The pigeon whistle is a small musical instrument that belongs to the group of so-called Aeolian musical instruments. The whistle is attached to the tail of the pigeon so that it produces sound as it flies. It is made of light materials such as gourd and bamboo and varnished, sometimes enriched with engraved patterns and ivory ornaments.

The Slovene Ethnographic Museum holds a collection of 14 pigeon whistles. They are part of a larger collection of Ivan Skušek Jr. (1877-1947), an intendant of the Austro-Hungarian cruiser S.M.S. “Kaiserin Elisabeth”, who collected the objects over a period of six years (between 1914 and 1920), when he was stationed in Beijing. It is considered one of the largest East Asian collections in Slovenia.

The examples shown present the three most common types of pigeon whistles found in the collection of 14 pigeon whistles; the gourd type (Figure 3, 5, and 6), the tubular type (Figure 2) and the combined type (Figure 1 and 4). Among all these types, the gourd type is the most common representative – a type of pigeon whistle that has a carved gourd as its base to which bamboo sub-whistles are attached.