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Why are owl hoots low-pitched? (midwest.social)

submitted 9 months ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/superbowl@lemmy.world

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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?

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[–] anon6789@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This is a great question! I haven't done much with vocalization here yet, due to I still think it's kinda janky and uneven of an experience how Lemmy deals with video clips.

I feel the others who have commented do far are on the right track. I recall reading recently something about how animals do something along the lines of how we divide bandwidth of communication spectrums up for different uses, emergency bands, TV signals, phones, radio, etc. Basically if everyone was talking in the same frequency range, there would be distortion.

I'll see what I can find article-wise for you. Also, if you let me know your general area (Southwest US, England, east Australia, whatever) I can try to get together so different owl sounds you may be hearing add don't even know they're owls. Some are very unexpected!

[–] sxan@midwest.social 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thanks!

Minneapolis, MN, USA, and it was most active around 2am.

However, it sounded to me the same as the owls we'd hear in Eastern PA, and in Bend, OR. It's what I've come to think owls just sound like: a low "hoo, hoo, hoo-hoo!"

[–] anon6789@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Owls of MN and Their Sounds

I want to get you a more in depth answer on your actual question, but I'll have to do that later today. In the meanwhile, this is a quick guide to MNs owl sounds.

Your particular owl I'm betting is a Great Horned Owl. That's the one I've got in my neighborhood in southeast PA. I figured out it was him but googling "Pennsylvania owl that hoots 5 times" and that sounds like exactly what you have. It also seems to be the most common owl in MN, and since GHO has no predators, they get to be more vocal than many smaller owls.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 9 months ago

My wife has an app for recording and identifying birds. Like Shazam for birds. Sadly, she's smart enough to not be awake at 2am.