Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Western North America
by Nathan Pieplow
From Houghton Mifflin Harcourt:
A comprehensive field guide that uses an innovative Sound Index to allow readers to quickly identify unfamiliar songs and calls of birds in western North America.
Bird songs and calls are at least as important as visual field marks in identifying birds. Yet short of memorizing each bird’s repertoire, it’s difficult to sort through them all. Now, with the western edition of 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 translate what they hear into visual recognition, without any musical training or auditory memorization.
The Sound Index groups similar songs together, narrowing the identification choices quickly to a brief list of birds that are likely to be confused because of the similarity of their songs. Readers can then turn to the species account for more information and/or listen to the accompanying audio tracks available online.
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.
The western edition of this innovative guide is now available (the eastern guide was published in 2017). All of the sounds in the book – “plus thousands more bonus recordings” – are available at petersonbirdsounds.com. It’s a valuable resource even without the book, as it’s a very extensive collection with spectrograms that allow you to see the sounds. But with the book, with its much-needed analysis and ancillary details, it should prove even easier to learn and identify sounds.
Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Western North America
by Nathan Pieplow
Flexi-bound; 648 pages
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; April 2, 2019
ISBN: 9780547905570
$28.00
Buy from Buteo Books
(based in the U.S.)
Buy from NHBS
(based in the U.K.)
Posted by Grant McCreary on May 16th, 2019.
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