Changes

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

|author=Simon Barnes

|borrow=Yes

|isbn=978-1907595479

|pages=288

|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.

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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.

The book is accompanied by a podcast of around 30 minutes of birdsong, and it is this that really does the business, with a recording of each bird preceded by a brief intro from Simon Barnes. Clearly it's intended to be replayed often enough to become familiar with sixty-six different tunes. On a first hearing, I found this a difficult task, with several species indistinguishable to my uncertain ears, but I have hopes that this sad lack of discrimination will improve if I listen more often.

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