|
 |
 |
|||
                    |
 |
 Featured in Print and RadioNPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Understanding Birdsong -- and its Fans. 3/29/2005 "Donald Kroodsma is a renowned specialist in the interpretation of bird songs. His new book, The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong, describes how birds communicate and why. But Kroodsma is also the subject of another book -- about those who listen to birds. Birdsong, by Don Stap, details the work and passions of people who analyze the sounds of birds. Stap followed Kroodsma from the lab into the field to write his account of the researcher at work. . . ." Audubon Magazine. The Sound of Music. March 2005. For a good read about Kroodsma's adventures with black-capped chickadees, see an excerpt from Don Stap's book Birdsong, as published in the March 2005 issue of Audubon Magazine. See also the web exclusive on The Singing Life of Birds, from Audubon Magazine, in an article entitled "The Oldest Music". Go here to understand the power of seeing songs as you listen. WICN Public Radio. New England's Jazz & Folk Station. "When my baby walks down the street, all the birdies go: Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!" And this weeks' guest knows exactly why. We spend a wild hour with professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Donald Kroodsma, who has studied birdsong for more than thirty years. Why do birds sing? How many different songs can they sing? What can a bird's song tell us about behavior, evolution and geography? You will be surprised and delighted to find out just some of the answers to these questions. Don has written one of the best, most enthusiastic and enlightening books about how real science is done titled, "The Singing Life of Birds." You will never listen to that robin chirping on your lawn the same way again.
During this hour-long interview with Donald Kroodsma, you'll hear samples of various bird songs from White-Crowned Sparrows to Mockingbirds and Chickadees to Brown Thrashers. To better understand the patterns and subtle harmonic differences in the various bird species, its helpful to view sonagrams of their songs as they're being discussed. Below are the names of each of the bird species covered in the interview. Click on the names to view sonagrams of their respective songs.
[At the WICN website for Inquiry, you can click on the following species names and see the beautiful sonagrams that have been reproduced from the book. If you listen to the interview, you can match the songs with the sonagrams. Or, better yet, just go buy the book. It's so inexpensive!] Entertainment Weekly. 3/25/2005. The Birds and the Bees. By Gilbert Cruz. Spring might be just around the corner, but that sound in the air is not a blue jay's sweet chirp. It's a bunch of exasperated book editors. This month and next, threecount em, threetitles on birdsong will hit stores. While it's no easy task to make a single book on avian bio-acoustics stand out, it's even harder when you're not alone. Lisa White, editor of birdsong scholar Donald Kroodsma's The Singing Life of Birds (Houghton Mifflin, $28) chalks it up to coincidence. Kroodsma and another bird expert are even characters in Don Staps Birdsong (Scribner, $24), but David Rothenberg's Why Birds Sing (Basic, $26) offers more direct competition for serious bird fanciers . . . Listen at
http://www.birderblog.com/?v=04-20-05 Laura: "Monday, I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Don Kroodsma, author of The Singing Life of Birds. The interview lasted over 40 minutes. I'm excerpting it this week on ''For the Birds,'' and next week will post the entire interview. I'm editing it to add the bird songs we're talking about. I'm no Terry Gross, but you may enjoy listening!" Visit this web site to hear several interviews on the following topics: USA TODAY Three birdsong experts chirp up This spring brings an unusual bounty of books about birdsongs -- well, three new ones, anyway. If a bird has sung it, there's a good chance it's in The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong by Donald Kroodsma (Houghton Mifflin, $28). "Somewhere, always, the sun is rising, and somewhere, always, the birds are singing," writes Kroodsma, who won the American Ornithologists' Union Elliott Coues Award in 2003, naming him the "reigning authority on the biology of avian vocal behavior." His 482-page book includes a CD of birdsongs. Birdsong: A Natural History by Don Stap (Scribner, $24). As part of his research, Stap, an English professor at the University of Central Florida, follows the aforementioned Kroodsma, as well as Greg Budney of Cornell University's Library of Natural Sounds, in an effort to unravel why birds sing and what the songs mean. Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song by David Rothenberg (Basic Books, $26). "The humble question, Why do birds sing? forces us to reconsider what music is and where it comes from," writes Rothenberg, a philosopher and jazz musician. Rothenberg bases some of the answers on his own observations from playing the clarinet with birds. Listen in at www.whybirdssing.com. The Leonard Lopate Show This week, our regular Please Explain feature is for the birds. We'll find out why birds sing, and what they're communicating with their songs. Don Kroodsma, author of The Singing Life of Birds, gives us some insight on our feathered friends. Kojo Nnamdi show, WAMU, 88.5fm. How do baby birds learn to sing? Do birds have regional accents or dialects? A researcher who has studied birds for more than thirty years explains how and why birds sing, and what we can learn by better understanding their songs. Guest: Donald Kroodsma, author "The Singing Life of Birds" (Houghton Mifflin) Voice of America, with Rosanne Skirble, May 2005 Book Clubs! Three book clubs (part of Bookspan) have selected The Singing Life of Birds to offer to their members: first, as a main selection of the Discovery Channel Book Club, and then, as an alternate in both the History Book Club and in the Quality Paperback Book Club. New Hampshire Public Radio--The Exchange, with Laura Knoy The Singing Life of Birds What do birds sing, why and what does it mean? We'll explore those questions with author and scientist Donald Kroodsma. His new book "The Singing Life of Birds" explains how birds acquire their songs, what makes them unique, and how they evolve. We will also take a listen to actual recordings of some familiar and not so familiar bird songs throughout the show. Birder's World Concluding paragraph: VOICE OF AMERICA Excerpt: Wisconsin Public Radio's "Calling All Pets" Radio Expeditions Excerpts from introductory web text: "Don Kroodsma has studied the songs of birds for 30 years and is recognized as the reigning authority on the biology of bird vocal behavior. . . . His field of study may be unique, but the way he goes about his research is equally unique -- Kroodsma tours the continent on his bicycle, collecting bird songs along the way. He biked completely across the nation once in 2003, and last year biked from the Atlantic shore to the Mississippi, lugging his recording equipment with him. In the latest report for the NPR/National Geographic co-production Radio Expeditions, Elizabeth Arnold profiles perhaps the most prolific collector of birdsong in America. Kroodsma has listened to and recorded bird songs from Virginia to California, and constantly adds to his birdsong library back home in Massachusetts, where he's professor emeritus of biology at the University of Massachusetts. "There is no better way to hear a continent sing than by bicycle," Kroodsma says. "You can read the minds of these birds if you simply listen... Riding a bike is just a great way to hear birds." . . . "There's this wonderful Zen parable," he says. "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." Ottawa Citizen Excerpts: "Dare I say it all comes down to sex?" asks Donald Kroodsma, a University of Massachusetts professor emeritus who has been wondering for 30 years why birds sing. In April, he released his masterwork, The Singing Life of Birds . . . About 30 years ago, everyone assumed birds mated, had babies and that was it. But then a researcher was astonished to find that female redwing blackbirds paired with sterilized males still laid fertile eggs. The ladies had been stepping out. Now, it is widely accepted that, in many species, a female will pair with one male, but mate with many. It complicates the dating scene considerably. Advances in recording and sound graphs or spectrograms, have led to the new field of bioacoustics, allowing researchers to zero in on animals' vocalizations, such as whale calls and, of course, bird songs and what they might mean. Song birds use their calls in an incredibly intricate daily negotiation of hierarchy. In North America, it is usually the males singing back and forth, riffing on one another like rappers, interrupting each other, copying each other. "Our best guess is that there is a lot going on in dawn chorus, a hierarchy being established among males, and females are listening to these interactions and making mating decisions based on what they hear," says Kroodsma. . . . EarthWatch Radio "Singing Competition" "Learning to Sing" "The Sound of Biodiversity" "Beaks with a Beat" Buffalo News The Singing Life of Birds is featured as one of "The Best New Nature Books for Summer Reading" The Wild Side News. The Voice of the Earth (wsradio.com) Web text introduction: "Ever wanted to learn how to listen to birds? Well, Dr. Donald Kroodsma gives you a whole new way of looking at the art of listening to birdcalls. We go in-depth to discover how the reality of bird life and communication can help you better learn how to become familiar with the calls and songs of the birds in your life. His approach is a bit different than some may suggest. But the benefits will be well worth taking the time to practice these habits of listening and seeing." New York Times NAME THAT TUNE -- Learn more about birds by exploring their songs. Donald Kroodsma's ''The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong'' (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) raises questions, like whether birdsongs are encoded in DNA and why male birds typically do the singing. With a CD of birdsongs. |
||
|
|
|
