Order Of The Wolves

Communication

Communication between pack members allows wolves to care for and feed of their young, defend their common territory, and cooperatively bring down prey larger than could individual wolves on their own.

Physical Behaviors:

Wolf communication

A great deal of the communication among wolf pack members involves body language. Specialized behaviors and postures have evolved that help reduce aggression between individual animals within the pack. Body language helps the pack live together more agreeably.

Facial expressions are often used to express emotions. Wolves may indicate dominate behavior by baring teeth and pointing erect ears forward. Subordinate behavior may be indicated by closed mouths, slit-like eyes, and ears pulled back and held close to the head.

Wolves also use tail positions to communicate emotion. Wolves expressing threatening signs hold their tails high, almost perpendicular, while submissive wolves lower themselves before dominant pack members, tails tucked between their legs.

Scenting Behaviors:

A wolf’s sense of smell is up to 100,000 times greater than humans’. Under good conditions a wolf can smell something a mile or more away. Scent is a very effective means of communication for wolves.

Wolf packs are highly territorial. Scents are used to clearly mark the boundaries of territories, to claim and defend that territory from other packs, to mark food ownership, and to act as a sort of road map for the pack itself. Scent is a way for a pack to make its presence known long after it has moved to another part of its territory.

Urination is the most common form of scent marking for wolves. Wolves produce scent from  glands between their toes.

Vocal Behaviors:

Vocal communication among wolves consists of a panoply of howls, whines, growls and barks.

Howling session

Although all the functions of howling are not known, scientists believe that wolves may howl to assemble their pack, to claim territory, to warn intruders away from a home site or kill, or to identify other wolves. Wolves also howl in the evening and early morning, in the summer when pups are young, and during the mid-winter breeding season. It is a myth that wolves howl at the moon, but they do point their snouts toward the sky to howl. Projecting their call upward allows the sound to carry farther. Wolves have excellent hearing, and under certain conditions can hear a howl as far as six miles away in the forest and ten miles away on the open tundra.

A wolf howl is a deep and continuous sound from about half a second to 11 seconds long. The pitch usually remains constant or varies smoothly. A howling session by a single wolf lasts an average of 35 seconds, during which the animal howls several times. A howling session by a pack lasts an average of 85 seconds. It is initiated by a single wolf, and after its first or second howl one or more others may join in.

Alpha wolves usually display a lower-pitched howl and will howl more frequently than those with a more subservient social standing. Pups practice howling as they mature, mimicking those of adult wolves. Lone wolves may not howl as much to hide their position from other residential wolf packs.

Except for the high-pitched yapping of pups, wolf howls almost never include barking. Whines are used often at the den site, primarily by the adult female. They are thought to be sounds of affection. Growling conveys aggressiveness and usually comes from a threatening dominant male.