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 About the Author
DONALD KROODSMA, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, has studied birdsong for more than thirty years. He was recognized as the "reigning authority on avian vocal behavior" in the citation for his 2003 Elliott Coues Award from the American Ornithologists' Union. He has edited three scholarly volumes on the field of acoustic communication among birds, and authored more than one hundred articles in both scholarly journals and popular magazines such as Auk, Condor, Birder's World, Living Bird, and Natural History. Kroodsma is a sought-after speaker on bird vocalizations. Kroodsma majored in chemistry in college and discovered birds in a local Michigan marsh during his last semester. That summer he went to the University of Michigan field station in Pellston, taking beginning and advanced ornithology courses simultaneously. From there he traveled cross-country to Oregon State University for graduate school, where a singing wren in his backyard got him started on a lifelong passion for listening to birds. The Singing Life of Birds is Kroodsma's first full-length book. Read about the author in the Hampshire Life section of the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Kroodsma's hometown newspaper in western Massachusetts: So the story begins: For 30-some years now, Don Kroodsma has led a curious, clandestine life. He's crept from the house in the early morning to clamber onto the roof, armed with Rube Goldberg-like contraptions that look like they belong in a sci-fi movie. Other times he's headed out of town and driven for miles and miles. Then he's set up recorders, cables and microphones, and lurked, for hours on end, in some godforsaken marsh. Once, on Martha's Vineyard, the police showed up, prompted by calls from islanders worried about the odd stranger toting what appeared to be a shotgun. But Kroodsma, all of the above notwithstanding, hasn't been operating in some shadowy underworld. Just the opposite. He's been studying songbirds, of all things. . . . "What's that you said?" asked the Zen master. "You say you've heard dozens of birds sing? Ah, but have you heard the bird or the label? If you listen to a thrush and hear a thrush, you have not really heard the thrush. But if you listen to a thrush and hear a miracle, then you've heard the thrush." |
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