by Barry Lopez
But the term alpha—evolved to describe captive animals—is still misleading. Alpha animals do not always lead the hunt, break trail in snow, or eat before the others do. An alpha animal may be alpha only at certain times for a specific reason, and, it should be noted, is alpha at the deference of the other wolves in the pack.
The wolf is a social animal; it depends for its survival on cooperation, not strife. Human beings, particularly in recent years, have grown accustomed to speaking of “dominance hierarchies” in business corporations and elsewhere, and the tendency has been to want wolf packs (or troops of chimpanzees) to conform to similar molds. The social structure of a wolf pack is dynamic—subject to change, especially during the breeding season—and may be completely reversed during periods of play. It is important during breeding, feeding, travel, and territorial maintenance, and seems to serve a purpose when wolves gather to reassure each other of the positive aspects of their life-style as reflected in this social order, one that enhances survival by collective hunting and natural population control.
To place a heavy emphasis on such supposed facets of behavior as “intimidation,” “pulling rank,” and games of psychological cruelty based on social structures, however, is simply to confuse the tools of human analysis with the actual behavior of wolves.
Four weeks old.
Another factor to be considered is that wolf packs, like individual wolves, have personalities. Packs may contain autocrats, petulant individuals, or even cretins; and the personalities involved may make one pack more Prussian or austere in its organization than another.
With this to mind, the following can be taken as a “typical” pack structure: an alpha male and alpha female at the top, perhaps four or five years old; subordinate males and females, some sexually mature, in the middle, the dominant of which are called beta animals; and the pups. Deference is shown to alpha animals by subordinate animals of both sexes. Subordinates of the same sex establish their own order, usually with the yearlings at the bottom and a two- or three-year-old animal at the top. The pups, too, have their own social order, but theirs is without regard to sex. The alpha animals and the others gradually bring the pups into the social structure as the litter stabilizes toward the end of summer. Wolf discipline is firm but not ruthless. An errant pup is typically held by the muzzle and pinned momentarily to the ground.
After the pups are weaned, the other members of the pack play an increasingly greater role in their upbringing, providing both food and recreation. The pups eat partially digested food regurgitated for them by adults. Babysitting adults play rag doll to the pups, who now have needle-sharp milk teeth and are mobbing each other, wrestling, biting, and generally grabbing reclining adults vigorously by the ruff of the neck. This behavior will later be molded into efficient hunting technique.
Daily activities center around the mouth of the den until the pups are about eight weeks old, at which time the adults move them to the first of a series of rendezvous sites where they remain while the others hunt. By late fall the pups may weigh forty-five to fifty pounds and accompany hunting adults. The knack of taking large animals like deer, moose, elk, mountain sheep, and caribou is behavior that must be taught; trapping mice with a bilateral stab of the forelimbs or surprising and catching a snowshoe hare comes more naturally.
By the time the pups are a year old they are almost full grown. Some disperse and either spend time alone or attempt to join another pack, or follow their own pack at a distance; others stay on with the pack for another year, until they reach sexual maturity.
There is probably a significant difference from year to year in the way a particular pack of wolves gets along. The loss of a good hunter, a drop or rise in the prey population, a prolonged winter, excessive social tension within the pack—all these are part of the ebb and flow of life for the wolf. Although no formal studies have been made, field studies of more than a year’s duration suggest an annual cycle of individual identification with the pack that takes on unusual significance in the light of the suggestion that wolves seem to have both a sense of self and a sense of the pack and of preserving it.
Social tension increases in late winter with the evolution of a mating pair in the pack, and the level of anxiety is sometimes marked. Once two wolves have mated, however, emotions abate. The pack may split up to hunt more effectively. The pack’s identity at this time may be at its loosest, with members hunting in ones and twos. The pregnant female, perhaps accompanied by her mate, selects a den site a week or more before she whelps, and the pack drifts together again to provide for her and the pups. This is undoubtedly a most difficult time in the year for the wolf. Activities center on the den site, when the most efficient kind of hunting would be one without such a locus. The pups are vulnerable and a few inevitably succumb quickly to exposure or starvation. There must be among wolves some sense of the importance of the population, as defined more by the hunting and reproductive unit (the pack) than by the individual, that leads wolves to stay together at this time in an effort to raise the pups.
With the calving of local prey species and the increased mobility that comes with moving the pups from the den to a series of sites from which the adults hunt, a climb up from this annual low point begins. The pack is given to emotional greeting, general nuzzling, and increasing horseplay as the summer goes on. They eat well. The weather is good. Their emotional peak must come in the fall and early winter. The pups are able to travel with the adults. Game is fat. The healthiest wolves have a tone of well-being, a strength of bone and mind, that will take them safely through the winter and into spring. They look to each other more often now, knowing that soon it will be impossible to get by alone as one could have done in summer. The increase in howls, their coming together frequently and wagging their tails as they orient around the alpha animals, marks the onset of winter.
