150 British and Irish birds and their amazing sounds, by Jonathan Elphick, Lars Svensson and Jan Pedersen.
My wife & I have really enjoyed poring over this unusual book, reading about and admiring birds both familiar and unfamiliar, and playing the audio samples. It’s the latter, played using the strange looking grey plastic panel, visible in the above cover image, that make this book on birds so unusual.
Not being experts in ornithology I can’t really comment on the quality of the material other than to say its fascinating and informative. But then that’s why we got it; to learn about our avian friends. What is immediately clear, however, is that the production is high quality, with the visual aspects of the book being quite sumptuous: each bird is illustrated with a large and beautifully shot photograph and, in many but not all instances, small painted illustrations, sometimes showing an alternate view (e.g. winter plumage) or how the male and female or juveniles differ.
There are a few pages introducing the book and it’s subject, including a ‘how-to’ for the rather chunky and ugly but immensely enjoyable and intensely fascinating audio player. These pages detail the types of noises birds make and their various functions, and give a brief rundown of basic anatomy and plumage.
Each bird is named firstly in large type by the common English name, and then under that by its Latin name, in smaller type. One of the only things about the book that puzzled me is the seemingly random order in which they’re presented. But apparently the book “follows standard scientific taxonomy and classification, listing species in order of genetic relationship”.
Under the name, each bird is described succinctly in four or five brief fact-filled paragraphs. related to this is my only criticism of the book (which I note other reviewers elsewhere have also made): a separate index of the audio clips would have been a good idea. As the book stands you have to use the index to locate the bird, and then from the page given, discover the number of the clip/s you’re trying to listen to.
But the positives far outweigh this one small criticism, and this rather odd book-cum-audio-resource is certainly living up to my hopes for information rich rewards: on first sitting down with it, after half an hour of checking out various of the audio samples (it’s such fun!), I immediately learned that Robins belong to the ‘chats and thrushes’ (which was news to me), and that they’re unusual in that the females are almost as vociferous as the males. And, rather fascinatingly, I learned that there is regional variation amongst birdsong and calls, in other words an avian equivalent of dialect or accent!
This would be a good book just on account of the visual and written content. But it is of course, as the title suggests, all about the wonderful sounds these exquisite creatures (the sole-surviving direct descendants of the dinosaurs, no less: apparently there were even, at one one time, creatures with four wings!) make. The audio element is fantastic, providing hours of enchantment, fascination and fun. We’re really chiff-chaff-chuffed with this delightful if unusual techno-tome.
PS – If, like us, you have a cat, your interest might be shared by your furry friend/s: ours came over to investigate, and was clearly perplexed, although I won’t lie and say he actually pawed over it as we pored over it.