R shows as uvular trill, upside down as fricative ... on a PC, so probably not a Mac thing.

www.ipachart.com -- had to go here to reach for dim memories and now the web makes it so easy to hear it on demand.

Good luck with the puzzle.

German /r/ in initial position is a uvular fricative. Flip that R upside down.

Uvular trills are vanishingly rare. Last I hear some dialects of Swedish used them and some language in Malaysia or Indonesia. It's likely that they were transitional between a dental trill and the uvular fricative (I think), but a lot of people really have trouble with them and they're very, very poorly attested. Wiki has a slightly different list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvular_trill); what I remember is from UPSID in the late 1990s. It pays to not consider extreme versions of the sound to be normative--in the right circumstance a native speaker might pronounce the fricative as a trill; but I've heard speakers of languages do strange things when being especially emphatic, with ejectives and implosives or aspirated consonants popping up in languages without either.

A uvular trill and a dental trill are very, very similar to my ears. I perceive the uvular trill to be a bit sloppier, a bit less sharp (to use an old phonological feature) and with less lateral frication. I'd record and embed spectrograms but my PRAAT knowledge wasn't great and is now in complete disrepair. I've never heard a native speaker of a language variety with a uvular trill. Note that I've learned some French, some German and a bit of Arabic and Portuguese, and they all had uvular fricatives. With Arabic, of course, the one that didn't have the fricative as a reflex of an originally dental trill.

I can't do either kind of trill, nor can I hear the difference. I'll never speak proper Spanish. The initial German R sounds the same to me as that of the dialect of French spoken in Paris, which is taken to be standard. If I understand what you are saying, and if the noise in question is not a trill, then there's hope for me (or there would be if I were younger). I can pronounce German words like "Bach", so maybe I can add voicing to make an acceptable approximation to the initial noise of words like "Reich".