Bird Watching Books, CDs, Courses & Cool Products

Re: Which Bird Songs CD is best?

Dragonflyspit — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:50:14 GMT

Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs. There is an eastern and western edition. I have the western edition with 4 CDs with nearly 100 songs per CD. It comes with a small guide to help you find the track for any bird. I use mine constantly. It doesn't really teach you about songs or how to learn songs, but it's the most complete guide of recorded bird vocalizations that I've ever found. If a bird has several vocalizations, the guide tries to cover them all, or at least most of them (other than chip-calls).

The one improvement I wish they'd make is to categorize songs by type in the guide (trills vs. whistles, etc), but I copied all 4 CDs to my laptop and I'm in the process of tagging them that way for easy reference when I hear a bird that I'm clueless about.

I used to have a field guide on cassette tape, Peterson's or Audubon's, if I remember right, and it taught the types of calls and how to describe them, which was very helpful in learning, but not very helpful in the field.

Re: Which Bird Songs CD is best?

luv2bird — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:51:25 GMT

Whatbird has the "Hearbirds" learning course available on CD for $38, or an annual subscription rate of $24.95 per month at http://www.whatbird.com/store/p-33-hearbirds-course.aspx Funny you posted this topic. I looked on Amazon and eBay for used CD's but the balance wasn't less than $20 after shipping. I download the sounds from enature or elsewhere onto my PC then replay them before I go on outings to refresh my memory on the bird calls for the region I'll visit. Audubon members like to play them in thier cars traveling to and from but I find it distracting personally from actually hearing the REAL birds. Some people I know use the iPod recordings for pishing, but I don't personally, but sometimes I whistle.

Re: Which Bird Songs CD is best?

DoityBoid — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:54:58 GMT

I just got the Stokes' Eastern Region CDs. I had bought my wife an iPod Touch (since her old iPod Shuffle finally died) and decided to put the Stokes' CDs on it using BirdJam software I bought at the same time.

I love that we now have a picture, text and a few calls for each bird handy like this for when we are out in the field.

Re: Which Bird Songs CD is best?

thekiwi — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 01:22:41 GMT

Petersons is pretty good

try here under the audio link

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/peterson/petersonhome.cfm

Re: Which Bird Songs CD is best?

natureboy — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:19:41 GMT

i'm sure its good enough although i'm not familiar with it. i think my friend has a Peterson's (not sure of the name, it may be a Nat Geo) CD and it is pretty good as well. each track has the birds grouped into related species. the only thing not so good about it is that there may be 10-15 species' songs on one track, so if you want to listen to a certain one, you may have to go through several minutes of songs first.

Which Bird Songs CD is best?

Jello5700 — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 18:42:45 GMT

Birding by Ear: Eastern and Central North America or Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs: Eastern Region?

Next week im taking a family vacation to Myrtle Beach, SC from Indianapolis so I'll have 12+ hours in the car. So I thought it would be fun to learn to ID birds by there calls. Does anyone have experience with these CD's and which one do you recommend?