Hitting the Right Note

A review by Caitlin Kight

A Sweet, Wild Note: What We Hear When the Birds Sing, by Richard Smyth

Elliott and Thompson, 2017

208 pages—softcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 14983

Between my sophomore and junior years in college, I worked as a field ornithologist for the Institute for Bird Populations (IBP). I had been a lifelong lover and watcher of birds, and though I could already identify most East Coast birds by sight, this three-month job, with a wonderful mentor and many hours of practice, changed my relationship with birds by letting me add birdsong identification to my repertoire. Now, as a birdsong researcher and perpetual birder, I have found that the knowledge I gained back then has permanently altered the way I interact with the environment around me: Everywhere I go, I hear familiar avian voices, and I understand much of what they are saying. It is magical.

This magic, and the different ways that people discover it and try to capture it, is at the heart of Richard Smyth’s A Sweet, Wild Note: What We Hear When the Birds Sing. In his prologue, Smyth establishes that he was once like me as I was before that wondrous summer of netting birds for IBP; in his words, he was “shut out of the birds’ conversation.” A Sweet, Wild Note examines what you lack before being initiated into the world of avian vocalizations—and how much you gain once you begin to understand what you are hearing. 

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