Picture our planet Earth as dawn’s first light and a burst of birdsong sweep the globe, racing continuously and endlessly from east to west at a clip of a thousand miles per hour, repeating every twenty-four hours. In North America, imagine riding this wave of light and song as it sweeps across eastern forests, the prairies, and western mountains. A few years ago I had the opportunity to ride this wave of birdsong as my son and I biked from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. We began our trip in Virginia in early May and rode along with the crest of the birdsong season to finish in Oregon by mid-July. On the best days, we began biking an hour or two before sunrise, feeling the power of this dawn wave approach and then pass over us.
I love the visual image of a perpetual dawn with an endless promise of a new day, but it is the aural experience that I live for. I rode across the country not with binoculars but with wide-open ears, listening to all the birds had to say, relishing their every peep. As with my human friends, I do enjoy seeing them, but I’m less interested in seeing them than in hearing what is on their minds.
My hope is that you’ll use this book to identify birds by their appearance and also learn how to “bird by ear,” recognizing them by their sounds. But this book is not a mere guide to identifying particular species; no, my goal was to instead create a guide to identifying with birds—to come as close to understanding these amazing creatures as we can by interpreting the way they express themselves in calls and song.
Let me give a human analogy. Suppose you move to a small, friendly town of about a hundred people, and you want to get to know your neighbors. One approach would be to start with a mug shot and voice clip of every person so that each could be identified by sight or sound, maybe even by using binoculars at a distance of a hundred yards. Most of us, however, would find that a rather shallow experience; we might start with some pictures, but very quickly we’d want to move on to more intimate experiences with selected individuals. Maybe we’d linger over a lunch or go for a walk together, all the while truly listening to what is on the mind of each newfound friend. As you come to know these people, never again do you think of identifying a person or of confusing one person with another, because you know him or her so well.
This book reveals the joy in that kind of deep listening to birdsong, of coming to understand birds by how they express themselves—it is a guide to identifying with birds.
