Driving the Cat Crazy

By M. John Fayhee

Bird Songs from Around the World by Les Beletsy. (Chronicle Books, 2007. 368 pages. ISBN: 1-932855-61-0. $45)

When any outdoor-oriented person thinks in terms of technological improvements to a given activity, thoughts naturally wander towards tech-heavy pursuits such as backpacking, bicycling and kayaking. You’d be forgiven if you did not automatically include birding in that list, except that birders certainly do utilize backpacks, bikes and kayaks. But in actuality, in the past few years, birding has benefited from two distinct trends: one technological, one demographic.

Second one first. It is interesting to a great many of us who are 1) achieving a certain degree of long-toothedness and 2) have spent our entire lives out in the backcountry to watch what is happening to the sociology of outdoor recreation as the Baby Boomers limp their way toward decrepitude. Multi-day backpacking trips into the wilderness, for instance, are free-falling, while day-hiking, fly-fishing and groomed-trail cross-country skiing (to say nothing of–ugh!–golf) numbers rise.

One of the other outdoor activities that has seen an increase in participation as more active Boomers become eligible for AARP is birding (nee bird-watching … more on that nomenclatural distinction here in a minute). Despite its eccentric, fuddy-duddy image, birding as an activity requires serious effort and expertise and affords the opportunity for exercise, travel, camaraderie and measurable achievement. It can certainly be done in a more laid-back fashion. You want nothing more than to identify a couple tweety-clones in your backyard or along your favorite trail? Cool. But if you want to plan every vacation of your life around the pursuit of Birds of Paradise and Quetzals, then you can also set yourself up for tromping through the mountainous jungles of Indonesia and Central America.

Either way, technology has a lot to do with birding’s recent increase in popularity. In the past several years, bird call/song recording databases have grown more complete, while the ability to translate those recordings into the field via MP3 and iPod technology has grown exponentially.

Which gets us to the first nomenclatural distinction. Even areas aggressively marketing themselves to tourists as areas of avian interest still sometimes use the term “bird-watching.” But, as any birder will tell you, though eyeballs play a major role in the process of adding species identification to one’s life list, the ears play an even larger role. Thus, the more accurate term “birding.” I have heard vociferous arguments between those who espouse using “birding” and those who go for “bird-watching.” As I live in a very popular birding area, I’ll go with what most people around here say.

Forever and ever, birders have had to rely solely on often organizationally challenged printed guidebooks and the assistance of other birders in hopes of making an honest and accurate identification of a given species. But when it came to the audible identification of birds — which often form the only contact a person in the field will have with a given bird/bird species — human faux vocalizations/mimics of their calls and songs have served as the be-all, end-all.

With MP3s and iPods, however, birders can not only take their dusty field printed guidebooks into the bush, they can bring entire vocalization databases too. This, of course, provides no identification guarantees. You hear a call or a song, and it might take some time to go through the appropriate sections on your iPod to attach a species to that sound, but you can definitely work the other way: If you’re looking for a Yellowbellied Roadpecker, then you can first familiarize yourself with the Roadpecker’s myriad songs and calls.

MP3 technology met more traditional birding tools a couple years back when Washington State-based birder-extraordinaire Les Beletsky released Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds in Song to rave reviews, including a thumbs up from O: The Oprah Magazine. That book was in and of itself a masterpiece that included the usual written descriptions of individual birds, their habits and habitats. In addition, the book contained an audio player that included the songs from all the birds described therein. (OK, second nomenclatural distinction: According to Beletsky, bird “songs” are vocalizations, first, limited to songbirds, and second, longer, more melodic vocalizations, while “calls” are typically briefer and non-musical. An inference is drawn that songs are to birds just what they are to humans, while calls are more prosaic, such as warning your buddy about the approaching cat.)

Based on the success of his North American book, Beletsky again joined creative forces with San Francisco publisher Chronicle Books, this time to produce the recently released Bird Songs from around the World. In addition to boasting narrative descriptions of 200 birds divided up by continent, this work includes stunning artistic depictions of each species. But what separates the book from other similar works is, again, the fact that it contains an integral audio player. Each bird description is numbered, and all you have to do to hear the call of, for instance, the Two-Barred Crossbill is punch in 092, and you’ve got yourself a recording of a male Two-Barred Crossbill’s song during breeding season, presumably proclaiming, “I know where all the best grub places are, I’m well hung, I’ve got colorful plumage, a nice nesting site, and I just want to get laid! PLEASE!!!”

The sound is good enough (and this is where things get amusing, especially if you’ve been smoking dope) that any proximate house cats will be sufficiently driven bananas trying to locate the singing bird, which, in and of itself, is worth the cover price.

“The biggest thing was selecting which birds to include,” Beletsky said. “There are 10,000 species of birds in the world. I wanted to pick a representative group that did not only include the most colorful and exotic birds. But, since we were going to do artistic renditions, we wanted birds that were visually appealing.”

Beletsky says his book is not a field guide per se.

“It is too big and bulky, and it does not include enough species from any given area to be a truly useful tool in the field,” he said. “It’s more of a coffee table book, one that people can visually enjoy and that has the added bonus of the songs.”

During the species-choosing part of the creative process, Beletsky only chose species that were included in the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which maintains recordings of more than 160,000 sounds, including 67-percent of the world’s birds. So, it was like that limited factor was real limiting.

Like its North American predecessor, Bird Songs from around the World has received rave reviews, and that popularity has translated in yet another book contract for Beletsky from Chronicle. He is now working on a more complete version of his Bird Songs of North America. The sequel, he says, will include 750 species — almost everything with wings between Darien Gap and Baffin Island.

As far as sites Beletsky recommends for birders to interface with all manner of bid-based skinny are the American Birding Association’s www.abasales.com and Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s shop, www.birds.cornell.edu/shop.