Howling with Wolves

Lay of the Land
Art by James Wardell

IN THE 1990s, the internationally acclaimed French classical pianist Hélène Grimaud had an encounter with a captive she-wolf. “The wolf was life itself,” she wrote in her memoir, Wild Harmonies: A Life of Music and Wolves. “[It was] more biting than the frost. Life itself, with an incredible intensity.”

In 1996, Grimaud cofounded the Wolf Conservation Center (WCC) in New Salem, New York, which since 2003 has helped to breed Mexican and red wolves and release them into the wild. Some of WCC’s most popular educational events are “Howl for Pups of All Ages” and “Howl for Adults,” during which people can blend their voices with wolves’ calls.

“Why do wolves answer our human howls?” I ask Grimaud during a recent phone conversation.

She speaks in thoughtful bursts and riffs, as if following some musical score in her mind that is scrawled over with notes on wolf science. “Perhaps wolves are generously nondiscriminating,” she says wryly. “One of the things that makes working with any wild animal so interesting and humbling is that you have to interact with them on their terms. Often they are quite forgiving of our bumbling attempts to connect in a proper and dignified way, in wolf terms. It could just be that the wolves interpret humans howling as an invasive threat from another pack. So the wolves want to advertise that this territory is already occupied.”

Do wolves ever just sing to make music, as we do?

“One of the most intriguing elements of wolf howling is what scientists call social glue,” Grimaud explains, adding, “This spreading of good feeling like humans singing around a campfire, feeling closer to one another—it’s that same idea: you howl or harmonize and so reaffirm your social bonds with one another. That’s not surprising. Any pack animal really depends upon the others to survive.”

Certainly, humans are social pack animals. We are also profoundly moved by music, especially by making music together. That’s why the word harmony relates both to music and to relations between people and groups of people. When we hear human music, we physically attune to that vibration; when we sing together, we blend our voices, matching thirds and fifths and sometimes deliberate, clashing dissonance. We try to fit and find our part in the greater chorus.

Wolves actually harmonize their voices with ours. “Have you noticed,” Grimaud asks me, “that when a human—who is less naturally gifted in that wolf language—joins in a howl and his pitch lands on the same note, the wolves will alter their pitch to prolong the harmonization? It’s very interesting. If you end up on the same pitch as a wolf, he will scale up or down, modulating his voice with yours.”

Does this mean that animals also seek to blend with or are attracted to our music?

“When you practice your piano,” I ask Grimaud, “do the wolves join in your music by howling along?”

During the seasons when Grimaud lived next to the WCC in upstate New York, she didn’t notice any exact correlation between the wolves’ howling and her piano. “Their howling was random, coincidental with my playing,” she says with a laugh. “But there was one foster wolf pup who seemed to react to violin music when she heard my recordings. She’d come out of her den and raise her head and howl along to the violin strings. There definitely seemed to be a relationship there.”

“If you were going to compose a concerto for a wolf audience,” I ask Grimaud, “would it be a love song, a requiem?”

I am thinking about the elegy a composer might create for the Judas wolves, those solitary survivors of lethal hunts who are repeatedly radio-tagged and then targeted again to betray the location of their next family for a kill. Imagine surviving so much loss.

“I’ve never been asked that question before,” she says. Grimaud is silent for a while, then adds pensively, “Probably I’d choose music with a sense of longing. That’s always what I think when I hear wolves howling. Endless longing.”

Brenda Peterson is the author of over 23 books of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir. Her novel Duck and Cover was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Wolf Nation: The Life, Death, and Return of Wild American Wolves was chosen as a “Best Conservation Book of the Year” by Forbes magazine. She also writes children’s books, including Wild Orca, Lobos, and Catastrophe by the Sea. Brenda’s work has appeared on NPR and in The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Tikkun, Seattle Times, Orion, and Oprah magazine.

Comments

  1. I went to WCC about four years ago and it was my first encounter with wolves. I found their spirit magical and stunning.The look in Zephyr’s eyes is something I will never forget. It has made me a lifelong advocate and supporter of WCC and wolves everywhere.

  2. I have been writing pleas and donating money to win wolves the right to live and thrive ever since I became an adult – quite a while ago now… I have been appreciative that the the wolves have such an outstanding advocate in Ms. Grimaud. I wish I knew how to do more to help wolves. People seem to enjoy killing them. The wolves are obviously more intelligent than the hunters. Thank you for helping, Ms. Grimaud. Please let us know what we can do to be more effective in saving them!

  3. Really nice piece Brenda! I remember being at Nez Perce Wolf Center in Winchester many years ago and the wolves started howling at the end of the gathering of scientists and wolf advocates. It was my birthday and the others felt that they were singing Happy Birthday to me. So very special!

  4. Predators are keystone animals in ecosystems. The return of wolves to Yellowstone helped everything from prey herds becoming more healthy to fish in streams and the plant life surrounding them and so much more. Wyoming recently removed all protections of our wolves here, not just hunting, but barbaric slaughter. Traps, shooting them down from planes, cyanide bombs, poisoning pups and mothers in dens, shoot on sight. This law states that the law MAY NOT COME UNDER JUDICIAL REVIEW. Why? What are they afraid of? I’ve been in a back and forth fight with one of my senators demanding he explain the legality of this to me. So far, no luck. Slaughter, to him (and them), means state “management.”

    I’ve worked with wolves at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, IL, visited sanctuaries. My favorite memory was of the wolves in the outside exhibit howling with a siren early morn on New Year’s Day.

    I’ve since come to despise zoos. Still do and always will love wolves and other predators. So needed.

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