How to Call an Owl!

Hi, I'm Jared. Welcome to Fun Science Demos. We're back with another science story. In a previous video, we showed you an owl pellet dissection to go with this classic book, Owl Moon by Jane Yolen, and today we're going to do another demonstration that goes with this great book. We're going to be making an owl call. This little guy is supposed to be an owl, and he doesn't just look like an owl, he sounds like an owl. We're going to show you how to make your own and see if you can call an owl in your neighborhood or forest. Now in the book Owl Moon, a boy and his father actually call in an owl using nothing but their own mouths. Now that's really complicated to do, so we're going to try and make our own owl call using a bunch of recyclable containers. Things like paper towel tubes, plastic bottles, even paper cups. You want to collect things of different sizes and shapes to see how they're going to work and how they're going to sound, because we want to try and match as closely as we can the perfect owl call. Now making the owl call is surprisingly simple. All we are going to do is just cut a little hole in each of the containers and then use a straw to blow air across the opening. We want you to hear what each of these bottles sounds like, so we can see if we can find one that matches the owl call most closely. Here we go. Let's try this one. Let's try a different container. Do you hear a difference in the sound? This one sounds like it has a higher pitch. It's a smaller container. Let's try this bottle. Not bad. It is a little tricky to get the sound just right. You have to position the straw just perfectly. That seems like a nice deep call. Let's try the paper towel tube. And we have this bottle. We even put a little hole in a paper cup. This one took a little practice. I didn't really get a sound when I have the paper cup open, so I want to kind of control the opening of the cup by putting another cup in. Let's try and see if we can get a sound out of this. You can hear that each container sounded a little bit different. To me, I think this container sounded most like an owl, so we are going to use a container just like this to show you how to make your own. One thing we wanted to quickly point out is that these flimsy plastic bottles are much more easy to find, much more easy to cut into as well, but the sound just isn't there. It's not as strong as these bottles which have a harder, firmer plastic. Now, you will need an adult to help you cutting into this one, and that's one thing we want to quickly point out. An adult will need to help you cut this little hole out. This little bottle is the perfect size, and the plastic really isn't flimsy, so we're going to start by taking the cap off. It's a little orange juice bottle, and I'm going to use a marker. We're going to zoom in so you can see what size shape to make the hole. Now, the neat thing about this is you can experiment and try different locations for the hole and even different sizes for the hole to see which gets the best sound, but for some reason, I tend to like to put the opening closer to the bottom of the bottle, and you want the opening to be about the same width as a straw, nothing bigger. We're actually not even going to measure. I'm just going to draw a line that looks about as wide as a straw, and then I'm just cutting a simple little rectangle. Once I have it traced out, I'm ready to cut this opening, and believe it or not, my call is ready to go as soon as I then make a straw to go with it. Now, this is where an adult comes in. It'd be very difficult to get into that cut with just an ordinary pair of scissors, so you will need some kind of straight knife. This is a box cutter. I'm just going to use this blade to push into the bottle carefully, and once I have an opening, now my scissors can get into that cut, and I can use the scissors to cut the rest of the way down one side, down the other side, and then the opening. There we go. So, we have our opening cut into our bottle. The next thing we need is a straw, because if I just try to use my mouth to blow across this opening, it's really difficult to get a sound. I'm trying different angles. It's not really working, so I need a straw to focus where my air is blowing across that opening, and if I just use a round straw, I'll bend this up, you're going to notice it's also very difficult to get a sound. Now, if I angle it a little bit, that's because I need to change the overall roundness of my straw. I need to flatten out the end of the straw, so I get a nice consistent straight airflow across that opening. So, there's multiple ways to flatten the end of the straw. You can use your fingers and rub it back and forth. You can use your teeth, just the front of your teeth, slide it back and forth, and you have a nice flattened end of the straw. Now, to get a sound, you might have to use your fingers to push down just a little bit on the straw to flatten it out. You want to line it up, you get a nice clean sound, and now I can change the rhythm of that sound by puffing and controlling the airflow. And just like people talk, owls also talk, and this is going to allow you to talk to an owl. You can call, and hopefully an owl will answer you back. Now, there is a certain rhythm to the call. You can't just walk into the woods and blow this thing. It's not a train whistle. So, experts who study owls have noticed that there's a certain pattern or cadence to the owl call. A lot of people say you should say, who, who, who cooks for you? It'll give you the rhythm, so it'll sound something like this. While this will work as an owl call, we found it fun to decorate our calls to make them look like owls. Paper towel tube, spin this around, and then this little guy. We'd like to give a huge shout out to Jane Yolen and her awesome book Owl Moon. We hope that you get a chance, like the book, to get out into the woods and try calling in your own owl, and hopefully that owl will call back. If you want to learn more about owls or animals or science, check out our YouTube channel, Fun Science Demos. Science is so cool, especially when you can learn to talk to animals. Thanks for watching.