I’ve been fascinated with owls ever since I was a child and we had a Little owl nesting in the big cherry tree that I liked to climb. I never saw it, but on clear summer nights I would listen to its wailing calls and wonder what it looked like. Nevermind the rather morbid mythology that exists around it and other owl species, I was more curious about its motives and yearnings. It took many years before I could get access to more accurate information about owls, and my fascination has only kept growing.
More than three decades later I am traveling the world so I can record nature and wildlife sounds. Owls rank highly among my favourites and I often spend considerable time just to capture a few seconds of a certain species. I’ve got some lovely books on Owls and of course the internet exists now which means my curiosity isn’t starved anymore.
What is still applicable though is mythology. Many of the places I visit are home to owls, and the local people have a wide variety of stories about them. Often heard but seldom seen, they are prime subjects for anthropomorphising and for assigning a variety of attributes, from positive to benign and sometimes quite negative and foreboding. I’m sure this would be different if owls had more melodious sounds, or if they were active during the day. As it stands though, their calls can be a bit unsettling and their habits are rather cryptic.
Of course, owls are not inherently evil or destructive. They are living beings and deserve to share our planet with us, just as we deserve to share it with them. In situations where local culture and beliefs affect them in a negative way, there needs to be outreach and education. Understanding owl behaviour (and wildlife behaviour in general for that matter) is key for the conservation of many such species.
Verreaux’s eagle owl - Ketupa lactea in the African bush
Even something as simple as going out and listening to their calls can help dispel some of these myths. My guides are often a bit suspicious about my motives, but they usually get over it quickly and become fascinated once I can play back my recordings to them. I hope the following collection of owl sounds can help dispel some of these myths and create a bit of positive interest in them.
Beyond the conservation and environmental aspects, owls and their sounds are often encountered media in general. Unfortunately they are mostly represented by the Owl hooting trope, probably due to its geographic availability around Hollywood and the US in general. The owls of the world exhibit a dazzling variety of calls and it’s worth getting acquainted with them. As sound designers and editors, we want to use an existing sonic language in the media we work on, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t educate the audience to some extent.
Randy Thom once told me, in reply to a Verreaux’s eagle owl call I posted, that it would be a bad idea to use that as an Owl sound in a film, because it sounds so strange and so different from what the audience is expecting. I tend to disagree, and I hope the audience can be convinced there are more than a few species of owl in the world.
Anyway, this is to say that owls are awesome and it’s worth learning more about them. What better place to start than a curated selection of owl recordings, captured by your favourite wildlife sound recordist! Enjoy.