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SOUND APPROACH
THE SOUND APPROACH TO BIRDING
A guide to understanding bird sound
Mark Constantine, The Sound Approach team
twarda okładka
Nowa religia - oznaczanie ptaków wyłącznie za pomocą wydawanych przez nie dźwięków. Autorzy są przekonani, że jest to możliwe i diagnostyczne w każdym przypadku. Biblia dla każdego miłośnika ptaków, który na serio traktuje te zainteresowanie.
Wszystko to ze znakomitymi sonogramami, napisane wesołym językiem, a co najważniejsze z 2 płytami CD z wysokiej jakości nagraniami głosów ptaków. Dodatkowo, zestawione są obok siebie bardzo podobne gatunki, tak by maksymalnie ułatwić wychwycenie różnic, w tekście te różnice sa wskazane na obrazkach sonogramów.
This is a book that steps boldly and bravely into the mucky world of identifying birds by sound. Its aim is very ambitious – to make birders look at bird sounds in a new way, and thus, by implication, to become better at recognising and understanding them.
Plenty of newly published books claim to take a “new approach” to this and that, often with little supporting evidence that they are doing anything novel. This one, however, which comes with two CDs, is genuinely groundbreaking. Building on the foundations of “The New Approach to Identification” pioneered by Killian Mullarney and the late Peter Grant in the 1980s, in which birders were encouraged to look more closely at bird details and so work out how plumage varied with age and moult (among other things), this book aims to take the same empirical, measured and scientific approach to bird sounds. It does so primarily through presenting bird sounds graphically on the page as “sonograms”, dozens of which adorn the neatly designed pages.
Sonagrams, in case you didn’t know, are graphs: basically plots of frequency (the pitch if the note/s) against time. As bird sounds vary, so do their patterns on the printed page, which are as distinctive as any plumages. With enthusiasm and loving care, these sonagrams are presented quite beautifully in this book (as well as I have ever seen), and clearly labelled and explained. Since they all correspond to recordings on the accompanying CDs, the authors achieve their aim of making sonograms understandable, and demonstrate how useful they are.
The book is divided into ten chapters, all on different aspects of bird sounds and their recognition. It begins with three chapters on learning bird sounds, and these are excellent. The next chapters deal with, respectively, the problems of labelling sounds as “songs” or “calls”, with the development of calls and songs as birds grow older, with the functions of song, with mimicry and dialects, and with taxonomy. There is a brief section on playback (playing recordings to birds to get a response), and then a summing up. In these chapters it all gets a little complicated, and many readers will probably give up. That’s not to say that there isn’t good stuff, it’s just pretty heavy. You will have to be seriously interested in the subject to get this far.
Every important book has its faults, of course. At times the tone in the text gets a little self-important – people did, after all, try to recognise bird sounds before this book came along! The main author also has the incredibly annoying habit of telling us utterly irrelevant information about himself and his mates, as if he were at an award ceremony and was thanking everybody from his agent onwards. This is unnecessary and clogs the text; it almost made me give up before I had really looked at the book. I was also not happy with the sweeping statement : ‘What is not understood is that all passeries include mimcry somewhere in their repertoires…’, which is plainly wrong. The section on the development of Chiffchaff calls was also not convincing, and neither were all the confident statements about plastic song. I think the author(s) should have been a little more careful in reminding us that the understanding of bird sound is very much a work in progress.
But these are minor quibbles. Overall this book is an important contribution to the subject, written with a highly infectious enthusiasm. The recordings of the CDs are terrific, and there are some that you will undoubtedly never have heard before: all the different sorts of crossbill, for instance.
I would say, however, that it is really a book for the confirmed enthusiast, who already has a deep passion for the minutiae of bird sounds.
DOMINIC MITCHELL - Birdwatch
| Autor | Mark Constantine, The Sound Approach team |
| Tytuł | THE SOUND APPROACH TO BIRDING |
| Objętość | 192 strony |
| Okładka | twarda |
| Wymiary | mm |
| Wydawnictwo | SOUND APPROACH |
| Termin wydania | 2006 [grudzień] |
| Uwagi | kolorowe fotografie, rysunki, 2 płyty CD z nagraniami głosów |
