zooey-deschanel-ellen-degeneres

During a Thursday appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, new mom Zooey Deschanel opened up about 7-month-old daughter Elsie Otter.

The actress said her baby girl “makes a lot of little, like, pterodactyl kind of noises.”

“Like ‘ahh, ooh, ahh.’ And a noise that sounds like choking,” Deschanel added. “She’ll be like ‘ah, ah, ah.’ And I’ll be like, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she’ll be like, ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ ”

That said, the New Girl star gushed, “she’s freakin’ cute!”

The actress – who welcomed her first child with husband Jacob Pechenik in August – talked about choosing such a unique middle name for their little girl, joking, “In a sense that we’re all mammals.”

“We thought Elsie is a classic name — a lot of people have grandmas and aunts named Elsie,” she added. “And then we were like the middle name can be a little bit like wild.”

“We both found that we had a mutual love for otters,” she said. “There were some more normal middle names… but I realized that nobody else likely had the middle name ‘Otter.’”