Hollywood Has Gone To The Birds

BirdNote^®
Hollywood Has Gone to the Birds 
Written by Georgia Sparling

This is BirdNote.

Some of Hollywood’s most iconic beasts owe much of their signature sound to the squawks, tweets, and even hisses of birds.

Take Jurassic Park. To create the mournful call of the brachiosaurus…

         [Brachiosaurus call from Jurassic Park]

…sound designer Gary Rydstrom slowed down the honks of geese!

         [Canada Goose flight call]

What about the velociraptor’s unnerving hiss?

         [Velociraptor hiss and growl from Jurassic Park]

That’s an angry goose.

         [Canada Goose hiss]

In Jurassic World, Gentoo and Emperor Penguins also contributed to the raptor’s vocals. Giving it that playful, “chittery” sound.

         [Emperor Penguin]

In The Prisoner of Azkaban, the hippogriff’s scream…

         [Hippogriff cry]

…is actually a Limpkin…

         [Limpkin call]

…whose high-pitched call earned it the nickname ‘the crying bird.’

         [Limpkin call]

Or in the sci-fi film, Arrival. To create the language of the aliens, New Zealand-based sound designers David Whitehead and Michelle Child recorded local birds and lowered their pitch — then added some other animals and instruments, like bagpipes and didgeriodoos.

         [Arrival aliens share their ‘names’]

Ironically, Alfred Hitchcock didn’t use any birds for the soundscape of his classic horror film The Birds. Instead, the sound of those murderous seagulls was made using an early synthesizer called the Trautonium.

         [Synthetic seagulls from The Birds]

Hitchcock claimed he couldn't find any real birds that sounded spooky enough!

         [Synthetic seagulls from The Birds]

That’s Hollywood for you. For BirdNote, I’m Mark Bramhill.

###

Senior Producer: Mark Bramhill
Producer: Sam Johnson
Managing Producer: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Ariana Remmel
Content Director: Jonese Franklin

Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. ML224949841 recorded by Nick Tepper. ML502088901 recorded by Nathan Pieplow. ML67963 recorded by Paul A. Schwartz.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2026 BirdNote March 2026
Narrator: Mark Bramhill

ID# film-01-2025-03-02    film-01

Reference:

Gary Rydstrom on Jurassic Park sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRj0vKruPv8; https://thevinylfactory.com/features/iconic-film-sound-effects-how-they-were-made/
Jurassic World’s bird sounds: https://www.audubon.org/magazine/jurassic-worlds-dinosaurs-roar-life-thanks-bird-calls
The hippogriff sound: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2005/12/blockbuster-movies-turn-lab-ornithology-blockbuster-sounds 
Arrival sound designers: https://www.asoundeffect.com/arrival-sound/  
The Birds sound effect: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/musicshow/peter-pichler-trautonium-soundtrack-to-hitchcock-the-birds/11091542; https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/the-birds-hitchcock-music-in-movies