Nature's Music: The Science of Birdsong [Hardcover]

Peter R. Marler (Author), Hans Slabbekoorn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 17, 2004

The voices of birds have always been a source of fascination. Nature's Music brings together some of the world's experts on birdsong, to review the advances that have taken place in our understanding of how and why birds sing, what their songs and calls mean, and how they have evolved. All contributors have strived to speak, not only to fellow experts, but also to the general reader. The result is a book of readable science, richly illustrated with recordings and pictures of the sounds of birds.

Bird song is much more than just one behaviour of a single, particular group of organisms. It is a model for the study of a wide variety of animal behaviour systems, ecological, evolutionary and neurobiological. Bird song sits at the intersection of breeding, social and cognitive behaviour and ecology. As such interest in this book will extend far beyond the purely ornithological - to behavioural ecologists psychologists and neurobiologists of all kinds.

* The scoop on local dialects in birdsong
* How birdsongs are used for fighting and flirting
* The writers are all international authorities on their subject

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Enter the world of research on bird song with 'Nature's Music: The Science of Birdsong,' edited by two of the field's experts, Peter Marler and Hans Slabbekoorn (Elsevier, 2004). Be forewarned: this book isn't for the faint of heart. It has 14 chapters, each one written by a researcher who presents substantive overviews of the staggering variety of mechanisms underlying the production of these delightful sounds that permeate our world -- the mimicry of the lyrebird, the deception of the chicken, the 2,000 songs of the brown thrasher. It comes with two CDs of songs and calls recorded across the globe over a 50-year span. If you really want to know what's up with bird song, hunker down with this book."--Sarasota Herald Tribune "An enormous amount of care and hard work has resulted in a lavishly produced and illustrated volume, complete with two CDs of bird sound recordings and even some music."--Clive K. Catchpole, School of Biological Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London, UK, in ETHOLOGY

"...a unique item...most chapters have 'learning boxes' that provide additional information, sometimes more technical than the rest of the text or simply expanding on a particular point. These are highly useful as they prevent the text from becoming too dense or detailed for a more general reader and provide the curious read with a worthwhile digression from the regular text...The print index of the items on the CD-ROMS is very helpful. CD tracks are listed in numerical order by book chapter along with an informative description. The majority of the tracks relate to the learning boxes in the chapter and the book text also refers to the CD tracks where relevant...recommended for public libraries and for academic libraries that support this discipline...the comprehensive text and enjoyable CDs make this item a valuable addition to relevant collections."--Beth Thomsett-Scott, University of North Texas Science and Technology Library, in E-STREAMS

"The volume is a landmark for birdsong research...One of the great strengths of the book is its use of beautiful examples to teach key concepts...what really drives these lessons home are two CDs that contain over 90 tracks each...These superb recordings accompany sonograms or points in the text, so readers can read about particular songs while listening to them...Today's amateur birders deserve a sophisticated presentation of the natural history of birdsong. This book delivers...if you followed Luis Baptista's work and learned from him, you will appreciate what a lovely monument this is to his memory."--Jack Dumbacher of CALIFORNIA WILD (2005)

"Nature's Music is a remarkable book in many ways- the breadth of its coverage, the blend of field and laboratory studies, and the balance between facts and speculation...The quality of figures is excellent, as are the two CDs that convert many of the sounds illustrated as sound spectrographs back into an impeccably clean soundtrack. In all these ways, this book is a labor of love...This book will make fine reading for all those drawn to birds and their songs, and will provide a sturdy backbone for courses on animal behavior, animal communication and learning. Those who labor all day in concrete jungles or in the confines of a laboratory may find in this book an incentive to strap on the binocular, step outside and follow nature's music."--Fernando Nottebohm, Field Research Center, Rockefeller University in NATURE MAGAZINE (2005)

-Article in BIONIEUWS (March 2005)

Book Description

A book on the voices of birds heavily illustrated with sound spectrograms of songs and calls, many with recordings on an accompanying CD.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 504 pages
• Publisher: Academic Press (November 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0124730701
• ISBN-13: 978-0124730700
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,133,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive Bird Song, April 29, 2005

By 

E. N. Anderson (Riverside, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nature's Music: The Science of Birdsong (Hardcover)

This volume brings together the findings of the dramatic bird song research in the last 50 years. The research was launched by W. H. Thorpe in the 1950s, but it was his student Peter Marler who turned the agenda into an explosion of work and exciting findings. Marler and his students have energized not only biology, but psychology, linguistics, and evolutionary biology. Key results are summarized in this huge volume, dedicated to the memory of the late Luis Baptista, one of Marler's early students.
Some particularly dramatic findings of the last 50 years include the widespread existence of learned song-dialects; the importance of learning in general; the ability of many birds to sing two notes at once; the many purposes to which song is put; and the degree to which birds are conscious of meanings and structures. Before the Marler revolution, biologists usually thought of birds as "birdbrains," driven solely by instinct or primitive stimulus-response learning. Now we know birds learn very complicated songs, often from other species, and plan ahead to accomplish their goals by varied communication strategies. They aren't as smart as humans or apes, but they are far smarter than we used to think we were. They continue to surprise us.
Bird song and bird society can be useful simple models for us; they show how relatively complex systems can evolve, and provide ideas for how human (proto-)language and society might have evolved a million, or a few million, years ago. This book does not get much into that realm of speculation, but some of the authors here (notably W. T. Fitch) have worked with linguists on these questions. We need more work on this. Moreover, humans and songbirds share true music; apes don't seem to have it. To understand how humans evolved musical competence, we have to look at avian models.
Two cautionary notes. First, this is a book for professionals; it won't be easily accessible to the general reader. Fortunately, one of the authors, Don Kroodsma, has filled the gap with his new book THE SINGING LIFE OF BIRDS. The second is that the recording quality of the CD's is uneven; the nightingales sure don't sound as good as they do in the woods of south France!
One chapter treats conservation issues; I wish it were longer and more comprehensive. Since Rachel Carson's classic book SILENT SPRING, Carson's worst fears have come to pass in much of the world. Just in the last five years, spring has become almost totally silent (in regard to bird song) at my house. Not only the pesticides she feared, but urbanization, global warming (fires, droughts...), and now West Nile virus are killing off the songbirds. The cover of the present book portrays a meadowlark. This formerly abundant bird has been reduced in numbers by about 99% in fast-urbanizing southern California since my youth, and is now a genuinely rare bird over almost all its range. The younger authors of this book may live to see their subject matter go extinct. My younger children have grown up in a song-deprived world; my grandchildren hear almost no bird songs at all, except on the wildlife programs they love to watch on TV.
Thus, I would very, very, very strongly urge all students of bird song to get out there and document wild birds and their songs, while there is time. Much of this book deals with experiments on domesticated birds. Such work is very valuable, but we desperately need to get the wild songs documented while yet we can.

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars very good, April 3, 2010

By 

gerst "gerst" - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Nature's Music: The Science of Birdsong (Hardcover)

The book is wonderful, in excellant shap and the delivery was correct en very quick