Listening to a Continent Sing. Birdsong by Bicycle from the Atlantic to the Pacific
Donald Kroodsma
Princeton University Press | 2016
336 pp. | 16 x 24 cm | 125 line illustrations
Hardcover | £22.95 / $29.95 | ISBN: 9780691166810
Listening
to a Continent Sing documents a ten-week cycle trip made by Don
Kroodsma and his son David across the USA from the Atlantic to the
Pacific – east to west against the wind in order to best take
advantage of the advancing season – “
lingering and listening to our
continent sing as no one has before”. A taste of the
coast-to-coast journey, made during the summer of 2003, can be found
in the NPR clip
Searching
Out 'The Singing Life of Birds', recorded a couple of years after
the trip. The author's pure joy, his sense of wonder and curiosity,
combined with scientific rigour, so evident in Elizabeth Arnold's
interview, are qualities that infuse the resulting book. The text
takes the from of a travelogue, but it is more immediately an
exploration of rural back routes, a celebration of nature, and a
wonderful appreciation of bird song. As a travel diary, it is an easy
and entertaining read. But for those who want to take the subject
further the book serves as an introduction to learning bird song: the
QR codes sprinkled throughout link to 381 recordings that really
bring the trip to life and are a great way for the reader to gain
familiarity with some of North America's finest songsters. This and
much more material is provided on the author's Listening to a Continent Sing
companion website. A handful of recordings
make up an audio archive documenting some of the characters that the
cyclists met
en route and their relationship with birds:
family store owner
Charles
Haupt on his Purple Martins in Charles City, Virginia, bubbly
Park Naturalist
Terry Owens on the avian delights of Breaks Interstate Park, far
western Virginia, or
Rev.
James R. Love on his local birds (maintaining that birds sing
because they are happy) in Eastview, Kentucky.
Listening to a Continent Sing will be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in the
outdoors, by cyclists (David Kroodsma is himself an experienced
cyclist and author of
The
Bicycle Diaries), and above all by birders. I have only just
begin reading the book, but I already suspect that it will turn out
to be one of the outstanding popular bird books of the year.
***
 |
| Don Kroodsma at work in the Mérida Andes. Photo: Don Kroodsma |
I first met Don
Kroodsma in 1995 when he had quickly acquired a reputation as an
eccentric
gringo professor studying, together with student
Viviana Salas, endemic Mérida Wren
Cistothorus
meridae, a scarce bird restricted to a tiny range in the
Venezuelan Andes. This species was a key target for visiting birders
and was not all that well known ecologically, so I was surprised to
find that Don knew so much about the population at the head of the
Santo Domingo valley: where to find them, how many territories there
were (over a dozen!), and of course how many songs formed the
repertoire of each male... He was a fount of
fascinating
information on the species – and one of his tips helped us
obtain superb views of the bird, which can be a tricky business when
the weather is inclement.
A year or two
later, I was lucky enough to be invited to take a Cornell LNS bird
sound workshop with Don, Greg Budney and Dave Ross at the joint
ABA/AFO conference in Costa Rica. Their combined experience was
formidable and really got me hooked on professional sound recording
(prior to that I had been using a cheap and inadequate Sony video
microphone feeding into a budget dictaphone).
Being taught by one of
the world’s experts in bird vocalisations together with one of the
premier recordists was a real privilege. On our field trip to Tipantí
National Park we were accompanied by a friend of Don’s, the late
Dave Stemple (husband of children’s author Janet Yolen), with whom
I was later to spend a lot of time recording bird songs and through
whom I kept in contact with Don.
In 1998 I was
able to repay Don for his efforts in teaching the workshop, when,
while living in Managua, I noticed that the Three-wattled Bellbirds
Procnias tricarunculatus of the Nicaraguan highlands sang very
differently to their
Costa Rican relatives that I knew fairly well. I
suspected that Don might be interested in this, and through Dave, I
was able to send Don some extended sound recordings of the Nicaraguan
birds, which helped him
document
song learning in a suboscine passerine. This exciting discovery
is described in Don Stap's
Birdsong.
A Natural History.
Over the years I have kept up with Don’s research – he is, after
all, an authority in the field of bird song and his discoveries
demand to be read by anyone with an interest in bird vocalisations. I
was able to procure a copy of the superb
The
Singing Life of Birds and occasionally come across radio
interviews. Another NPR interview, with Terry Gross,
Understanding
Birdsong — and Its Fans was made on the launch of The Singing
Life of Birds. A useful
2009
interview in the ABA's Birding magazine contains plenty more
links to cuts of North American birds.
“There’s this wonderful Zen parable. If you listen to the
thrush and hear a thrush, you’ve not really heard the thrush. But
if you listen to a thrush and hear a miracle, then you’ve heard the
thrush.”
