense combinations of these behaviors are likely to be observed just before wolves set off on a hunt and when separated individuals and subgroups rejoin.  

 

High ranking wolves returning to provision pups at a summer homesite (den or rendezvous site) after a couple of days away on a hunt clearly delight in the responses they hear back when sometimes they begin howling to wolves at the site while still several miles away.  I’ve listened to and watched wolves in these exchanges, well before they could see each other.  It was as if the returning hunters were anticipating and trying to intensify the excited welcome they were about to get at the homesite.  

 

Wolves call-howl to missing family members.  They howl in obvious pain and distress while still alive in traps or snares, and so do any other family members on the scene who might be trying to help them.  The emotions that I’ve observed on various occasions in the howling and other behavior of a wolf near a close mate who just died were obvious and intense, moreso than in similar circumstances involving the most intelligent, expressive dogs I’ve known.  

 

Other than in distressful situations and apart from the other adaptive values, wolves seem to howl in large measure simply because they enjoy howling.  The photos at the top of the page and just below, of three howling Toklat West (Grant Creek) wolves 10 days ago, provide an example.  The wolves essentially ignore our circling airplane, with one fascinating exception when they are merely resting or lounging around:  The sound of the airplane often prompts them to howl.  As far as I can tell, the explanation is pretty straightforward.  In essence they are singing along with a sound they like - not uncommonly, as in the photo below, while heads turn together to follow our orbits.  

 

 

 

 

  

Next two photos: The above male’s father in February 2005 howling with obvious distress for his dead mate, the day after local trapper Coke Wallace hauled her away from his nearby Savage River trapline (bottom photo).  The male apparently remained with her or nearby for most of the approximately two weeks that she struggled in a trap and a snare (both can be seen on Wallace’s sled).  The male returned to the trapping site repeatedly over the next 3-4 weeks.  A hunter shot him just outside another area of the park a month later.