The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong

by Donald Kroodsma

Overview

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 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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547344874
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/17/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	470,596
File size:	119 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

DONALD KROODSMA is a world-renowned authority on birdsong and professor emeritus of ornithology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. As a research scientist, he published widely on birdsong for more than 50 years. More recently he has authored books that introduce the general public to birdsong: the award-winning The Singing Life of Birds, The Backyard Birdsong Guides, Birdsong by the Seasons, and Listening to a Continent Sing. He lives in Hatfield, Massachusetts.
 

Read an Excerpt

The Singing Life of Birds

The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong

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By Donald Kroodsma

Houghton Mifflin

Copyright © 2015 Donald Kroodsma
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-547-34487-4

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Preface

SOMEWHERE, ALWAYS, the sun is rising, and somewhere, always, the birds are singing. As spring and summer oscillate between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, so, too, does this singing planet pour forth song, like a giant player piano, in the north, then the south, and back again, as it has now for the 150 million years since the first birds appeared.
Ten thousand species strong, their voices and styles are as diverse as they are delightful. Some species learn their songs, just as we humans learn to speak, but others seem to leave nothing to chance, encoding the details of songs in nucleotide sequences in the DNA. Of those that learn, some do so only early in life, some throughout life; some from fathers, some from eventual neighbors after leaving home; some only from their own kind, some mimicking other species as well. Some species sing in dialects, others not. It is mostly he who sings, but she sometimes does, too. Some songs are proclaimed from the treetops, others whispered in the bushes; some ramble for minutes on end, others are offered in just a split second. Some birds have thousands of different songs, some only one, and some even none. Some sing all day, some all night. Some are pleasing to our ears, and some not.
It is this diversity that I celebrate. How the sounds of these species differ from each other is the first step to appreciating them, of course, but those questions quickly give way to “why” questions. Why do some learn and others not? Why do dialects occur in some species and not others? Why is it mainly the male who sings? It is these and similar “why” questions that so intrigue us biologists as we try to understand the individual voices that contribute to the avian chorus.
In writing about our singing planet, I can focus on only a few of its voices. The thirty stories told here are personal journeys, ones that I have traveled over the past thirty years in my quest to understand the singing bird.

Many are based on my own research and are years in the making. Others are based on just several days’ experience, or even less, as I seek out birds that illustrate the research of friends and colleagues who share my passions. No matter the source, each story is based on listening and on learning how to hear an individual bird use its sounds, and each story illustrates some of the fundamentals of the science called “avian bioacoustics.” Together, I hope these stories and their sounds reveal how to listen, the meaning in the music, and why we should care.

Copyright © 2005 by Donald Kroodsma. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Singing Life of Birds by Donald Kroodsma. Copyright © 2015 Donald Kroodsma. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

1. BEGINNINGS 1 Hearing and Seeing Bird Sounds 1 The Bewick’s Wren 10 The American Robin 23 Good Listening, Good Questions, This Book 37

2. HOW SONGS DEVELOP 42 Introduction 42 Learning Songs:Where,When, and from Whom 44 The White-crowned Sparrow 44 The Song Sparrow 55 Borrowed Songs: Mimicry 68 The Northern Mockingbird 68 Songs That Aren’t Learned 79 Tyrant Flycatchers: Alder and Willow Flycatchers, Eastern Phoebe 79 Why Some Species Learn and Others Don’t 89 The Three-wattled Bellbird 89 The Sedge Wren 102

3. DIALECTS: How and Why Songs Vary from Place to Place 119 The Great Marsh Wren Divide 120 The Black-capped Chickadee 135 The Chestnut-sided Warbler 145 Travels with Towhees, Eastern and Spotted 157 The Tufted Titmouse 165

4. EXTREMES OF MALE SONG 177 Introduction 177 Songbirds without a Song 179 The Blue Jay 179 Songbirds with Especially Complex Songs 191 The Brown Thrasher 191 The Sage Thrasher 202 The Winter Wren 214 Songbirds with Especially Beautiful Songs 225 The Bachman’s Sparrow 225 The Wood Thrush 237 The Hermit Thrush 255 Music to Our Ears 267 Songs on the Wing 276 The American Woodcock 276 Tireless Singers 287 The Whip-poor-will 287 The Red-eyed Vireo 297

5. THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN 304 The Eastern Wood-Pewee 304 Chipping and Brewer’s Sparrows 313 The Eastern Bluebird 325

6. SHE ALSO SINGS 335 The Barred Owl 336 The Carolina Wren 346 The Northern Cardinal 357

Appendix I: Bird Sounds on the Compact Disc 366

Appendix II: Techniques 402

Appendix III: Taxonomic List of Species Names 411

Notes and Bibliography 415

Index 452

Editorial Reviews

Kroodsma, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, shares what he's learned from more than three decades of recording and analyzing the songs of birds in this intriguing, instructional book. Using "sonagrams" (also known as sound spectrograms, they plot a sound's frequency over time), he illustrates the songs of 30 birds, from the familiar American robin to the exotic three-wattled bellbird of Costa Rica. He considers how birds acquire their songs (some species learn them; others have their tunes "encoded somehow in nucleotide sequences of the DNA"), what makes the songs unique, what functions they serve, and how they've evolved. No two species sound alike, of course, but groups of birds within each species have their own dialects, and individual birds have their own repertoires as well. A CD of the bird songs discussed is included, as are descriptions of the recording equipment Kroodsma used and explanations on how to make similar recordings and "sonagrams." Kroodsma is a warm, encouraging guide to the world of birdsong, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Illus. Agent, Russ Galen. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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