Review – Birdsong by the Seasons: A Year of Listening to Birds

Donald Kroodsma’s follow up to The Singing Life of Birds provides much of the same song learning techniques but with an easier read. Birdsong by the Seasons: A Year of Listening to Birds has 24 stories that follow the calendar year with tales straight from the field.

 

All of the 24 accounts are fascinating and fun to read but a few favorites stand out: “A Prairie Dawn on our Pawnee National Grassland” with all its prairie goodness and “The Flight Calls of Nocturnal Migrants” which has information on the sounds migrating birds make. I remember how thrilling it was to be woken in the middle of the night from the mysterious noise of hundreds (thousands?) of migrating birds, but not knowing what they were.

Included with Birdsong by the Seasons: A Year of Listening to Birds are two CDs with 126 total tracks that are referenced throughout the text.

Both Birdsong by the Seasons: A Year of Listening to Birds and The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong are essential tools to understanding birdsong and for learning how to train your ears to listen.

Birdsong by the Seasons: A Year of Listening to Birds
Donald Kroodsma
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2009
ISBN-13: 978-0618753369

Disclosure: we were given a copy of this wonderful book by the publisher to review. However, we were not persuaded to say or do anything other than give an honest review, which we have.