Although traveling far and wide to see birds is a passion of many birders, what I find most satisfying is lingering in a favorite place, such as my backyard, and just listening to all that the most common of birds have to say. Perhaps it’s a cardinal who’s singing, and I listen, to hear what is on his mind. Or it may be a titmouse, or robin, or chickadee, or vireo, or blackbird, or any bird, as each tells his life’s story in how he sings. And it is their stories that I want to hear.

“Perhaps it’s a cardinal
who’s singing, and I listen,
to hear what is on his mind.”

In the process of coming to know and understand birds better, I think of a human analogy. Consider your best friends and how well you know them. “Identifying” each one and distinguishing one from another is never a problem because you have come to know each so well. That’s my goal for you with the birds, too, that you get to know a robin so well, for example, that you’d never mistake it for what some have called “robin sound-alikes” (e.g., rose-breasted grosbeak, scarlet tanager). Instead, just as with your human friends, you’ll quickly recognize the robin and then be eager to know what’s on this particular robin’s mind as you listen to him tell you all he knows.

These two books are guides to identifying with birds, based on what the birds themselves have to say. Each guide was 40 years in the making, as I could not have written them without the kind of intense, scientific study of birdsongs that I have enjoyed during my academic career. When the invitation came to join with outstanding artists and with Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology to produce these books, I leaped at the chance, as I knew that together we could do something really special.

We couldn’t resist giving you a brief sample of the kinds of listening experiences that await you in these Backyard Birdsong guides. Greg Budney (curator of sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology) and I put our heads together and whittled down our long lists of favorite species to just nine from each book. For each of these species, we provide a brief quote from the book, sounds from the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at Cornell, and then some brief text that tells how to listen to each of the sounds.