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| The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong | 
 enlarge | Author: Donald Kroodsma
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy New: $4.61
You Save: $12.34 (73%)
New (33) Used (22) from $1.43
Avg. Customer Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 70137
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 496
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6.7 x 1.3
ISBN: 0618840761
Dewey Decimal Number: 598.1594
EAN: 9780618840762
ASIN: 0618840761
Publication Date: April 25, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product 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 birds. 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 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 CD.
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
The CD alone is worth the money! March 29, 2005
107 out of 112 found this review helpful
Just listened to an interview with the author on NPR which included a number of selections from the accompanying CD, all I can think of is 'how awesome!' The author has spent many years studying and documenting birdsong and makes me realize that what I thought I knew from growing up in the country surrounded by birdsong is a tiny fragment of what I actually was hearing. The CD includes birdsongs at normal speeds and slowed to 1/2 and 1/4 speed, which allows the listener to hear the discreet sounds. The accompanying text includes graphic description of the sounds for a clearer understanding. If you love birds, you will love this!
Exceptional September 17, 2005
44 out of 58 found this review helpful
There is not one page in this book that is not interesting, and along with the CD that accompanies the book, the reader will be exposed to an incredible amount of information, resulting from years of fieldwork on the part of the author. Even the reader who is not an active birder will, after finishing the book, be left with a deep appreciation of the singing abilities of songbirds. Many, many questions arise from the reading of the book, some of these being:
1. Why do some songbirds, such as the whip-poor-will, the catbird, and thrasher have thousands of songs in their repertoire and sing them almost unceasingly, when such a strategy might result in them not been appreciated by their listeners?
2. Is there ample empirical evidence that will support the notion that the speed of singing increases as the number of different songs increases?
3. Do birds that sing with a great variety in their songs sing more continuously and vice versa?
4. How does one characterize a bird song, i.e. how for example does one define when a song starts and when it ends?
5. The male whip-poor-will has been documented by the author as being able to sing as many as 2, 590 songs (all the songs the same) per hour. What kind of food consumption is necessary on the part of this bird to give him the energy needs for this rate of singing? And is this singing rate optimal, i.e. what is the maximum rate of singing that this bird can perform? And is there a genetic advantage in such a high singing rate? Do female whip-poor-wills really listen attentively to the quality of each song, to see how perfectly each one is, as the author speculates in the book?
6. It is readily apparent when reading the book that the hours of dawn are the most optimal when listening to bird song. Why do birds choose these hours, instead of for example, the hours of dusk, to sing?
7. For a given species of bird, how much variability is there in the selection of songs from morning to morning?
8. What is the ratio between birdsongs who learn their songs from their parents and those who have their songs "wired into their genes"?
9. What dependence on age is there in the selection of songs for a given species of songbird?
10. For a given species of songbird, how much variability is there in the selection of songs for different phases of the breeding cycle?
11. For a given species of songbird, how much variability is there in the selection of songs for different geographical locales that the bird resides in?
12. What is the longest recorded song and which bird sings it?
13. What is the most complex song ever recorded and which bird sings it?
14. For a given species of songbird, how do the songs of the female compare with those of the male? Are they more complex or less? Are they longer or shorter? Are they more delightful to listen to? Why does the female sing? How does the female distinguish a song from a male member of her species if there are many songs being sung simultaneously by other males of many different species?
15. How does the songbird vocal anatomy vary among songbirds?
16. Mockingbirds can mimic the songs of other birds, as is well documented in this book. Should this mimicry be considered "learning"?
17. If a male songbird is singing to attract mates, is he singing to capture the attention of a particular female or is he engaging in "multicasting", i.e. seeking to attract the attention of any female in the given locale?
18. Do male songbirds try to compete with other male songbirds by singing songs that are qualitatively better, i.e. give more pleasure, to the female songbird who is listening to them?
19. The author has reported that the male Carolina wren has large groups of specialized "song-learning" neurons in its forebrain, resulting in a extremely large repertoire of songs. Is brain size of songbirds correlated positively with the size of the song repertoire?
20. What is the difference between "singing" and "calling"?
21. Do mockingbirds copy songs with high fidelity? How effective is their process of duplication?
22. What species of songbirds are able to respond to songs that they do not share among themselves?
23. Can any songbirds be made to learn songs that are designed/composed by the human ornithologist?
24. Why do some species of songbirds learn their songs while others do not? Is there an evolutionary advantage in learning songs?
25. Is there evidence from the fossil record that some species of bird existing today used to be songbirds in the past and vice versa?
26. Are there different dialects of song in a particular species of songbird? How do these dialects very with the geographical locales that the songbirds inhabit? If there are different dialects in the species, can a songbird using one dialect learn the dialect of another? Could they learn perhaps a "hybrid" dialect?
27. If male songbirds learn only the songs of their fathers, how would this affect the genetic diversity of these songbirds? Would it increase or decrease it?
28. If the song repertoires of a particular species of songbird change in evolutionary time, how fast do they change? Is there a correlation between environmental changes and changes in song repertoires?
29. As reported by the author, some species of songbird songs with their neighbors (of the same species). What advantages does this confer on the songbird?
30. Can the listening of songbirds shed any light on the status of their health? To what extent do viral infections for example, affect the quality of their songs? Could one diagnose a malady in a songbird by listening to its song?
Suberb--a lovely merging of science and poetry May 5, 2005
34 out of 34 found this review helpful
I was predisposed to like this book, since I love birdsong and have long been drawn to research about it. But this book far exceeded my high expectations. Don Kroodsma takes us through the entire process of listening to a song, thinking up questions about how the species acquired it, and step by step through the process of learning the answer, setting up the sections like little mysteries. He's recognized by the American Ornithologists' Union as an authority on acquisition of birdsong, and although the book is authoritative and scientific, he somehow manages to infuse every paragraph with his own sense of wonder and joy in his subject. This book may look like a textbook, but it reads like a cross between a mystery novel and lovely poetry. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Wow - my ears are opened! November 2, 2005
33 out of 33 found this review helpful
I just got a book out of the library. The author is a nut about recording songs and analyzing the sonograms (frequency intensity over time), and in his mind, when he hears a song, he identifies it by how it "looks" in his mental sonogram.
This whole idea is amazing, and I think I'll never listen to birds the same way again - just after reading the first few pages!
The writing style pulls you into the author's world as he tracks birds and ponders the meaning of their song. If you love birding, you will wish you had been there on every walk, and you'll want to wake up two hours before dawn the next day to discover the amazingly different pre-dawn songs of common birds.
The book comes with as CD with 98 tracks of songs, and some of the tracks are slowed down, which really changes your perception and shows you the depth and richness of some of those "blurt" sounds birds make. The Woodthrush at 1/10 speed reminds me of a howling wolf. I know I'll never listed to this song the same way again!
A masterpiece of Avian Bioacoustics. April 22, 2005
29 out of 29 found this review helpful
A masterpiece of avian bioacoustics (Sorry, I just had to use those words).
I have a bird outside my window just now singing a song of some kind. I've long thought it was pretty, but thought no more acout it. Now this book has come along and my casual listening has become much more interesting. I found the bird outside my window in the book and sure enough here is a sonogram, a voice print if you will of what the bird sounds like. Further, there is a track on the CD that comes with the book that has this bird's song recorded. It's not exactly like the bird outside the window, but birds (I've learned) are individuals too.
Birding is one of the more popular pastimes in this country, and growing quire rapidly. This book would be a supurb gift to any birder, even if you have to give it to yourself.
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