Donald E. KroodsmaReseñas

Extraordinary little book that offers clear and joyful Bird Songs!

It also includes one page of habitat, description, and fun features for each bird included.

The book runs on batteries.

It would be welcome to color code those birds which stay around in winter or to make a book
which includes just those winter birds across the U.S.

A year of Listening to birds

Eastern and Central North America. A guide to listening. has songs in it.

Definitive, but not very readable. I prefer the older musical notation of Schuyler Matthews' Wild Birds and their Music. I have used oscilloscopes in premed physics; I have graphed impedance and various sine/cosine wave electrical functions, so I understand their use in sonographs. But I don't think they represent the bird sound effectively. Scientifically correct, they are a bit like wave function suggestions of astronomical bodies, rather than photographs.
Hidden amidst much technical data which expands our knowledge of specific birds' vocalizations, Kroodsma gives personal accounts of his work to discover and record these data.

The Singing Life of Birds is a summary of thirty years worth of study on bird singing. Glancing ahead at the book, I thought it looked way more detailed than I would care about and I would just skim it. I, however, found it very readable and so interesting that I did no skimming at all. Besides giving an overview of the immense diversity of birdsong, it's study has revealed much about bird behavior. The author's enthusiasm is contagious. It also comes with a CD so you can hear what you're reading about. An excellent book½

I found this book enjoyable and useful, and there's also the decadent fact that it's a BOOK that makes BIRD noises. (As opposed to a bird that makes book noises: not decadent). So this rating might seem a bit churlish, but Kroodsma, your book is just too high-level. Going for all of Western North America (perhaps those were the sound files you had available at the time?) means that you get all the common obvses, which is fine for someone who wants to know what a robin sounds like but not for someone who wants to find out what that weird bird on the porch is. Also scrolling is hard, and the bird drawings kind of look like sexy 3-D computer animations (only birds). Still, it taught me a lot of shit about a killdeer.

This book drives my cats nuts! It's the new book in a series of very authentic bird sounds books. But this one has some of my local birds that I have heard but haven't yet been able to identify. I bought it for the kritters though. Pure entertainment!

book also has CD of bird songs