The Bird Songs Anthology: 200 Birds from North America and Beyond [Hardcover]

So you want to become a birder? In my case I would like to join my mother and sister in their, to me, amazing store of knowledge about birds and their songs. One day the three of us were sitting on my patio, overlooking the bayou when I heard a particular bird. "That's a red-headed woodpecker." They wanted to know, How do you know? "Because a pair live in that tree and I see them all the time." Sure enough, they saw the male. I had heard the song of a bird they didn't know and a fairly common one. That is the point of birding--to see and learn a new bird.

"The Bird Songs Anthology" is an excellent way to learn to recognize the physical description and the songs of 200 birds. These songs came from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which maintains over 160,000 natural sounds of birds, including sixty-seven percent of the world's birds.

Compiled into this book are sounds of birds from six of seven continents (not enough species in Antartica), with major representative birds from each continent and then those that are "especially striking, attractive, or rare" (8). In addition to teaching birders, the book also encourages and promotes conservation of natural habitats. By teaching sight and sound of each bird, the book is promoting familiarity. With familiarity comes the need to protect and so on.

North America is the first continent shown and the edges of the pages are color-coded red. As you read the left page of description, habitat, migration, song type, you can study the images of male and female on the right. There is a strip of mechanism to the far right and is an extension of the book format. Press the middle button and listen to the song, which plays twice. The songs do not advance unless you press the button.

The first bird is the Common Loon. Oh my, what a haunting melody. Wah, whooooooooooooUhhh. Wah, whooooooooUhhhhh. The first time I went through the book, my three-year-old niece operated the mechanism and was fascinated with the bird songs, listening to half before her attention went elsewhere. Note: some of the birds have just one page each.

The second bird is the Horned Grebe. What if I close the book at this point and leave it? Where will I be when I return? The digital face goes blank if left unattended and automatically returns to zero. Each bird is numbered on the left page, so you can always locate the number on the digital face by pressing another button to go up or down.

At some point something was accidentally placed on top of the button, causing the battery to die. I thought, Uh oh, how will I ever match the bird with the song? That is when I discovered how the unit works. It starts back with one, that is, the correct "one." I suppose that is why the book is called a Collector's Edition.

Listening to these songs and studying the corresponding birds is a relaxing pastime, one to pursue in one's leisure and as many birds as the armchair birder chooses.

I'm glad the above reviewer liked the book, but I couldn't disagree more. Since it was remaindered at Borders for $10, I bought one. I live in a natural area on the MD/PA border surrounded by dozens species of birds and have always wanted to identify them vocally. Not with this! If you check the contents, you'll see that that not many common species appear though plenty of parrots and so on (and I'm talking about the American section here). Not only that, but one short vocalization is given for each when the reality is a LOT more complex than that. The descriptive information on the species is very superficial. It was not intended for serious birders, I hope.

I went on to purchase the "Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds with 587 DVD Birdsongs". In addition to having a much larger selection of vocalizations it is a very good field guide as well, in the Peterson tradition. So you wouldn't really need another book. It cost $20! The project of identifying birds by listening to the songs is not easy, it turns out. Fieldwork would seem to be the only sure way to success.

The upside is that pushing the button and playing the songs really pricks up the cats' ears and makes them look around. But I didn't get $10 worth of kicks from that, even.

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews  3.5 out of 5 stars