What Sound Does A Great Gray Owl Make?

Yesterday, I finally passed the owl quiz. Yay for me!   Passing this quiz was my goal because last year I failed it. You get 5 times to pass and I didn’t make it.  So this year I was going to make it come hell or high water. The program  has a new coordinator and I happen to have met her so I wanted to make a good impression by passing the test. I was systematic about it this year.  The number of owls we’re required to know is 10 (barn, barred, boreal, eastern screech, great gray, great horned, long earned, northern hawk, northern saw whet and short eared owl).  The quiz is a matching quiz.  We have 14 sound samples to match to the 10 owls.  The first time I took the test I got 80%.  I need 100% to pass.  I missed the long eared and the great gray.  Next time I took the test I got 90%.  The long eared owl sounded like a raspy ‘whoop – wheep – whoop.’  So the great gray had to be one of the last four sounds. I write descriptions of the sounds so to keep track.  One sound track sounded like a pigeon ‘coo – wheep – coo – wheep’.  The second was “twitter – oink – twitter – oink.”  The third one sounded like another northern hawk owl with tree frogs in the background.  And the fourth one was completely silent except in the middle was the sound of a loose banjo string like a green frog makes followed by more silence.  I listened to this sound 6 times.  Three times I held my notebook computer up to my ear thinking I just wasn’t hearing what I should be hearing.  Am I going deaf?  Why is this test so much harder than it was the first year?  Logically speaking the test should get easier with experience. In my notes I labelled this one WTF. Silence and a green frog is not a sound I expect any owl to make.  So WTF?  That does not stand for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.  Never mind what it stands for. I can feel anxiety manifesting itself in my chest and upper arms.  I feel champagne bubbles under my skin.  I'm not used to anxiety.  Anxiety does not feel good at all.  I press the submit button. Imagine my surprise when WTF turned out to be the correct answer for great gray owl!  WTF!  I say it WTF out loud and the canary, who has been listening to owl calls for several hours over the past two weeks, looks up at me and no doubt wonders what my problem is.  Whatever, I passed!  Passing the owl quiz was my goal.  And I believe I know those owl sounds better than I ever knew them before.  So what sound does a great gray owl make?  A great gray owl makes sound out of my hearing range evidently.