Howl: The Secret Language of Wolves

Howl: Decoding the Secret Language of Wolves

Excerpt from the Text Version (audio version here)
Chapter One: Do Wolves Talk?
(Use Your Cell Phone on the QR Codes to Play Sounds and Video)

Three Tone Howl

Howl. Some hate it. Some love it. But nearly all know it.

The wolf’s howl is one of the most iconic sounds in nature. Our ancestors could imitate it. And during the Covid lockdown, modern souls echoed this primal sound from their porches, signaling to the world and themselves that they were still here…still enduring.

Why Howl? Such a simple question. Yet, mostly a mystery until recently.

I’m about to share with you the voice of a wolf, but not just any wolf—this is 907F, one of the most enduring souls to ever roam Yellowstone. Born in 2013 to the Junction Butte pack’s second litter, she was eleven years old at the time of this recording—a lifetime for most wolves. What makes her tale more extraordinary is that she’s lived much of it with just one good eye. Yet, despite that, she’s risen time and again, leading her pack as the alpha female on multiple occasions, especially during the years when their numbers swelled to an impressive 35 wolves, and they became masters of hunting bison. In 2024, after the pack lost its leading female, 907F took up the mantle once more, delivering her tenth litter—three pups this time. After all she’s endured, no one would blame her for a below-average litter.

When she made the howls you're about to hear, she was separated from the rest of her pack who, an hour prior, had chased elk by a hidden audio recorder. Here’s what the elk sounded like.

Elk Running

An hour later and alone by herself standing next to the recorder, she let out a sequence of howls that went on for over 30 minutes. Close your eyes and picture the scene. The snow fell, soft yet persistent, matching her steady breath. She paced back and forth over the rocks beneath the fir tree which held the recorder ten feet off the rocky floor. She paused, just feet away, her howl alive in a sea of snowflakes, each breath a murmur that seemed to echo from some ancient, forgotten place.

907F Howling

Open your eyes. Here she is, the matriarch of the Junction Butte pack—a one-eyed wonder captured in the eerie glow of a night-time photo. Her lone, functioning eye still reflects the infrared. The other eye, now lost, tells of battles fought and dangers survived.

This is what she said, at least as it’s encoded in a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a way of writing down sound. And artificial intelligence uses it to decode animal communication, with similar technology it uses to detect your friends on Facebook or in security systems used by the police or military.

The Cry Wolf bioacoustics project, which has amassed over 100,000 hours of audio from the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, is using artificial intelligence to decode spectrograms and better understand the question "Why Howl? Clues are emerging that suggest the way a wolf howls might reveal some of the reason behind its call.

And scientists are continuing to learn that a howl is not just a howl...is not just a howl.

In this book, we'll become sound trackers of the 20+ vocalizations that wolves make. As a linguist experienced in decoding ancient texts, I will serve as a guide by drawing analogies from human languages. But I will do my best to let the wolves speak for themselves. We will encounter similarities and differences between us, the wolf, and our beloved pet, the dog. Dogs evolved from wolves...and we sat in the middle molding their communication to our will.

In Chapter One, we’ll dive into the most iconic wolf sound—the howl—and explore its many shapes and purposes. Chapter Two focuses on barks and how wolves use them to communicate different kinds of threats. Chapter Three shifts to close-range sounds like growls, snarls, and teeth-clacking, while Chapter Four delves into vocalizations like whimpers, whines, moans, and yelps—sounds that reveal much about wolves’ social bonds. In Chapter Five, we’ll tackle the intriguing and controversial idea that wolves might combine sounds into phrase- or sentence-like structures to create more complex meanings. Finally, Chapter Six uncovers the collective magic of the chorus howl, where wolves communicate as a group in a way that’s as mesmerizing to us as it is meaningful to them.

And yet, to us, the wolf’s howl is more than a word begging for translation; it’s a distant echo of something we once knew, a call that resonates deep within us, stirring something primal. Why? In part, no doubt, because we shared territories and food sources with wolves long before some of them became our companions and guardians.

Despite all efforts to distill the meaning of the howl, the howl of a wolf remains, to our ears, a form of music—menacing to some, symphonic to others. There might be a coincidental reason for this. Acoustically, the gray wolf’s howl centers around 350 hertz—Middle F on a piano. It’s a pitch that resonates in compositions written in F Major and F Minor, drawing us in with a sense of familiarity, whether it be soothing or unsettling.

In Western music traditions, minor keys are widely recognized for their association with feelings of sadness, introspection, and emotional depth. And F Minor is a common one. For my generation, there’s "Dream On" by Aerosmith in F Minor—an anthem of perseverance, born from Steven Tyler's reflections on life’s struggles and the pursuit of greatness.

But if there is one piece of music that truly embodies the melancholy of F Minor, it’s Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. This haunting composition has become synonymous with despair, setting the emotional tone for films like The Elephant Man, Lorenzo’s Oil, and perhaps most famously, Oliver Stone’s Platoon, where it underscored the heartache and futility of war. Few melodies reach so deeply into the soul, echoing the inescapable melancholy that seems to reflect the human condition itself.

Having been raised in the American West where whiskey is for drinking but water and wolves are for fighting, it captures, for me at least, what a wolf’s howl truly means. There’s something in it—an echo of the wild, a call that reaches deep into the part of us that remembers when we too were part of a wild pack. Adagio might resonate with Platoon’s sorrow of war, but the wolf’s howl resonates with the memory of our own wildness, a haunting reminder of what we’ve lost in the modern world.

Adadio

Like a wolf’s howl, the opening of Adagio climbs slow and steady, reaching some unseen crest, then falls away at the end, leaving the air heavy and still. Platoon is one of those films that lingers in the mind, made even more unforgettable by the music. As many Vietnam veterans have said, “We weren’t just fighting the enemy, we were fighting ourselves.” The same could be said of the ongoing wolf wars in the United States, where some have conflated destruction with dominion, and lost sight of the wildness that connects us all.

On a crisp March morning in 2023, at precisely 7:29 a.m., that hour when the wild things are in search of their meal, a lone wolf moved along a snow-covered trail. It paused before the game trail camera, lowering its head, and burying its nose into the snow where another wolf had marked its presence. After taking in the scent, it lifted its head and howled—a long, solitary note that echoed in the still morning air. Then, as if the call had settled something, it moved on, disappearing into the winter woods.

Snow Howl

Why do wolves howl? It's a question as old as the mountains, and maybe it doesn’t need an answer at all. Sometimes, the simple, unbroken call of a wolf cutting through the wilderness says more than we ever could. Perhaps it's enough just to feel it—a sound that starts as a tremble in your bones, rises to meet the stars, and settles back down deep in your soul. That’s the wild calling, and maybe that’s the only answer that matters.