After many years of work in the wild studying wolves, Adolph Murie wrote that the strongest impression he was left with was of the wolves’ friendliness toward each other. Most systems of human description of animal behavior fall abysmally short in this area, which is unfortunate where wolves are concerned. Even as adults, wolves play tag with each other or romp with the pups, running about a clearing or on a snowbank with a rocking-horse gait. They scare each other by pouncing on sleeping wolves and by jumping in front of one another from hiding places. They bring things to each other, especially bits of food. They prance and parade about with sticks or bones in their mouths. I recall how one Alaska evening, the sun still bright at 11:30 P.M., we watched three wolves slip over the flanks of a hill in the Brooks Range like rafts dipping over riffles on a river. Sunlight shattered on a melt pond ahead of them. Spotting some pintail ducks there, the wolves quickly flattened out in the blueberries and heather. They squirmed slowly toward the water. At a distance of fifty feet they popped in the air like corks and charged the ducks. The pintails exploded skyward in a brilliant confusion of pounding wings, bounding wolves, and sheets of sunburst water. Breast feathers from their chests hung almost motionless in midair. They got away. The wolves cavorted in the pond, lapped some water, and were gone. It was all a game.
The social relationships of wolves are maintained through three systems of interpersonal and interpack communication: vocalization, postural signaling, and scent marking.
The wolf’s howl is the social signal perhaps most familiar to everyone. It typically consists of a single note, rising sharply at the beginning or breaking abruptly at the end as the animal strains for volume. It can contain as many as twelve related harmonics. When wolves howl together they harmonize, rather than chorus on the same note, creating an impression of more animals howling than there actually are. Wolves do not have to stand to howl. They can howl lying down or sitting on their haunches. I’ve even seen a wolf, with an air of not wanting to miss out, howl while defecating.
There has been more speculation about the nature and function of the wolf’s howl than the music, probably, of any other animal. It is a rich
, captivating sound, a seductive echo that can moan on eerily and raise the hair on your head. Wolves apparently howl to assemble the pack, especially before and after the hunt; to pass on an alarm, especially at the den site; to locate each other in a storm or in unfamiliar territory; and to communicate across great distances. Some Eskimos, according to writer/naturalist Farley Mowat, claim to be able to understand what wolves are howling about and to take advantage of it when the howling reveals the approach of migrating caribou. The howl may carry six miles or more in still arctic air.
There is little evidence that wolves howl during a chase, but they may do so afterward, perhaps to celebrate a successful hunt (the presence of food), their prowess, or the fact that they are all together again, that no one has been injured. Adolph Murie, who had an eye for such things, reported a lone wolf howling while hunting mice.
There has never been any evidence that wolves howl at the moon, or howl more frequently during a full moon, though howling may be more frequent in the evening or early morning. Howling reaches a seasonal peak in the winter months, during the time of courtship and breeding; it is easy to see how the idea that wolves howl at the moon might have gained credence and played well on the imagination during these cold, clear nights when the sound carried far and a full moon lent an eerie aspect to a snowscape.
Howl
It was wild, untamed music and it
echoed from the hillsides
and filled the valleys. It sent
a queer shivering feeling along my
spine. It was not a feeling
of fear, you understand, but a sort of
tingling, as if there was hair on my back
and it was hackling.
—ALDA ORTON, Alaskan trapper
What emotions prompt a howl remain unknown, though field and laboratory researchers both suggest that solo howls and group howling alike are brought on by restlessness and anxiety. Loneliness is the emotion most often mentioned, but group howling has a quality of celebration and camaraderie about it, what wildlife biologist Durward Allen called “the jubilation of wolves.” Murie writes of four wolves assembled on a skyline, wagging their tails and frisking together. They began to howl, and while they did so a gray female ran up from the den a hundred yards away and joined them. She was greeted with energetic tail wagging and general good feeling, then they all threw back their heads and howled. The howling, wrote Murie, floated softly across the tundra. Then, abruptly, the assembly broke up. The mother returned to the den and the pups; the others departed on the evening hunt.
Similar actions among Cape hunting dogs have been called mood-synchronizing activities by one researcher.
The wolf’s other vocalizations have received less attention, though wolves seem to use these other sounds more often, to communicate more information. They are commonly divided into three categories: growls, barks, and whines or squeaks. Howls have been recorded and studied in the wild. Growls, squeaks, and barks have only rarely been heard in the field, so we must proceed here solely on the basis of information from captive animals.
Wolves only infrequently bark, and then it is a quiet “woof” more often than a dog-type bark. They do not bark continuously like dogs but woof a few times and then retreat, as for example when a stranger approaches the pen. Barks reported from the field are associated with a pack’s being surprised at its den and an animal, usually the female, rising to bark a warning.
The wolf in the middle in the photograph on the left begins to howl in response to the others. In chorus like this, each wolf chooses a different pitch. The production of harmonics (see chart, page 42) may create the impression of fifteen or twenty wolves where there are in fact only three or four.
