Gray Wolf

Gray Wolf. Voice of the wilderness , Canis lupus. , Gray wolves are social animals and live together in tightly organized packs. packs are typically family groups, and consist of a dominant breeding pair, their pups, and young adults from previous litter. This pair directs the pack's traveling, hunting, resting, and breeding. Although only the dominant pair normally breeds, all pack members help raise the litter of four to six pups. Wolves communicate by using body postures, facial expressions, scent marking, and vocalizations. Their distinctive howling can be heard for up to six miles, and helps assemble the groups and advertise its territory. Cooperative hunting enables a wolf pack to effectively take, large hoofed animals, like deer, moose, and caribou. Though known as gray wolves, fur color can range from white to shades of gray, brown, and black., Wolves were once the most widely distributed mammal in the Northern Hemisphere, and ranged throughout most of North America. Although stable populations survived in Canada and Alaska, large-scale predator control programs and loss of habitat and prey virtually eliminated gray wolves from the continental United States by the mid-1900s. Federal protection, successful reintroduction efforts, and natural recolonization have resulted in the slow recovery of wolf populations in select portions of the Rocky Mountains, the southwest and the western Great Lakes region.