How to Make Animal Sounds

There are a few great reasons to learn to make animal sounds. Animal sounds can make learning more fun and interesting for children and even adults too. Whether you are in preschool or in an ornithology graduate level course, the educator that can make duck, warbler and owl sounds will grab your attention fast. Another useful purpose in learning animal sounds is to communicate with animals, whether these be beloved pets or for attracting animals for the purposes of hunting or wildlife photography.

Decide on the animals that you are interesting in learning to call or mimicking their call.

Determine the level of accuracy needed for your animal sounds. Making an animal sound for babies requires less knowledge, skill and accuracy than to call a wild bird for a bird count or for hunting purposes.

Research the animal and the sounds or calls that the animal makes. Listen to the sound clips repeatedly. View videos of the animal making sounds if possible too--sometimes this helps in learning to replicate the animal sound properly. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology macaulaylibrary.org site (see Resources for a link) is a great place to start because it is "the world's largest archive of animal sounds and videos."

Practice making the animal sounds or noises with your mouth and voice. A simple sound that beginning bird callers can use is pishing. To pish, make a sshhh sound sandwiched between p sounds like "Psshhp Psshhp Psshhp" or "Pish Pish Pish." This bird call, a scolding or warning call note, attracts the interest of many varieties of bird species in North America, Europe and Northern Asia, according to Lorne Malo, a senior regulatory scientist in Florida.

Make simple animal sounds with kids, though if you learn to really sound like the actual animals, they will find it even more fun. Here are the typical animal sounds for Old MacDonald's Farm: Dog , woof woof or bark bark; cat, meow meow or hiss hiss; chicken, boch boch or cluck cluck; rooster, cockle doodle do; pig, oink oink or grunt grunt; cow, moo moo; horse, neigh neigh; sheep, baa baa; donkey, heehaw heehaw; frog, ribbit ribbit or croak croak; duck, quack quack; goose, honk honk.

Learn special hand positions or methods of making simple tools to create animal calls that are more accurate. ForemostHunting.com explains a variety of methods to make simple homemade turkey calls.

Record the animal sounds and play them back on a recorder, iPod, computer or a recordable key chain when you need them if you find that you cannot recreate some animal sounds accurately enough for your purposes.