A comprehensive field guide that uses an innovative Sound Index to
allow readers to quickly identify unfamiliar songs and calls of birds in
western North America.
Bird songs and calls are at least as important as visual field marks in
identifying birds. Yet short of memorizing each bird's repertoire, it's
difficult to sort through them all. Now, with the western edition of
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 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 that are likely
to be confused because of the similarity of their songs. Readers can
then turn to the species account for more information and/or listen to
the accompanying audio tracks available online.
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.