Some of those are eerie, but I would say the pup howls are adorable. You can hear samples of all three here: What's in a Howl. Howls themselves vary, from rather joyful choruses, to mournful love songs, to growling confrontational howls. (I love that quote and nearly called my wolf howl PhD thesis that, but apparently it wasn’t scientific enough, so instead you get “Improving individual identification of wolves (Canis lupus) using the fundamental frequency and amplitude of their howls: a new survey method ”.) Allen didn’t hear that - he heard wolf choruses as “the jubilation of the wolves”. There’s a weight of cultural expectation, bred in by stories and movies, where we think of darkness and fear when we hear howls. That can be scary or wonderful, depending on your frame of mind. If there’s more than one, you can feel surrounded, enveloped by the sound, wrapped up in it. In daylight, perhaps it just catches your ear and makes you tilt your head. So that long slow note that rises up over the trees sends a shiver down your spine as it falls again, trembling into nothing on the night air.
It also makes us feel less safe, less secure, and more likely to view unknowns as threats. It makes us pay much more attention to our ears. Night strips our sense of sight down to the basics. Now I’d also say it depends on the time of day you’re hearing it and what you’re expecting. We feel like we should know the sound, but it’s never clear. It also means wolf howls have frequencies not dissimilar to those of human speech.Īs for why howls are eerie, it’s partly due to the fact that it’s similar to human singing but without words. There are also only so many ways you can vary a low frequency sound, so some whale song is spookily similar to wolf howls. That’s why whale song is so low and can transmit over hundreds of miles. In essence, a high pitched scream can be very loud but isn’t heard from that far away compared to a low roar because the higher-pitched, shorter sound waves don’t travel as far as the lower-pitched, longer waves. There’s a nice answer on why lower sounds carry better at distance here: Matthew Reynolds' answer to Acoustics: Do high frequency sounds dissipate less in air than low frequency sounds? Part of how they do that is by using relatively low frequencies, which do not attenuate as much over distance. Actually, nearly all animals have individual voices, different from one to the next, if you listen carefully enough.Ī howl can be heard up to 10 km (6 miles) from the originating wolf, so when they howl, they are broadcasting their message far and wide.
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