Customer Reviews

Bird Song Ear Training Guide: Who Cooks for Poor Sam Peabody? Learn to Recognize the Songs of Birds from the Midwest and Northeast States

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

One might call this CD a companion "ear training guide" to the Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs. Or maybe a condensed Birding by Ear. It falls between the two in terms of number of birds (189) and amount of narration (about 5 seconds following each bird song). It has the lovely voice of a female narrator (unusual for a bird tape) and the birds have a tinge of a Wisconsin accent.

For some, the main draw of this CD is that one is allowed to guess before being told the name of the bird singing. Others might like the number of memorable mnemonics and brief song descriptions used. For those in the Midwest, the main draw might be that all the birds were recorded in Wisconsin (although most of the birds can be heard over much of the Eastern United States). And finally, the fact that one can review or "take a quiz" on the songs of 189 birds in only 60 minutes is a big advantage over the multi-CD guides.

This is, of course, only the opinion of the unbiased author.

John Feith's Bird Song Ear Training Guide is a unique and impressive CD audiobook providing instructions on how to recognize songs of birds common to the states of the Midwest and Northeast (including Wisconsin where almost all the bird songs were recorded and the post-production work was done). Each distinctive bird song is followed by a mnemonic or a short description. The bird is identified and a review sound is played again that fixes the song's identity in the mind of the listener. The Bird Song Ear Training Guide is enhanced with a quiz format which will aid the listener to focus on learning how to identify the bird songs. A complete list of bird species and mnemonics is included in an insert. All profits from this enthusiastically recommended CD instructional for birdwatchers will go to the Nature Conservancy and the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology.

Our family has owned a patch of shore/forest land in Wisconsin for 20 years although none have been birders. With this disk we easily learned to identify species and discovered the diversity that we never noticed previously. The call/naming/call format of this disk is excellent for new birders and the numbers of species covered is ideal. I use the Stokes disk set as a reference but the name/call format and large number species covered does not facilitate learning the calls.

I own several other audio programs for bird song, but none compare to John Feith's training guide. Birds have up to 200 songs. Many have five to ten. Most audio recordings try to give them all to you, and leave you baffled. Mr. Feith chooses the most distiguishable song. The intro of song then identification truly sharpens your identification skills, then after the identification one more clear song or call is played. Excellent format! I would recommend this audio and none other.

The CD arrived in the mail yesterday, and I've listened to it once all the way through. The bird songs were recorded in Wisconsin and I live in Connecticut, and I recognized most of the songs as ones I had heard near my house, so it seems that birds selected for inclusion on the CD are widespread enough to make the CD useful for most of the eastern US.

The format is excellent. The bird songs are arranged in alphabetical order by bird name. Each entry begins with about 20 seconds of bird song (usually 2 repetitions) followed by a speaker describing the song in words that are easy to remember and giving the bird's name, and ending with another 5 seconds of bird song. It is easy to tell when one entry has ended and another has begun. I expect to do most of my listening in the car, so this format is perfect for me.

I was always good at idenfitying birds by site but not by call and thanks to John's cd I am now good at both. I listen to it all of the time and would be lost without it. It is very informative and clever. I would suggest this cd over any other bird call cd! Thanks John for this great learning tool!! My cat loves it too.


Jayne Gulbrand

My 7, 4, and 1 year old love this cd. Their friends love it. We listen to it often in the car. They have memorized and can repeat (as much as a human can) many of the calls, and they try to have "conversations" with the birds in our backyard. Let's face it, kids growing up in suburbia face challenges to acquiring the kind of nature literacy that the average child, say, 10,000 years ago, experienced as part of daily life. While some would debate it, I believe that their little brains delight in flickering firelight, picking out the movement of an animal in the brush, and yes, birdsong. I would absolutely recommend this as a gift for a child or even an infant. It's much safer than a blazing fire or a large shrub with a wolf lurking in it. My only complaint is that there is not a companion book with pictures; our solution has been to rip up an inexpensive copy of Birds of Massachusetts and re-shuffle the pictures to go with the order on the cd.

I'm a beginner when it comes to bird identification but am working toward gaining more knowledge of sight and sound out in the field. I was very pleased with my purchase of the CD and felt it suited my purposes perfectly. Calls are played and then a young female identifies the bird. There is also a very clear comprehensive printed guide about the materials on the CD. I found the author's descriptions of calls much easier for me to comprehend and use as a learning tool than some others I've come across. As a previous reviewer mentioned, only the main/major/most significant calls of various birds are given...but it's a real start! Once you've identified the singer, you can maybe hang around for some extended choruses and reprises if you so desire. It's exciting to begin the journey of learning.

John Feith had a brilliant idea (for us birders!) when he came up with this CD - pnemonics for bird sounds! It doesn't get much better than this because it is now so much easier to recognize bird calls and songs. Luckily I am a Midwestern bird lover who can fully reap the rewards of such a wonderfully produced CD. Thanks John!

While the coverage of songs is thorough, the acoustic quality is not nearly as good as four other bird song CDs that I also recently purchased (Stokes - Eastern Region, Peterson Field Guide sets - Eastern, Songbirds Bible by Proctor, Common Bird Songs by Borror). Moreover, the songs are very short, with minimal repetition or variation. It is nice to have narration that follows the songs, so the listener has a chance to guess what type of bird sings each song. However, given that the songs are so short, and the pauses after the songs and before narration are even shorter, there is no time for an advanced beginner birder such as myself to reflect, or even spit out the answer instantaneously. Furthermore, the next song often starts virtually "on top" of the narration (which is little more than just the name of the bird), making it easy to associate the bird name with the wrong song (ie, the song that follows narration rather than the song that precedes).