Vintage 🐦 NOS 1960s “Wonderful Double Throat” Swiss Warbler Bird & Animal Call – Prairie Whistle Classic

Remember Swiss Warblers? 🐦 The Same Trick That Gave Mr. Punch His Voice, Sold for Pocket Change

Size: 3 1/2" x 2"

Hold a strip of cloth tight across a curve of metal, tuck it against your tongue and hiss, and you have one of the oldest voice tricks in show business. Punch and Judy performers in Britain have long made Punch's shrieking voice that way with a device called a swazzle, a design the old "professors" guarded as a trade secret. American novelty houses sold the same idea to kids by mail as the Ventrilo, under the slogan "Throw Your Voice." This is the pocket-sized cousin sold for birdsong: a Swiss Warbler bird call, new old stock with its printed paper packet from Taiwan.

📜 What Is Printed on the Packet

The printed face carries a small drawing of a perched bird between the words of its headline, The Wonderful Double Throat or Swiss Warbler Bird Call. Beneath it:

"Only Original Bird Call and Prairie Whistle. Directions For Use - Soak in water until thoroughly saturated then place on your tongue with reed nearest the teeth, and finished side of leather upwards and hiss gently at first, keep increasing the hiss for a louder sound in giving imitations of Birds and Beasts, you make variations with the tongue and lips. Any person following these directions we will guarantee they can imitate any Bird or Animal in a few minutes."

The back of the packet reads "Swiss Warbler Bird Call" in typewriter-style letters, with MADE IN TAIWAN printed below.

🔧 The Call Itself

• Frame: a U-shaped strip of dark metal.
• Reed: a bright orange-red cloth half-moon with pinked, saw-tooth edges, stretched across and wrapped around the metal curve.
• Packet: printed paper envelope with a tuck flap; approximate packet size 3½" x 2".
• Condition: new old stock, unused, kept with its packet.

The printed directions still speak of a "finished side of leather", and mail-order voice reeds of this kind were long sold as metal-and-leather devices; this one is made with cloth. A novelty dealer who has handled the same Taiwan-printed packet describes the call the same way, a small piece of cloth combined with tin.

🎭 The Swazzle: Punch's Secret Voice

Punch comes from Pulcinella, the beak-masked, squeaky-voiced clown of the Italian commedia dell'arte. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, recorded the first known performance in England in May 1662 at Covent Garden, given by the Italian showman Pietro Gimonde with marionettes. By the nineteenth century Punch had moved into portable glove-puppet booths and become a fixture of Victorian seaside resorts, and performing families like the Codmans kept the show going for generations.

Punch's voice has always come from the swazzle, also called a swozzle or swatchel, a name believed to come from the German schwätzen, to chatter. It is a cotton tape reed held taut between two curved strips of metal, moistened, and set between the tongue and the roof of the mouth so the breath makes the tape buzz. Early swazzles were bone or ivory; modern ones are tin. Its design was once a secret passed only to apprentices who respected the craft, it takes long practice to speak through, and it is easy to swallow by accident, which is why some performers tie on a thread. Today swazzles are sold in joke and magic shops. The Swiss Warbler works on exactly that principle: soak it, set it on the tongue, and hiss.

📬 Throw Your Voice: The Mail-Order Legend

For American kids the reed-in-the-mouth trick arrived through the back pages of comic books. The Johnson Smith Company, founded in 1914 in Chicago, Illinois by Alfred Johnson Smith, moved to Racine, Wisconsin in 1923, on to Detroit in the late 1930s, and to Bradenton, Florida in 1986. Its catalogs claimed thousands of novelties, and its ads ran on the back covers of Action Comics #1 in June 1938, Superman's first appearance, and Detective Comics #27 in May 1939, Batman's. A 1932 Johnson Smith ad called "Boys! Throw Your Voice" pitched the Ventrilo, a small instrument that fit inside the mouth, and back in 1920 the company had already published George W. Callahan's booklet Art of Ventriloquism: How to Throw Your Voice; with Instructions for Using and Making the Ventrilo. And the Swiss Warbler itself was right there in the catalog in the 1950s. The 1951 Johnson Smith book lists it as No. 2858, "the genuine Swiss Warbler," a bird call you hold in your mouth to imitate birds and animals, pitched to ventriloquists, vaudeville entertainers and whistlers and sold three at a time. Humorist Jean Shepherd wrote in 1970 that the Johnson Smith catalog "might well be the Rosetta Stone of American Culture." The company ceased operations on December 31, 2019, after 105 years.

The story goes that novelty bird calls like this one also went out as prizes in boxes of Cracker Jack; a dealer who sold these packets passes it along. Cracker Jack itself began putting a prize in every box in 1912, and colorful tin whistles, spinners and clickers were among its favorite giveaways.

🏭 Made in Taiwan

The MADE IN TAIWAN stamp puts this packet in the early chapter of one of the great manufacturing stories of the twentieth century. Taiwan turned to export-oriented industry in the 1960s, when labor-intensive export factories gave work to a huge rural workforce, and garments and toys were among its first big exports. The toy industry boomed through the 1970s and early 1980s as foreign firms came for skilled, low-cost labor, and by 1987 Taiwan's toy exports reached US$1 billion. At its height Taiwan was called the "export kingdom," leading the world in twenty-one product categories, toys among them. A packet like this is one of the humble, pocket-change beginnings of that legacy.

🔍 Condition

New old stock: an unused call kept together with its printed packet. The packet paper has mellowed with age and the printing reads clearly. Please see the photographs.

🎁 Who It's For

• 🎭 Punch and Judy enthusiasts, puppeteers and ventriloquists curious about the swazzle family of reed devices.
• 📬 Collectors of mail-order novelties, comic-book ad premiums and joke-shop history.
• 🐦 Bird lovers and anyone who wants to put the packet's guarantee to the test.
• 🏭 Collectors of early Made in Taiwan toys and packaging.
• 🎁 A tiny, cheap-to-mail stocking stuffer with a big story behind it.

❓ Questions People Ask

How does a Swiss Warbler bird call work?

Following the packet's directions: soak it until saturated, set it on your tongue with the reed nearest your teeth, and hiss gently, then louder. Air passing over the taut cloth reed makes it vibrate, and moving your tongue and lips changes the sound.

Is this the same thing as a swazzle or a Ventrilo?

It works on the same principle: a reed stretched across a curved metal frame and held in the mouth. The swazzle is the Punch and Judy performer's version; the Ventrilo was the mail-order version sold to kids; the Swiss Warbler was pitched for bird and animal calls.

What is a prairie whistle?

Another name for this kind of tongue reed call; the packet uses both names.

How old is it?

Taiwan's export toy trade got under way in the 1960s, and a novelty dealer who handled this same printed packet identifies it as an early Taiwan version from that decade. The Swiss Warbler itself goes back further: Johnson Smith was selling it by mail in 1951, more than ten years before Taiwan's first year of toy exports in 1962. So the Swiss Warbler was already a 1950s mail-order bird call, and this packet is a later, Taiwan-made version.