His howl is a lot worse than his bite - wolves

HIS HOWL IS A LOT WORSE THAN HIS BITE

Aaawooooo! In the dense, nighttime woods of Minnesota, the wolvescouldn't see Fred Harrington and Fred Harrington couldn't see the wolves. They sized one another up, nonetheless: the timber wolves howled and Harrington howled back. ''I was intimidating,'' says Harrington, an ethologist at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. ''The wolves may have sensed that I was mad, aggressive, and big.'' So most of them shut up and stayed away. The few that approached -- they came within 150 feet of Harrington before backing off -- had deeper and coarser voices than those that remained behind.

Just as people can be fooled by parrots, he says, so wolves can be fooled by people. ''My howl is lower than those of many wolves,'' and a lot more wolf-like than some of the pathetic, squeaky, raspy howls he says he hears in the wild. That's why only deep-voiced wolves dared approach him. They were the ones who thought they were bigger and meaner than he was.

Mammals that have vibrating vocal cords judge each other by their sound, says Harrington, and the pitch of a wolf's howl may be a sign of his size. The larger the animal, the larger the vocal cords and the deeper the pitch. ''You can try to produce a lower sound,'' says Harrington, ''but there's a lower limit and an upper limit that depend on the size of your vocal cords.''

Besides, howling your gruffest howl isn't always a good idea. ''Sometimes a wolf just wants to make contact with another wolf,'' says Harrington. ''Then it uses a medium to low-medium howl.'' At other times it's showing fear, pleading ''Don't attack me.'' Once, says Harrington, ''I howled deeply at a wolf, and it howled back with a quaver in its voice. I changed my voice to make it high and quavering, and then the wolf's howl became very assertive and confident.''

Even if a wolf wants to show it can take care of itself, it doesn't necessarily go to the bottom of its range. Howling is something like bidding at an auction. Just because a wolf can go down to 340 hertz doesn't mean it starts its howling there. Harrington believes the wolf reasons this way: ''I don't want to let this guy know I can go to 340 hertz. Otherwise he might go to 310 and win. First I'll go to 360 and hope that's enough to scare him off. If that doesn't work, I'll go down to 340.''

Moreover, it's dangerous for a wolf to howl deeply if it's a wimp, because a big wolf may come to check out how mighty the howler really is. And wolf fights, says Harrington, aren't like dog fights, in which the combatants usually walk away. In wolf fights, no holds are barred. ''If a wolf calls your bluff,'' he says, ''that's the last bluff you'll ever make.''

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