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Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds
Peterson Field Guide To Bird Sounds Of Eastern North America
The first comprehensive guide to the sounds of eastern North American birds, featuring an innovative visual index that allows readers to quickly look up unfamiliar sounds in the field.
Bird songs and calls are just as important as visual field marks in identifying birds. But until now, the only way to learn them was by memorization. With this groundbreaking book, it’s possible to visually distinguish bird sounds and identify birds using a field guide format.
At the core of this guide is the spectrogram, a visual graph of sound. With a brief introduction to five key aspects—speed, repetition, pauses, pitch pattern, and tone quality—readers can learn to visualize sounds, without any musical training or auditory memorization. Picturing sounds makes it possible to search this book visually for a bird song heard in the field.
The Sound Index groups similar songs together, narrowing the identification choices quickly to a brief list of birds that sound alike. Readers can then turn to the species account for more information and/or listen to the accompanying audio tracks available online, through Cornell's Lab of Ornithology.
Identifying birds by sound is arguably the most challenging and important skill in birding. This book makes it vastly easier to master than ever before.
Bird songs and calls are just as important as visual field marks in identifying birds. But until now, the only way to learn them was by memorization. With this groundbreaking book, it’s possible to visually distinguish bird sounds and identify birds using a field guide format.
At the core of this guide is the spectrogram, a visual graph of sound. With a brief introduction to five key aspects—speed, repetition, pauses, pitch pattern, and tone quality—readers can learn to visualize sounds, without any musical training or auditory memorization. Picturing sounds makes it possible to search this book visually for a bird song heard in the field.
The Sound Index groups similar songs together, narrowing the identification choices quickly to a brief list of birds that sound alike. Readers can then turn to the species account for more information and/or listen to the accompanying audio tracks available online, through Cornell's Lab of Ornithology.
Identifying birds by sound is arguably the most challenging and important skill in birding. This book makes it vastly easier to master than ever before.
608 pages, Hardcover
Published March 7, 2017
3 people are currently reading
54 people want to read
About the author
Nathan Pieplow
2 books2 followersNATHAN PIEPLOW has been fascinated by birds since his childhood in South Dakota, and has intensively studied bird sounds since 2003. He is the former editor of the journal Colorado Birds and an author of the Colorado Birding Trail. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 8, 2020
This book attempts to tackle in written form what is most certainly not obviously visual; the wonderful, beautiful, and maddening/perplexing (if you are trying to sort out just what that bird is that is making that sound at just this moment!!) sounds of birds. Maybe more than any other bird guide in my plenteous library of bird guides, Pieplow's book demands a lot of the reader, but I believe that the work is worth the effort and this book is the first real guide to the journey that I have ever seen.
We are visual creatures that neglect most sounds. Most people proceed through a forest of bird sounds and have no awareness. I see this all the time as I stand in befuddlement, trying to pin an ID to that weird liquid chip rising from the murky depths down by the creek as my fellow humans hike on by just happy to be outside. Once you start noticing, you can no longer swim in ignorance, instead you drown.
The neighborhood birds are where you start and those become somewhat easy, but still they will confound you at times. As you got out more and more and really listen, you will build up a library of those birds that exist beyond your neighborhood but that you will find over and over again in your journeys. Depending on where you live this is about 50 bird species in total. Master these and then your learning can really begin.
Ever spring and every fall you learn that there are all of these birds that are just passing through. Many of these birds you will hardly ever see and they will only grace your bubble of awareness for a week or two on each side of summer AND they ALL make a medley of sounds that you will only hear for, at most, minutes all year. This is where a book like this comes into play. Taking these sounds and mapping them to the visual space via spectrograms and a difficult but necessary vocabulary of words to describe these sounds Pieplow catalogs many (not all) of the sounds that you may hear in your manifold path to learning how to be a better birder.
As I mentioned earlier, this is not an easy book. It requires real effort to get value out of it. I think though that it is an invaluable addition to an advanced birders library. When combined with the recording ability in any modern smartphone, it should provide a tremendous learning tool. But beware, you will make recordings and you will have this book (as well as all of the various tools on the internet) and you will still be confounded.
We are visual creatures that neglect most sounds. Most people proceed through a forest of bird sounds and have no awareness. I see this all the time as I stand in befuddlement, trying to pin an ID to that weird liquid chip rising from the murky depths down by the creek as my fellow humans hike on by just happy to be outside. Once you start noticing, you can no longer swim in ignorance, instead you drown.
The neighborhood birds are where you start and those become somewhat easy, but still they will confound you at times. As you got out more and more and really listen, you will build up a library of those birds that exist beyond your neighborhood but that you will find over and over again in your journeys. Depending on where you live this is about 50 bird species in total. Master these and then your learning can really begin.
Ever spring and every fall you learn that there are all of these birds that are just passing through. Many of these birds you will hardly ever see and they will only grace your bubble of awareness for a week or two on each side of summer AND they ALL make a medley of sounds that you will only hear for, at most, minutes all year. This is where a book like this comes into play. Taking these sounds and mapping them to the visual space via spectrograms and a difficult but necessary vocabulary of words to describe these sounds Pieplow catalogs many (not all) of the sounds that you may hear in your manifold path to learning how to be a better birder.
As I mentioned earlier, this is not an easy book. It requires real effort to get value out of it. I think though that it is an invaluable addition to an advanced birders library. When combined with the recording ability in any modern smartphone, it should provide a tremendous learning tool. But beware, you will make recordings and you will have this book (as well as all of the various tools on the internet) and you will still be confounded.
December 16, 2017
I love the way the author breaks down how to visualize sounds. The indexes and audio companion website are excellent.
June 16, 2018
Best writing on bird song I have ever read
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews