A Field Guide to Backyard Bird Song : Eastern and Central North America

Rating:
Summary: An excellent starter
Review: This CD lives up to the high quality standards of the Peterson Field Guide series and is a marvelous introduction to bird songs. I have taught ornithology courses for a number of years and this is the CD I recommend to my students.

To anyone just discovering the joys of birding, visual identification of birds can be overwhelming with over 650 species found in North America alone. If visual identification is difficult, audio identification can be nearly impossible.

BACKYARD BIRD SONG comes to the rescue by focusing the listener's attention on 28 of the most common backyard birds. Learning these songs and calls will boost your confidence and enable you to identify nearly all of the birds you hear on a daily basis. The recordings are grouped into categories of similar sounds such as "sing-songers" and "whistlers." This clustering facilitates comparisons of potentially confusing bird vocalizations.

The CD's one down side is that you cannot go directly to the song of a given bird. You are limited to selecting a song grouping and then waiting for the desired bird.