Twitter: Making a bird call from wood scrap

 

Yeah, these days when we want to trick wild birds to chirp near us, we can open an app to play bird song and turn up the volume of our cell phone. A real bird would start singing a song to quell the intruder (from the net space) into its territory. That’s that. Though, there is more organic approach to the matter. We can make a bird call from wood scrap. The other day, GROUP the Creation and Voice of the Woods had a workshop to craft the tool from scrap from their forestry activities. The design of bird call this time was done by Mr. Harada Akatsuki. It was fun!

Blueprint

The artists for the GROUP prepared the mini logs from various thinned branches of wood. The size of a wood is small enough to be held by a human palm. We try several mini logs to find one with which we feel right in our hands. To make a sound from a scrap, Mr. Harada combined two mini-logs. The smaller part is defined as a tail of a bird.

We chose one of these.

My choice

The bigger “body” wood has 3 holes that were prepared by the artists beforehand. Into the center, we screw in a screw. This is the beak of a bird. The other two holes are eyes. We paint this surface of wood with color pencils and crayons. It is the face of a bird.

Screw in.

Who are you?

I am …

a varied tit!
Ishiyama-san for the GROUP told me
nothing in nature is in a simple color.
For the face of varied tit,
the brown part is a mixture of blue,
light brown and dark brown.

Next, screw in a tale of the bird. As we make the tool sing by turning this tail, we should stop screwing the screw just at the right point. For my call, I stopped the screw here as in the below photo.

After fixing the smaller scrap to the main part of the call, we file this “tale” to create 3-4 grooves around the rim in order to make holds for playing the tool.

Filing

To finish the work, we spray pastel fixative to stop the painted colors from being wiped away.

Done! My bird caller.

To make a bird song, we turn the “tale.” There is just a right point for each bird caller to sing a song. I tried several turns to find the point. Finding the sweet spot itself was enjoyable conversation with a scrap. Interestingly, the voice differs according to

1. The diameter and the length of a scrap,

2. The variety of wood. Some say cherry trees make the best voice. Others claim sounds of oaks are better. 

3. Probably, the size of a screw also matters.

In forests, sometimes real birds are tricked, and the other occasions the birds must have thought this human fool tried to con them in a supposed to be quiet forest. A caution. Too many bird callers, whether it is from your cell phone or wood scrap, could harm wild birds’ breeding behavior, and give too much stress from a mistaken turf war. Please be modest and OK with just a little bit of fun with birds. 😉

If you have any questions about Yokohama’s Green Tax and Green Up Plan, please make a contact with

Strategic Planning Division, Green Environment Bureau, City of Yokohama
横浜市みどり環境局戦略企画課

Phone: 045-671-2712
FAX: 045-550-4093 

Email: mk-kikaku@city.yokohama.lg.jp