Every spring, during migration bird-watching season, I pull a bird book off my shelf, and this year it was BIRDSONG. Even as I've become more adept at identifying birds through visual cues, I'm still stumped by their songs, with only a few exceptions. I can't say that this book helped me with that problem in any practical sense, but it did inspire me to check into the works of birdsong expert Don Kroodsma, the main character in Stap's story. I also enjoyed the chance to follow Kroodsma and his fellow scientists and enthusiasts into the field to study the language of birds and what it might mean.

I was fascinated from the moment I started reading this book. It isn’t what I expected, but I also didn’t really know what to expect and was open to go on the journey (journeys) it took me on. One other review I saw said this book is much more about scientists than birds, but I think it’s both. I loved reading about the long hours of field research getting up before sunrise and standing still in the wild recording bird after bird, song after song, gathering evidence sometimes for scientific purposes, but also for the love of it and the interest and fascination of learning whether a specific species of bird (in this case a bellbird) was learning it’s song or whether it was born with it. This book was a very interesting and sometimes wild ride, and I was sucked into it more than I ever expected to be. I don’t know if this is a book for everyone, but I’m grateful to have come across it at my local library and started to read it standing in the aisle. I learned something about myself, and that’s worth it.
I think my 4 star rating is arbitrary because I got something out of this book that I don’t believe most people will, and many may be bored by it. Oh well. I would have given it another star if it came with recordings of the bird songs that were talked about in the pages of this book. I looked them up myself, but I often do not agree with the way people transcribe the sounds of bird calls and songs.
For instance when I hear a Chickadee’s fee-bee call it sounds much more like ‘me too’. I absolutely don’t hear anything that sounds like ‘hey, sweetie’.

part biography, part journalistic foray, part science narrative, this book describes some of the history of the study of bird song and how we found out much of it is learned from a first-person perspective.

Stap focuses on Kroodsma’s meticulous and reverent dedication to documenting bird songs from different regions and different species. this researcher even pioneered raising chicks of various species in the lab to help prove whether or not their songs are culturally learned or hardwired in their neurosystems. Stap delves into the science of bioacoustics just enough to explain what’s going on but keeps the story moving with biographical and historical moments.

he ends the book with almost a diary of field work that sought to find evidence for suboscine song learning in the bellbirds of Costa Rica. the passerine or perching song birds are subdivided into the oscines and the suboscines. the oscines are know to learn their songs and change them. they do not sing from a hardwired archive but the suboscines do. however, according to Stap, Kroodsma has intriguing evidence to the contrary but hadn’t published it at the time of this book’s release.

on an aesthetic note, i liked this book but, then, i find this topic fascinating and so am probably a bit biased. the writing was clear but the storytelling was a bit muddy and the last few chapters of the book felt a little bit like filler as Spat unwound the tale of the the bellbird search with perhaps a little too much detail. definitely a good read if you find this kind of thing interesting but don’t want to wade through a scientific manual, handbook, or published research articles.

Made me love birdsong. I fear for the day when my hearing is lost and I can no longer hear them sing.

This book has a number of fascinating facts and a number of interesting field observations and other ornithological incidents, but on the whole, its odd and unrewarding episodic nature is disappointing. But that is not why I don't recommend reading it.

Here's why: I am appalled at the bland manner with which the author reveals the atrocities that ornithologists commit in the name of research: castrating songbirds in order to determine whether testosterone affects their urge to sing; surgically deafening songbirds to study whether their song is instinctual or learned; and raising birds from infancy in isolation in order to see what they might sing or whether they sing at all. These sickened me.

The author reports these "experiments" without comment, apparently unaware that most readers will be people who are birders who respect the natural world and its denizens, particularly birds, or, worse, utterly unaware that such "research" might be repellent to anyone who is not "blinded by science."

The author knows how to write, but his traveling company and judgment leave all to be desired.

Birdsong seems to be one of those things that divides people into two categories - those who think it's quite nice, often quite attractive, and those that really, REALLY like it. If you fall into the first category, reading the accounts of people in the second category can leave you feeling a little more ambivalent than you were before: if I'm not a truly devoted fan like these people, am I a fan at all? I guess it's a better obsession to have than some - gets you up early, out in the fresh morning air, and (at least if you're not listening to zebra finches) birdsong is often very beautiful. Beats trainspotting.

Still, I'm a little unsure of what to make of this book, written by an English professor about the study of birdsong in general, and the work of Prof Don Kroodsma in particular. There's a little bit of structure to it, and an awful lot of information about a variety of aspects of the vocalisations of songbirds, including their evolution, learning styles, and study in the laboratory, but mostly it seems to revolve around the author relating stories of following Kroodsma about on early mornings in various locales of North & Central America. These can be quite interesting, and are certainly revealing, interesting portraits of a very driven scientist (one whose work, particularly more theoretical stuff on how to construct experiments and write about science, I'm quite familiar with), but overall... I'm not sure that it really deserves its title.

Quite close to being satisfying, but not quite getting there.

Not for everyone non-fiction. Having been involved in field work, I really enjoyed the adventures of ornithologist Don Kroodsma thru Central America looking for and recording songs of rare and disappearing birds. As a bonus, Google 'three-wattle bellbird' videos to hear his most astounding song and looks. They are disappearing as forest around them is being cut for farming.