Changes

|title=Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed: an introduction to birdsong

|author=Simon Barnes

|publisher=Short Books Ltd

|date=November 2011

|summary=An interesting variant on the usual birdwatching field guide. There are virtually no illustrations but author Simon Barnes gets up close and personal to the songs of over sixty birds in his text and accompanying podcast. Try it as a great present for a new birdwatcher.

}}

One of my best-ever auditory memories is waking up in a tent to a dawn chorus, sung in the middle of Ireland in spring. It was a high-decibel effort and seemed to involve hundreds of birds. I'm ashamed to say that I couldn't begin to identify the multitude of species I heard that morning. So I suppose I chose this book expecting it to be a field guide that could at long last help me get a handle on birdsong. But it isn't yet another handbook, but a much more interesting book than that, which I thought would make a great present for a new birdwatcher.