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.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.
Must have for any birder. Wonderful addition to our birding by ear collection. We now have the Stokes Collection and the Peterson MORE Birding By Ear. This set covers common birds with easier sounds to recognize. The More Birding by Ear set references things you’ve learned in this series so it is important to start with the first set. It is well organized with good narrations instead of just a list of sounds. I cannot believe how much I’ve learned from this set. Being able to ID birds by sound only has increased our…
The best introductory bird song guide available 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.
Birding by Ear 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…