There was an owl hooting outside our house earlier, and it occurred to me that every other bird has a high-pitched call.
Ravens have a croak that could be considered low, but their loud call is a caw that’s higher. I can’t think of another bird with a call nearly as low as owls’.
Search engines are no help, mostly duplicates answering why they hoot. Why are owls’ calls so much lower than other birds?
Got a unexpected lull in my morning workload and was able to find some really good info. I think these should be relatively digestible articles, they use some big fancy words, but I feel they break it down well enough for most to get the jist of things. Having some basic physics or music theory knowledge will help with really grok what they’re saying though.
This could be a decent writeup after in down the Owl of the Year if you guys want something a little more collected and simplified, but I’ll give you full links and highlights, and if there’s anything that isn’t making sense, we can of course take a look at it together, just give the word.
Brittanica - Signal Production
Think when someone shrinks or grows in a cartoon and their voice changes.
Many neat musical comparisons here! Timbre, additive and subtractive synthesis, etc!
Bandwidth issues as I referenced earlier…
Environment helps determine what sounds an animal will make to communicate effectively.
More bandwidth issues.
The rest of the article goes more in depth and also covers visual and olfactory communication. Tons of great stuff in here! I’m definitely going back to read this again when I have more time.
Science Direct - Vocalization (Rest of article is paywalled)
Anatomy is a key player in the amounts and types of noises animals can make.
Ugh, hitting too many paywalled articles. Let me know if this is good for an answer or if you need more. I’ll definitely be reading more about this in my own, but I did get Jennifer Ackerman’s What an Owl Knows book to read also to see what is in there. I’ve put up some interviews with her on here before and I’ve always found them interesting, so I’m trying to get that bumped up in my to do list. This is a very interesting topic though, so if you do want more clarification on anything, just let me know!
What a beautiful infodump, thank you!
My pleasure!
This is a lot of information to absorb; thank you for all the work in writing up a great summary!
I thought size wasn’t a factor, considering eagles’ high-pitched calls, and most interesting to me was the first quote:
This is blindingly obvious… in retrospect. When I read it, I thought of musical instruments - a piccolo vs an oboe - but it was really interesting.
I thank you for bringing it up, I hadn’t thought to read much about it before!
I still have some things bookmarked to read about it, but what I found to share with you was really interesting!