Customer Reviews

Birds, Birds, Birds! An Indoor Birdwatching Field Trip DVD Video Bird and Bird Song Guide

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I love this DVD! The pictures are pristine and show both sexes, the video footage sprinkled thoughout is excellent, and the sound recordings are first rate as well. The mnemonic approach is original and "fixes" the sounds more easily in your memory. I find the female narrator's voice very pleasant and easy to understand. A treat for anyone who wants to learn just which bird it is whose song and calls fill the air, especially in the spring. Oh, and another wonderful plus: Great entertainment for my two lovebirds! It cracked me up when my male belted out the song of the Indigo bunting in near-perfect imitation. A companion CD is also available so you can listen to bird songs anywhere (or entertain your birds).

Please note: this DVD has but one aim: to familiarize the viewer/listener with birds and their songs and calls. If you want to learn more about these birds, I recommend Stokes' Field Guide to Birds, simply because it packs the most information on the same page of any guide that I own. For identification purposes and range, Sibley's Guide to Birds, in my opinion, is unsurpassed. And once your interest in birds leads you to ask more questions, by all means, treat yourself to Sir David Attenborough's marvelous The Life of Birds. I have both, the DVD set and the book, and I can only urge you to get the companion book as well since it is so wonderfully written. I found that I learned even more by reading the book after I had first watched the series on PBS. Sibley's Guide to Bird Behavior is also highly recommended.

There is a wealth of information out there on these feathered wonders, but for sheer beauty and clarity of sound, this DVD is worth every penny!

Truly, I am enjoying "Birds! Birds! Birds!" and I am purchasing a second for the friend who patiently got me into birding back when I could just about tell that a Robin is not a Cardinal. Its photography and/or videography of each Eastern bird is impressive. More than a few of the shots are artistic and not just a 'make-do' illustration. The quality of the audio is fine, and the examples of calls and songs seem to be quite useful. Curiously, I am recalling more of the mnemonic devices (such as "ee-oh-lay" for the Wood Thrush) because of the narrator's voice which is female. Though not in-depth (like the birdsong collection by Peterson's Field Guides) this is, nevertheless, as they say, a bang for the buck. (And I saved nearly $10 buying mine from one of the other new/used sellers - located in my region.) There is no accompanying booklet; and that might be a problem for some folks. However, the DVD menu lets you go to the index. There's also a category of "Sounds Like..." To stretch your knowledge, there are numerous quizzes. I can imagine that birders of less than expert capabilities - such as myself - might even take this along to view and hear on a laptop or on a car DVD player to be able to check on characteristics while in the field.

With Birds, Birds, Birds John Feith reaches a whole new audience, especially of young people who didn't have the patience to sit through a whole CD without visual accompaniment, such as his wonderful compilation, Who Cooks For Poor Sam Peabody?

I recommend this DVD to anyone who enjoyed Sam Peabody, for now you can see the actual birds who made the memorable mnemonics in the CD (not all of them, but enough to make you sit up and take notice). The whole point is to get to recognize the song and be able to identify it, and with this one-two punch you should be able to attain that objective without ever leaving your house. Here in California we are lucky enough to get regular visitors from the upper Midwest, and among them are the migrating birds. And yet viewing the fabulous color photography of BBB, I found myself wishing that I lived in Wisconsin. It's so beautiful and it almost seems you can hear the birds more clearly than you can in the California fog.

Feith provides essential support to the burgeoning community of those who would like an easy, refreshing way to fix the song of your favorite winged friend in your mind. Here you see them sing, you hear them sing, and you remember their song, the most precious and puzzling gift in the universe

This is a fantastic DVD! When I get home from a hectic day at school, the sights and sounds on this disk calm me down and reminds me of the promise of spring birds soon to return. The "quiz" format is a fun way to review my bird ID skills. As a middle school science teacher, I plan to use this feature with my students. The audio, photographs and videos are all of excellent quality. I strongly recommend this DVD!

The DVD provided an image or images of the bird whose call we were hearing. Sometimes photos only, sometimes actual video of the bird. A woman described the call and imitated it, in human terms. She was excellent. First we just started the DVD and for an hour were treated to innumerable bird calls, from all over. Since we were trying to learn birdcalls, it was overwhelming. Then we discovered that there was an alphabetical index and we could choose which bird to hear.

I would have liked to see a better format where birds were grouped by family, perhaps, and a bit more information provided; like migration paths, mating habits and how the families developed and when the chicks went out on their own, for example. Perhaps there's another video that does just that.

But Birds Birds Birds is the first bird call DVD we ever heard or purchased. Holly/Brooklyn

I agree...I can always look forward to putting on this DVD after a stressful day and feel comforted and happy. Not only is the DVD as a whole very complete, compelling, interesting and infomative, the photographs, videos and sounds of all the various birds are exquisite. Such a great team of artists and professionals have contributed to the DVD and watching it is such a wonderful experience. These are birds that appear all across the country from the West to the East and John Feith's CD "Who Cooks For Poor Sam Peabody" is such a great learning tool in and of itself, and now Mr. Feith has come out with this great DVD to have such great images to accompany the bird sounds from the CD...plus with many new surprises added along the way! I'm looking forward to watching again and again and again!

