Bird Songs Bible: The Complete, Illustrated Reference for North American Birds

[A] copy of the new "Bird Songs Bible," a visual and audio treasure trove of the 747 breeding birds in North America. The hefty tome comes with a nifty digital audio player that quickly fills your ears with an amazing range of bird songs and calls, including the rarely heard shearwaters, who only vocalize at sea. What are shearwaters? The "Bird Songs Bible" (Chronicle Books, 536 pp.) will tell you that, too, in addition to having lovely illustrations of all the birds and maps of their habitats. The field recordings are from the esteemed Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the book is edited by Les Beletsky, a noted bird biologist. I quickly found it's great fun to flip through the book and then punch in the number in the audio player for any bird that caught my eye. It took about two seconds for my cats to start walking all over the book, looking for the birds.

Read that full San Jose Mercury piece here. NPR's All Things Considered also did a full story on the book and author.

There's a new book out that is unlike any other — it features characters with names like Hawaii creeper and bufflehead — and strangest of all: it tweets. And it doesn't tweet in the 21st century, social media sense, but in the good, old-fashioned bird-call sense. The Bird Songs Bible is a massive volume that comes with a built-in audio player featuring hundreds of bird songs. The 10-pound, $125 tome was edited by bird expert Les Beletsky and features recordings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It is billed as "The Complete, Illustrated Reference for North American Birds." "I think 'bible' really says it all," Greg Budney, audio curator at Cornell, tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "It covers over 728 species of North American birds including birds of Hawaii."

See the full featured webpage on that NPR story, here. Download the podcast to that show here.