Growling is heard during food challenges and, like the bark, is associated with threat behavior or an assertion of rights in some social context. To the human ear this is perhaps the most doglike wolf sound in terms of its association with other behaviors, such as a squabble over a bone. Growling is common among pups when they’re playing. Pups also growl when they jerk at the ruff of a reclining adult and comically will even try to growl adults off a piece of food. Another type of growl is a higher-pitched one that begins to sound like a whine and often precedes a snapping lunge at another wolf.
Perhaps the most interesting sounds are the whines and high-pitched social squeaks associated with greeting, feeding the pups, play, pen pacing, and other situations of anxiety, curiosity, and inquiry. They are the sounds of intimacy.
Over a period of weeks one spring I observed a captive pack that included four pups. With the aid of underground microphones in the den, I was able to listen to sounds that otherwise would have been inaudible. The pups frequently wrestled down there, growling and yipping, but they would stop immediately when the mother came to the den entrance and squeaked—usually, but not always, a call for food. Sometimes it was a call to play. It was the custom with this pack for the alpha animals to take meat (chicken) from the hand of their caretaker and to then call the others—the pups and yearlings—with squeaks. They would all trot over. Then adults and young alike would engage in a twisting, supple dance —everyone squeaking, the young jabbing at the adults’ muzzles—until the adults regurgitated the meat.
The mother would squeak on occasion when the pups were playing too roughly; the father would occasionally call the pups over to him with a squeak, and they would all just stand there and nuzzle. Reassurance, perhaps.
GROWL
BARK
HOWL
WHINE
Some squeaks were repeated often enough to be recognized; these were associated with certain specific behaviors, leading one to think of them as bits of true communication.
Wolves hear well up to a frequency of 26kH. (beyond the range of human hearing, in the range where bats and porpoises produce sound), but what wolves do with high-frequency information remains a mystery. The ability to detect high-pitched sounds—wolves can distinguish between sounds a single tone apart in the range of 10-15kH.—may help them locate rodents under a snowpack. Many Russian scientists believe that wolves hunt even large game more by sound than smell and that the wolf’s range of hearing and the fineness of its auditory discrimination make this its keenest sense.
Postural communication is composed of a variety of facial expressions and tail positionings, as well as such things as piloerection (raising the hackles). Lunging, chasing, body slamming and fighting, and more subtle gestures may also be considered in this category.
Rudolph Schenkel in 1947 was the first to document the great range of facial expression in the wolf and to relate it (and tail positions) to moods or feelings in the animal. These simple classifications for gestures—“suspicion,” “threat,” “anxiety,” “submission”—later came to be understood in a more complicated fashion. Today the tendency is to treat postural gestures dynamically, as part of a complex of behaviors, augmented by vocalizations, flavored by personal idiosyncrasies.
When an alpha male encounters a low-ranking male in the same pack, he may stand erect and still, his tail horizontal in line with his spine, and stare at the other animal. The subordinate animal generally lowers his body, holds his tail down, turns slightly away from the alpha male, and lays his ears back. In a more serious encounter he might retract the corners of his mouth to reveal his teeth in what is called a submissive grin and twist his head so that he is looking up at the alpha animal. This is called passive submission. The subordinate’s attempt to lick the alpha animal’s muzzle would be active submission.
To a casual observer such a display appears to clearly reveal a dominant/submissive relationship; however, an observer who was with the animals regularly and was familiar with their personalities and the history of the pack—fights, matings, alliances—could tell much more. Many encounters are simple, but it would be misleading to establish simplicity of gesture as the rule. An obviously “submissive” wolf may be expressing submission, fear, and defensive aggression simultaneously. Even trained eth
ologists have mistaken who the submissive animal in an encounter was, thinking that an inhibited bite (a submissive gesture) was an attack (a display of dominance).
An intense moment between a dominant ten-year-old male on the left and a yearling female on the right. The split second captured here reveals, in the body language of wolves, annoyance on the part of the older animal with a partial erection of his tail (1), the raising of his hackles (2), the forward movement of his ears (3), and the vertical retraction of his lips (4). The subordinate animal indicates acquiescence with a flattening of her ears (5), a flashing of the white of her eyes (6), an appeasement gesture called “licking intention” (7), and a general lowering of her body (8). Her raised paw (9) may be the tail end of the gesture that elicited the adult’s response, or part of another appeasement gesture.
Subtle gestures of postural and facial communication are accentuated by a set of dark lines marking the ears, eyes, muzzle, and shoulders.
Markings on the fur already mentioned emphasize detail in postural expression, just as lipstick emphasizes the lips or eye shadow the eyes in human beings. The dark tip of the tail creates simple contrast for increased visibility and also marks the area of the tail that twitches, a sign of excitement. A wolf’s black lips are set off against white hairs on the muzzle and lower jaw to emphasize this important area of the face, and the face itself is subtly marked, especially around the eyes. The ears are lined with light hairs and rimmed with dark.
