Try doing this with your mouth (just the vibration rolling the rs with no voice): "Frrrrrrrrrt! Frrrrrrrrrrt!"
If you go into the bush in the early evening or sometimes late afternoon in January, you'll hear that sound. If you quietly follow it, you'll find a baby owl which is big enough to leave the nest with most of its feathers but hasn't got enough voice yet to call "ruru" or "morepork" or to feed itself.
Owlets can be quite insistent with their calls and parent birds will be silently and swiftly flying back and forth with beetles or some other snack for the demanding young ones. Sometimes you can hear other little birds freaking out because they don't want to end up on the menu.
If you're lucky, you'll see those owlets rotate their heads 270 degrees to look behind them. They have extra neck vertebrae for that. Chicks also do loops with their heads, then turn their heads 90 degrees to look like carved Maori ancestors in a wharenui.
Ruru feathers are dark brown and beautifully mottled up close, and designed to make flight silent.