Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America - (Peterson Field Guides) by Nathan Pieplow (Paperback)

About the Book

The first comprehensive guide to the sounds of eastern North American birds, featuring an innovative visual index that allows readers to quickly look up unfamiliar sounds in the field

Book Synopsis

The first comprehensive guide to the sounds of eastern North American birds, featuring an innovative visual index that allows readers to quickly look up unfamiliar sounds in the field.

Bird songs and calls are just as important as visual field marks in identifying birds. But until now, the only way to learn them was by memorization. With this groundbreaking book, it's possible to visually distinguish bird sounds and identify birds using a field guide format.

At the core of this guide is the spectrogram, a visual graph of sound. With a brief introduction to five key aspects--speed, repetition, pauses, pitch pattern, and tone quality--readers can learn to visualize sounds, without any musical training or auditory memorization. Picturing sounds makes it possible to search this book visually for a bird song heard in the field.

The Sound Index groups similar songs together, narrowing the identification choices quickly to a brief list of birds that sound alike. Readers can then turn to the species account for more information and/or listen to the accompanying audio tracks available online, through Cornell's Lab of Ornithology.

Identifying birds by sound is arguably the most challenging and important skill in birding. This book makes it vastly easier to master than ever before.

From the Back Cover

Peterson
The best-selling field guides of all time

Bird songs and calls are at least as important as visual field marks in identifying birds. Now, with this groundbreaking book, it s possible to visually distinguish bird sounds and identify them using a field guide format. This is the most complete guide ever published to the bird sounds of eastern North America.

At the core of this guide is the spectrogram, a visual graph of sound. With a brief introduction to five key aspects speed, repetition, pauses, pitch pattern, and tone quality readers can translate what they hear into visual recognition, without any musical training or auditory memorization.

The Sound Index groups similar songs together, narrowing the identification choices quickly to a brief list of birds. Readers can then turn to the species accounts for more information and/or visit petersonbirdsounds.com to listen to over 5,500 streaming audio tracks that accompany the book, hosted online in cooperation with the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

Identifying birds by sound is arguably the most challenging and important skill in birding. This book makes it vastly easier to master than ever before.

Sponsored by the National Wildlife Federation and the Roger Tory Peterson Institute

NATHAN PIEPLOW teaches at the University of Colorado and has studied bird sounds since 2003.
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About the Author

NATHAN PIEPLOW teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado. A birder since childhood, he has studied bird sounds since 2003. He is the former editor of the journal Colorado Birds and an author of the Colorado Birding Trail. He blogs about bird sounds at Earbirding.com.