Informative, brief, arranged to make accessing particular species easier, and the announcer has a delightful voice -- she's almost as much fun as the birds with her mnemomic impressions.

If you enjoy birding, and particularly if you are new to the hobby, as are my wife and myself, you will find this well worth the investment. (BTW --Avoid the Audobon DVD's -- they may say they have corrected the poor manufacturing, but they haven't.)

This is highly recommended.

Birds, Birds, Birds! isn't really a film or a documentary, per se, because it doesn't have a narrative storyline. Instead it's a fascinating, well-made guide to a wide range of common North American birds, with excellent footage and sound recordings for each. As eye- and ear-training for birders, it's great, and for just general enjoyment, it's a treat for all bird-lovers. Personally I liked it better with the spoken soundtrack turned off, because the actress who was voicing the birdcall mneumonics was trying a little too hard to put interest into her line readings, to the point that sometimes the way she enunciated the phrase didn't show any similarity to the bird call in question. But that's just me.

The photography and video footage on this DVD are excellent, the recordings are top-notch, and it's a terrific way to either work on your call recognition for a birding trip, or just to relax and enjoy the beauty and songs of the feathered ones. I give it four solid stars.

It's been great for teaching a high school level bird watching class in the middle of winter before the birds get to the North East. Great preparation.

I decided to get serious about learning bird song for the Eastern US but had a hard time figuring out which CD to buy. What I found was no one CD does it all, they all have pros and cons. I ended up with 4 CDs -- and this DVD. Below is my take on them. In the end, while it took a bit of persistence, learning bird song has been an extremely rewarding experience, adding a new dimension to any walk.

I started with Feith's Bird Song Ear Training Guide: Who Cooks for Poor Sam Peabody? Learn to Recognize the Songs of Birds from the Midwest and Northeast States (1 CD). The big advantage of this CD is that it gives the song/call first, and then identifies it. So you can download the clips to an iPod, set it on random, and constantly test yourself. It covers 189 species, which is a lot. Finally, the narrator has a pleasant voice and often gives mnemonic suggestions (e.g., "Over here dear" for the Baltimore Oriole). This CD has two big disadvantages. First, many of the songs/calls are very short (many less than a few seconds). Second, there are very few songs/calls given for each bird (usually only one or two). In retrospect, they simply tried to cram too many birds onto one CD. These two defects greatly undercut the value of an otherwise good disk. Also, the birds are coupled so that if you download clips and try and randomize them you will always get the same two birds paired in the same order (the birds are ordered by alphabet). This makes it hard to learn the second birds based solely on the song of the bird - the Turkey always comes after the Towhee.

A friend gave me Elliott and Read's Common Birds and Their Songs (Book and Audio CD). In contrast to "Bird Song Ear Training Guide" this disk provides a variety of lengthy songs/calls for each bird. It pretty thoroughly covers 50 of the most common birds. It also comes with a glossy softcover book with great pictures and informative one page write-ups. I have a few problems with this disk. First, the bird is identified before each call, so it's hard to test yourself. Second, I'm sure Lang Elliott is a very nice man, but he doesn't have the most sonorous voice. Finally, the audio CD does not provide any mnemonics and there are only a few in the book.

Another friend gave me Elliott's Know Your Bird Sounds, Volume 1: Yard, Garden, and City Birds. This is similar to "Common Birds and Their Songs" but only covers 35 birds (as opposed to 50) although some are not included in "Common Birds." It also comes with a book with nice photographs but has less information on the birds and just focuses on describing their songs. The CD includes more information on the bird song than "Common Birds" (Elliott essentially reads the book) but has the same drawbacks; mainly, it identifies the bird before the song.

Having read that it greatly helps to simultaneously see and hear a bird singing its song, I purchased the product on this page: Feith's DVD "Birds, Birds, Birds: An Indoor Birdwatching Field Trip" This was a disappointment. In general it is the "Bird Song Ear Training Guide" CD (see above) matched up with still photographs and occasional video footage of the appropriate bird. It includes about a dozen more birds than the CD and can be arranged by "sound alikes" and set up to give one a quiz, but the drawbacks that undercut the CD - the brevity of the songs and lack of diversity of calls per bird - undercut the DVD. If you really need to see a picture of the birds while you hear them sing, buy one of Lang Elliott's CD/book combinations above.

Having made progress but still unsatisfied, I finally broke down and bought Birding by Ear: Eastern and Central North America (Peterson Field Guides(R)). It is a nice combination of lots of birds (about 85) with a long and diverse set of song/calls for each. The birds are also categorized by the similarity of song, which I found a helpful learning device. It comes with a paper pamphlet giving a very short description of each bird and a nice list of mnemonics at the back. The CD gives a fair amount of information along with the songs and is easy to listen to. The biggest drawbacks are the birds are identified before the song (although there are a number of quizzes arranged by habitat which compensates somewhat for this) and the clips go on for so long, due to the narration and groupings, that you can't really use them to download on an iPod and test yourself. I guess nothing is perfect.