Will Birders Ever Learn to “See” Birdsong?

A review by Marky Mutchler

Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America, by Nathan Pieplow

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017

593 pages, $28—softcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 14630

Songs and calls are very important in bird identification, in many cases as useful as the classic visual field marks, but they are often ignored. Nathan Pieplow’s Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America tackles this underused aspect of birding more thoroughly than anyone ever before.

The stunning and colorful cover makes a good first impression. In spite of the complexities of the subject, Bird Sounds is only a tad larger than the small, regional Sibley guides, and one could easily carry it in the field. Overall, the look and feel are similar to the other guides in the Peterson series.

This eastern volume–to be followed, I hope, by its western complement–comprises three main sections: an introduction, the species accounts, and a visual bird sound index. There is also a website, petersonbirdsounds.com, that lets the user hear a specific sound while studying its visual representation—but more on that later.
Introductions tend to be skimmed or completely ignored. It is especially important to take the time to read this one, though. The topic of visualizing sound is foreign to most of us, and there is plenty of new and intriguing information in the 33 pages of introductory material. The reader learns about the several types of sound, how birds create sound, a standard terminology for bird sound, and most importantly, how to read spectrograms. Spectrograms, or sonograms, are a visual graphing of sound, representing frequency on the y-axis and time on the x-axis. Pieplow tackles the learning curve by describing five basic pitch patterns, methods for reading spectrograms like music, and repetition of patterns among other commonly encountered bird sounds. I am relatively well versed in working with spectrograms, but I still found myself learning new things, such as polyphonic sounds and the “stacking” of “partials” (analogous to overtones in human music) to create different sound qualities. The introduction may just be my favorite part of the guide.
Next are the species accounts, making up most of the book. They are laid out similarly to the accounts in traditional field guides, with a lovely painting (most from other Peterson guides) and an inch-square range map showing state and province boundaries. A very brief text summarizes visual field marks and characteristic behaviors.

Needless to say, the accounts’ main focus is on the several spectrograms devoted to each species. Each spectrogram is labeled, sometimes as a “call” or “song,” but more often descriptively, as a “pip,” a “short twitter,” a “chuckle,” a “ka-lip series,” and so on. The accounts indicate the circumstances and times of year when each sound can be heard, and also point out variation within a species, to cover such special matters as the six Red Crossbill call types found in the East. (Pieplow mentions six, but actually treats only Types One through Four and Type Ten; I assume that the sixth, missing type is Type Five, a rare stray to New York.)

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