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Why do wolves howl at night, and what makes it quite an eerie sound? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Holly Root-Gutteridge, did a PhD on wolf howls, on Quora:
A wolf’s favorite time to howl is the quiet hours of dusk, usually between about 7pm and midnight depending on latitude. Humans happen to be quieter at that time and more likely to be listening so we think of howls as a night time occurrence.
Actually, while the first part of the night is their favorite time to howl, they also howl in the middle of the day and at dawn and pretty much every other time too.
It’s just that most people who hear them are sitting quietly in the evening so can hear it, whereas they are busy at 2pm and sleeping at 4am, and not paying as much attention to their ears as they are their eyes.
Wolves howl because they are sending a long distance message to other wolves and sometimes also talking to a wolf right next to them at the same time. A howl can mean many things, from a friendly call to a pack-mate to a noisy claim of territory to other neighboring wolves. It can be a rally to the pack before a hunt or an invitation to find a new mate in the dying months of winter.
We don’t know how much behavioral information a wolf howl carries, but we know they advertise their pack in their howls and that each wolf has its own individual voice just like a person.
Actually, nearly all animals have individual voices, different from one to the next, if you listen carefully enough.
A 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. Part of how they do that is by using relatively low frequencies, which do not attenuate as much over distance. 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?
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. That’s why whale song is so low and can transmit over hundreds of miles. There are also only so many ways you can vary a low frequency sound, so some whale song is spookily similar to wolf howls.
It also means wolf howls have frequencies not dissimilar to those of human speech.
As for why howls are eerie, it’s partly due to the fact that it’s similar to human singing but without words. We feel like we should know the sound, but it’s never clear. It’s so close to human but not.
Now I’d also say it depends on the time of day you’re hearing it and what you’re expecting. Night strips our sense of sight down to the basics. It makes us pay much more attention to our ears. It also makes us feel less safe, less secure, and more likely to view unknowns as threats.
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. In daylight, perhaps it just catches your ear and makes you tilt your head.
If there’s more than one, you can feel surrounded, enveloped by the sound, wrapped up in it. That can be scary or wonderful, depending on your frame of mind.
There’s a weight of cultural expectation, bred in by stories and movies, where we think of darkness and fear when we hear howls. Durwood L. Allen didn’t hear that - he heard wolf choruses as “the jubilation of the wolves”.
(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”.)
Howls themselves vary, from rather joyful choruses, to mournful love songs, to growling confrontational howls. You can hear samples of all three here: What's in a Howl.
Some of those are eerie, but I would say the pup howls are adorable. There’s no eerie feeling there, just the jubilation of young animals.
Others do have the true, monster movie shiver to them. Lonesome, as Harrington labels that first howl, is eerie, with its slowly tumbling notes, and it gets under your skin.
Listen to more here: Wolf Sounds.
All of it evokes primeval fears of darkness and teeth in the night, creeping footfalls deadened in the snow, and the snarl you hear before you die.
Which is rubbish, as wolves attack very few people and are far more threatened by us than we are by them (Are wolves a danger to humans?), but Little Red Riding Hood has a firm hold on our imaginations. Her story is over a thousand years old now: What Wide Origins You Have, Little Red Riding Hood!, which is a lot of dead Grandmothers and tardy woodcutters.
To the wolves, though, a howl is just a long distance conversation. They don’t know that we’re scared of their sounds, they are just calling to each other. They send their messages out and we eavesdrop on them. They are singing to each other, and we sometimes get treated to a command performance.
So cultural ideas, similarity to human voices, and fear of the dark, all play into our ideas of wolf howls.
Sometimes those howls sound sad, sometimes they sound eerie, sometimes they even sound joyful, but to my ears, they always sound beautiful.
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