Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds in Song

A book by Les Beletsky

Published by Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2006

One of the most enjoyable gifts I received in 2006 was a beautiful coffee table book entitled Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds in Song. This book is a rare treat – equally interesting and entertaining for birders of varied ability looking to advance their skills (like me) and for beginning bird watchers alike.

Bird Songs is no mere coffee table book. Indeed, how would one produce an ordinary coffee table book that does justice to the amazing range of vocalizations that come from our bird species? Instead, the book marries beautiful and artistic styling with a small digital audio player attached to the book’s back cover, in order to provide recorded bird songs to play along with the text.

The book pairs short but interesting descriptions of the natural history of 250 bird species – close to a third of the species found in North America – with large, detailed illustrations of each bird, often taking up a whole page. Descriptive content included for each species includes information such as range, plumages, and conservation issues. Each synopsis also includes detailed, and often evocative, descriptions of the songs or calls of the species. For example, the book’s treatment of Common Loon reads:

"The Common Loon’s yodel – its territorial call, given only by the male, is called the “song of the loon.” The birds produce these loud, haunting vocalizations during the breeding season, usually at night, often from the otherwise quiet lakes of northern New England, the northern Midwest, Canada, and Alaska. Yodels carry up to a mile, and each male’s call is unique to that individual."

Finally – and this is the extraordinary part of this book – each species page provides a reference number which, when punched into the attached digital audio player, plays the bird song as described in the text. Recordings for these songs are from the world renowned Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. They are excellent quality field recordings of the bird songs, and they come through the small player with surprising clarity.

The book’s species are organized according to bird type, rather than taxonomy, making it easy for beginning birders to find the accounts and songs of familiar birds. For example, all shorebirds, waterbirds, and waterfowl are grouped together, as are all woodland birds. I’ve spent lots of time with this book over the winter refreshing my memory on the songs of our breeding birds that are now just beginning to return for the summer. Now that spring is here, hopefully with every passing day I’ll be hearing more and more of the songs and calls I’ve learned from Bird Songs.

Sarah Wren is Nature Canada's Conservation Biologist and an avid birdwatcher.