Awesome Book: The Backyard Birdsong Guide

Last year on a trip to Costco I found an amazing book, The Backyard Birdsong Guide: A Guide to Listening by Donald Kroodsma. The book not only provides pictures and details for 75 different birds across North America, but also comes with a small little digital audio module that stores over 125 sounds provided by the Macaulay Library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Looking through this wonderfully interactive book has enabled me to identify the calls of dozens of birds in my neighborhood and throughout California. I have found myself feeling so much more in touch with my surroundings than ever before, and in a new and exciting three-dimensional way.

As I write this I am sitting on my back porch. Day-light savings is still messing me up a bit, but today I have a day off from work and school, and I'm enjoying the slow, overcast dawn. I can tell that spring is right around the corner, not because of the weather, but because of the flood of sound coming from every direction around me. I can hear California towhees and their single Tsip notes, spotted towhees and their Zhreeeee calls, the thick caws of the resident crows, interrupted by the twists and turns of the Anna's hummingbirds' bzzbzzbzz bzzbzzbzz dynamic songs.

In my graduate class on math instruction, I've been learning how to teach Number Talks to my students, a fun way to help them develop their number sense. With regular Number Talks students begin noticing mathematically-related patterns everywhere, not just in school, and makes math a part of their everyday, problem solving mind. The Backyard Birdsong Guide has essentially had the same effect on me but by given me a better bird sense. I am conscious of them always now, and when I hear a call that I recognize, I feel as though I know a secret about my surroundings and it gives me an awesome thrill.

I feel as though I'm surrounded by an incredible slough of neighbors I was never before aware of. By noticing what is around me, by learning where some calls come from more than others, my understanding for how these incredible animals live and socialize has taken on new shape, and their lives and struggles has become that much more important to me. As I listen to the vibrat vocal stylings of the sparrows and chickadees coming from the giant oak tree next to me, I can't help but think of their struggle to compete for a mate to help them carry on their bloodline. The Great Competition for Survival. It sends my mind in far-reaching directions... Each leaf of the tree they perch and sing from competing for sunlight, each root competing for water, photosynthesis producing the oxygen I breathe in right now, the incredible cyclical balance of nature...how precious.

As I wrote that last paragraph I heard a mallard, looked up, and sure enough, saw a lone female making a broad U-turn in the sky, perhaps on her way back to the Lake. How did I know it was a female? Perhaps if she was closer I could tell by her uniform brown coloration, contrast to the males, who bear an iridescent set of royal green around their head and neck. But she was too far up in the sky for me to visually tell her sex. I knew from her calls!



I highly recommend this book to one and all, especially kids that are interested in learning more about the wildlife that surrounds them. It would perhaps be especially exciting for those that don't live in areas with a great deal of nature on a ground level, since there are birds that live nearly everywhere (we just don't think to look up or keep our ears tuned often enough to realize that they're there!). I remember being so excited as a kid to turn over a rock in the backyard and to find pill bugs and earthworms. I know that if I had this book when I was young I would have carried it around everywhere.