The distinctive and amazing songs and calls of birds: a meditation and a lexicon.“A miraculous little book: a compressed encyclopedia of our fascination with avifauna.”
—The Nation
“A charming, funny, and eccentric book.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“An elegant tribute to the beauty of its subject.”
—Los Angeles Times
Birds sing and call, sometimes in complex and beautiful arrangements of notes, sometimes in one-line repetitions that resemble a ringtone more than a symphony. Listening, we are stirred, transported, and even envious of birds'' ability to produce what Shelley called “profuse strains of unpremeditated art.” And for hundreds of years, we have tried to write down what we hear when birds sing. Poets have put birdsong in verse (Thomas Nashe: “Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo”) and ornithologists have transcribed bird sounds more methodicall
