Elliott, The Songs of Wild Birds

Lang Elliott is among the best and best-known recordists of birdsong in North America. His new book, The Songs of Wild Birds, is a combination of words, images, and often spectacular sounds that will delight and intrigue birders and non-birders alike.

Elliott’s selection of 50 species reveals a distinct eastern bias (could a western volume be in the works?). The handsomely designed book presents each in a dazzling full-page portrait, most by the author, some by other well-known photographers; in a few cases, small but well-reproduced inset images allow visual comparison with similar species.

The short texts facing the photographs provide a general description of the bird’s appearance or habits and a brief analysis of one or the other of its vocalizations, accompanied by large-format sonograms (here spelled uniformly “sonagram”). The most effective and appealing of these essays are the most anecdotal, where Elliott enthusiastically describes his own experiences and impressions gathered in recording the vocalizations. Unfortunately, at least one of the essays (p. 52) appears to have been ghostwritten, and sloppily at that–or is the author really in the habit of referring to himself in the third person as “world-famous bird expert Lang Elliott”? I hope not.

A couple of the species essays also play a bit fast and a bit loose with history. Twice the author rehearses, uncritically, the canard about Benjamin Franklin and the Wild Turkey, a story that I had thought long past the need for debunking. If memory serves, the owl that Bourke describes riding on the saddle horn of one of General Crook’s soldiers in Sonora was in fact a screech-owl; I certainly wouldn’t let the talons of a Great Horned Owl anywhere near my pommel. And Bryant did not invent the name “Bobolink,” already attested a century before the fireside poet’s reedbird spinked and spanked its way into American classrooms.

Such quibbles are quickly forgotten at the first sounds from the audio cd accompanying the book. Engagingly narrated by the author, the songs, calls, and mechanical sounds of the birds range from the beautiful to the strange. I particularly enjoyed the eery “quartet” performed by trilling Eastern Screech-Owls; the juxtaposition of eastern and western Winter Wren vocalizations is extremely informative and useful, as are the illustrations of dialect differences in White-crowned Sparrows. I’m less certain just what is to be immediately learned from the slowed-down versions of the songs of Grasshopper and Henslow’s Sparrows, but in their otherworldly strangeness these sequences are indeed eye-openers, or ear-openers, reminding us that there is often much more going on in birdsong than the merely human ear can fathom.

Who will enjoy this book? Easier to pose the question in the negative: Who wouldn’t? And the answer: No one I can think of.