In Search of Ponies: Animal sounds abound

It might have been the closest a city kid would ever get to hearing a real pig when the chord was pulled and the scratchy "The pig says Oink Oink" filled the room.

And shaking the can with the holes on the bottom must have terrified the poor cow inside, but it "Moooo'd" every time, the mystery of how the heck they got a cow in a can taking second place to the loud sounds such a little thing could make.

The twisted rubber band inside the paper envelope ALWAYS sounded like a rattlesnake, and if you were lucky, scared a few members of the older generation for extra giggles.

Wind-up parakeets chirped perfectly from hanging perches.

Truly special teddy bears roared when squeezed, rubber ducks kind of quacked when the air was squished out of them and really, really special stuffed dogs barked when a little switch was flipped on their bellies.

Even though they never really imitated life very well, (you can always tell how accurate an animal sound is by whether or not the dog lifts his head to acknowledge it) it doesn't take Mattel to prove the range of language present in the animal world is unrivaled.

However Mattel, and many others, certainly figured out that not only do people like animals, they really like animal sounds, and kids — even though you would think learning a whole new language would be challenging enough — absolutely love them.

Even as they age beyond shake cans and farmer wheels, people still find themselves intrigued and entertained by animal language.

But then there are the pros, the big dogs of animal audio, if you will.

Charging through brambles, hiding in woodland stands, hunkered down in the grasslands, wading through the swamps and even blowing bubbles in murky waters, they hunt.

A tweet, a growl, screeches, howling, croaking, yelping, cackling, you name it, if it's audible, they document and collect.

It's not exactly a new thing, though it is confined to the era in which recording devices make it possible. An era which is, of course, an improvement on the documentation of our cave dwelling forbearers who handed down legacies like "quack," "ribbit," and "bow wow."

But were it not for the dedication of these folks who hunt high and low for sounds of the wild, we would not know that under water, a male walrus sounds like a hammer tapping rhythmically against the hull of a ship.

Or that a cephalopod (tentacle sea creatures) emits something that sounds like the snipping of taut guitar strings crossed with pennies dropping in a jar.

Sounds of laughter should be amusing to hear, except of course when it's coming from a stork which guffaws so loud and incessantly it might keel over from lack of oxygen — so eerie, a hyena's laughter is frighteningly funnier.

Predictably, a channel bass comes across like a drowning beatboxer.

Sounding like barking frogs, Blue monkeys hardly croon from the swamps of Uganda, and a hammer head fruit bat manages to do a pretty good imitation of a team of pick axe wielding mythical dwarves working in the mines.

With close to 150,000 cataloged sound bites in the Cornell University online database, the oldest recording, made in 1929, was the sweet sound of a song sparrow rather than the crashing of the stock market.

After an enormous investment of time in which organizers labored for years, digitizing their collection of audio files and spent further decade-plus converting their database to a web-friendly format, the Macaulay Library (macaulaylibrary.org) has evolved into a modern showcase of more than 80 years of listening around the world.

Including video footage, of course they add to it as they go — so go ahead and make Fido famous with that recording you made when he howled in his sleep — and they have a 10 most wanted list of mostly obscure birds, they clearly aren't finished.

But beyond the obvious painstaking work and valuable reference the library provides, it's a bit refreshing to know that even though mankind has dedicated the majority of Thomas Edison's hard work to reveling in the sound of his own voice, when nature speaks, a lot of someone's' have not just been listening, but also making sure we can all hear what it has to say.

Sharna Johnson is a writer who is always searching for ponies. You can reach her at: [email protected] or on the web at: http://www.insearchofponies.blogspot.com