Birding by Ear: A Guide to Bird-Song Identification/Eastern/Central (Peterson Field Guide Series/Book & 3 Cassettes) [Paperback]

Richard K. Walton (Author), Robert W. Lawson (Author), Roger Tory Peterson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Peterson Field Guide Series/Book & 3 Cassettes | Publication Date: March 1989

Birding by Ear is a unique and important new tool for birders. Now they can easily master one of the most useful and difficult field skills - the ability to recognize birds by their songs and calls. Birding By Ear points out exactly what to listen for to tell one bird from another. As the Peterson Field Guide groups birds by visual similarity, Birding by Ear groups them by acoustic similarity. Dick Walton and Bob Lawson have arranged eighty-five common species into seventeen intelligible learning groups, such as "whistlers," "chippers and trillers," "name-sayers," and "mimics." The entertaining and educational narrative does the same job as the arrows in the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds, pinpointing the precise differences between similar species. The songs themselves are recorded to the highest acoustic standards and are a delight to listen to. Birding by Ear can enable anyone to become a better birder. Use it in conjunction with the Peterson Field Guide to Bird Songs, which provides a thorough catalog of the songs and calls of the familiar birds of eastern and central North America (a Field Guide to Western Bird Songs is also available). Birding by Ear may well become as essential to you as your Field Guide and binoculars.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ever wonder what that trill in the backyard is? Or how to distinguish between all those similar warbler songs? If so, try Birding by Ear. This great resource for birders all over eastern/central North America conveniently packages three cassettes and an accompanying booklet into a single videocassette-like box. Each tape groups bird species according to acoustic similarity in order to help you learn the basics of bird-song identification. Soon you'll know just by listening whether the bird skulking underneath the bushes is an orange-crowned warbler, a chipping sparrow, or a dark-eyed junco.

About the Author

Roger Tory Peterson, one of the world's greatest naturalists, received every major award for ornithology, natural science, and conservation, as well as numerous honorary degrees, medals, and citations, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Peterson Identification System has been called the greatest invention since binoculars, and the Peterson Field Guides® are credited with helping to set the stage for the environmental movement. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (a); Bk&Csst edition (March 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395500877
• ISBN-13: 978-0395500873
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 4.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,392,781 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

87 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best introductory bird song guide available, March 16, 2000

By 

James Remsen, Jr. (Lindenhurst, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Birding By Ear: Eastern and Central North America (Peterson Field Guides(R)) (Audio CD)

Walton and Lawson's series of audio guides to bird songs are perhaps the best available for the beginning student of bird songs in North America. The reason for this is simple. Beginners need repetition to learn bird songs, as well as lengthy recordings that repeat each bird sound several times. These guides provide that, along with a detailed narration that points out specific differences between similar songs.

There are four guides by Walton and Lawson that use this format: three "Birding by Ear" Guides (one for eastern and central North America, one for western North America, and a second volume for the east called "More Birding by Ear") and another guide called "Backyard Bird Song."

All the guides are three CDs, except for "Backyard Bird Song" which is one disc, and is essentially a "junior" edition of the eastern/central edition of "Birding by Ear." All of the species on this single disc are also on the full-length guide, and are common garden birds found over much of the continent. This recording would provide good listening for someone who finds the full-length "Birding by Ear" overwhelming. In addition, it contains the sounds of several mammal species common in suburban and rural settings, which are not found on "Birding by Ear."

The guides feature very good sound quality and generally excellent field recordings. (The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics provided most of the recordings for all the guides except "More Birding by Ear," where Lang Elliott's Nature Sound Studio and the Borror Lab are the primary sources of material). My only complaint (and this is a highly personal bias) is Walton's over-reliance on phonetic or verbal interpretations of bird songs to serve as a memory aid. Does anybody's ear actually interpret the brown-headed cowbird's song as "bubble, bubble, zee" or the great horned owl's call as "Who's awake, me too?" I can't hear this by any stretch of my imagination. But as Walton rightly points out, each person's ear is a bit different so if this works for you, all the better.

Walton and Lawson have created invaluable tools for learning the too-often ignored language of nature around us. With most of these guides now available at reduced prices, I'd say buy them all if you can and you'll have an instant library of North American bird song, complete with a narrated tour to take you into this special world.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Birding by Ear, April 16, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Birding By Ear: Eastern and Central North America (Peterson Field Guides(R)) (Audio CD)

This is a great intro to bird songs. It has many common birds as well as several I had rarely seen but often heard. Its strength is that it is arranged in groups of similar-sounding birds, with narration that ties them together with memorization clues. This makes listening on my way to work amusing, and memorization not too tough. The weakness is that it is not easy to find the song of a particular bird if you want to identify something you just heard. A good companion would be a CD with lots of individual songs easily searchable, although such a format would not be nearly as easy to listen to for more than a few minutes.

On the whole, a great start. Bike rides are more fun too, since you always hear more birds than you can see. After two years of listening to this each spring, I'm ordering the sequel, More Birding by Ear, as well as a more complete song collection for searching.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great choice for the first step in learning birdsong, May 16, 2002

By 

John (Whitmore Lake, MI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Birding By Ear: Eastern and Central North America (Peterson Field Guides(R)) (Audio CD)

If you live in North America east of the Mississipi and want to identify birds by ear, read on...

This audio set is a very well thought out and produced tutorial for introducing beginning "ear" birders to the world of birding by ear. The audio quality is excellent with several renditions of each song and call. The pace is well suited to the target audience - only after repeated listening will you want to skip ahead through sections. The groupings of similar songs seem well designed, and reflect situations in the field that pose problems. Each song is described verbally, with an onomatopoetic description. I wish the CD were coded so that sub-tracks could be accessed directly without the introductory descriptions, but the design of this set isn't as encyclopedia of song, rather as short course in learning how to identify song.

Buy this and the "More birding by ear", listen to them for 10 - 30 minutes a day (great drive time listening), and master the art of birding by ear!