Canidae Central

TheWhiteFox · Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 3:56 pm Post subject:

Don't worry about it; it's rather interesting on what superstition your family has. But yeah, most of the wolf/moon thing is supersition.

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Opferte · Fox Kit Joined: 24 Mar 2007 Posts: 19

SittingFox wrote:

Wolves just have a way of forcing themselves upon the human consciousness. It would be interesting, actually, to monitor howling and see if it really *is* more common during full moons. I'm not sure if that's ever been properly studied. Of course, a lot of the time wolves howl when meeting at rendezvous sites etc so the amount of moonlight wouldn't affect that.

I'm really into astronomy, actually. I took this picture a few months ago. No wolves howling in the background Sad

I have been coming to WMS for 4 years contiguous (5 years total), and I can tell you something about howling.. Especially because more often than not it wakes me up, at midnight, at 1 am, at 2 am, at 3 am, at 4 am, at 5 am, at 6 am, you get the point.

I can tell you right now, that the brightness of the moon, the stars, or the Indiglo on my watch have no effect on when wolves howl. They will howl at coyotes, at a change of wind, over loneliness, over horniness, over excitement, over boredom, over any little thing.

I think if you had to justify the howling at the moon thing, I suppose you could say that if there's a full moon, the wolves could see prey better, and may rally the pack together to take down prey-but that is so far fetched it's ridiculous.

I have a 40KHz threshold dual channel digitizing spectrum analyzer with waterfall function (You need to know algebra to take full advantage of the machine-I slept through algebra so I can use only the basic functions) that I wanted to pair with a good microphone that can pick up frequencies above the human spectrum, and analyze their howls.

That was a big sentence. Anyway, the problem is that when one wolf howls, they all howl. So isolating an individual wolf's howl as compared to it's perceived mood and reason for howling would be VERY difficult. It may or may not be worth the effort, but I already have most of what I need.

Fang · Team Dog Joined: 21 May 2006 Posts: 650 Location: England

Whenever the moon is full, I like to stare at it sometimes, so it wouldn't be very uncommon for other animals to like to look at the moon. It is a source of light that you can actually look at. Just about anything else will hurt your eyes, from the sun to light bulbs.

So wolves just might be a bit more active during full moons because everyone likes to look at it and there's more light to do lightly activities.