The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong
by Donald E. Kroodsma
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Description
Listen to birds sing as you've never listened before, as the world-renowned birdsong expert Donald Kroodsma takes you on personal journeys of discovery and intrigue. Read stories of wrens and robins, thrushes and thrashers, warblers and whip-poor-wills, bluebirds and cardinals, and many more bird. Learn how each acquires its songs, how songs vary from bird to bird and place to place, how some birds' singing is especially beautiful or ceaseless or complex, how some do not sing at all, how the show more often quiet female has the last word, and why. Hear a baby wren and the author's own daughter babble as each learns its local dialect. Listen to the mockingbird by night and by day and count how many different songs he can sing. Marvel at the exquisite harmony in the duet of a wood thrush as he uses his two voice boxes to accompany himself. Feel the extraordinary energy in the songs just before sunrise as dawn's first light sweeps across this singing planet. Hear firsthand the unmistakable evidence that there are not one but two species of marsh wrens and two species of winter wrens in North America. Learn not only to hear but to see birds sing in the form of sonagrams, as these visual images dance across the pages while you listen to the accompanying audio. Using your trained ears and eyes, you can begin your own journeys of discovery. Listen anew to birds in your backyard and beyond, exploring the singing minds of birds as they tell all that they know. Join Kroodsma not only in identifying but in identifying with singing birds, connecting with nature's musicians in a whole new way. Please note: this ebook includes embedded audio files. You will only be able to access these files from a device that supports embedded audio. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
great book for bird lovers but i could not read it through. it's more of a reference book about recording bird song and making sonograms of them. the author writes well with an entertaining style but he goes into technical scholarly details on every bird species he's ever encountered (hyperbole much?).
i had this on loan through interlibrary loan and i sent it back unfinished. in fact, i did not get very far in but i would like to own it, i think.
i had this on loan through interlibrary loan and i sent it back unfinished. in fact, i did not get very far in but i would like to own it, i think.
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 book
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.
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.
book also has CD of bird songs
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Author Information
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Donald Kroodsma is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting fellow at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.
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Awards and Honors
Awards
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2005
- Important places
- Amherst, Massachusetts, USA; Appalachian Mountains, USA; Berkshire Hills, Massachusetts, USA; Central America; Costa Rica; Florida, USA (show all 15); Michigan, USA; Nebraska, USA; New England, USA; New York, USA; North Dakota, USA; Oregon, USA; Pacific Ocean; Saskatchewan, Canada; Washington, USA
- Important events
- Pleistocene Epoch
- Epigraph
- The earth has music
for those who listen.
-William Shakespeare - Dedication
- For Melissa
- First words
- Somewhere, always, the sun is rising, and somewhere, always, the birds are singing.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)How fitting that, in the world of birdsong, where much of the noise is designed to impress her, she would have the last word.
- Blurbers
- Winter, Paul
- Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 598.1594
- Canonical LCC
- QL698 .K76
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 332
- Popularity
- 95,405
- Reviews
- 4
- Rating
- (4.17)
- Languages
- English, French
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
- UPCs
- 2
- ASINs
- 1
