iBirdSongs™: Background
The Missing Field Guide to Bird Songs
Have you ever heard a hidden bird singing in your backyard, neighborhood, or local refuge and wondered what it was? Did you know that experienced birders find many of their most interesting birds by first hearing them? Being able to identify birds by their song is both useful and enjoyable, but until recently there wasn't an effective field guide for identifying bird songs that you could use in the field.
Printed field guides are very effective at helping you identify birds you can see. The most popular printed guides are organized so you can easily make comparisons between visually similar species using photos or illustrations. But most printed guides only provide brief text descriptions of bird songs and calls, and they aren't organized specifically to identify bird songs. The biggest limitation, however, is that you can't hear examples of singing birds from a printed guide.
There are several popular sets of audio CDs with extensive reference collections of bird songs (Stokes and Peterson). These are great resources to use when you want to hear the songs and calls of a particular species. Using these CD sets, however, is not as easy as it could be since playing the recordings for a particular species involves looking up the track number for the bird in the printed booklet, juggling multiple CDs, and then locating the track and the bird within that track using the controls on the CD player.
One of the most effective products for learning how to identify bird song is the Peterson Field Guides: Birding By Ear audio CDs. These instructional CD sets are organized to help you learn how to identify bird songs. The CDs start by describing some useful techniques for identifying bird song. The CDs then walk you through several categories of bird songs using extensive narration and song recordings to demonstrate how to distinguish between similar sounding species. These CDs are an incredibly valuable learning tool and anyone interested in identifying bird song should invest the time to listen and learn from these CDs. As effective as the Birding By Ear CDs are as a learning tool, the multiple CD format and the multiple species per track make the CDs somewhat difficult to use if you are looking for a quick reference or something to use in the field.
iBirdSongs™: A New Type of Field Guide by iFieldGuides™
Most of the shortcomings of the above guides can be addressed by taking advantage of the functionality of an iPod® (or another MP3 player) loaded with bird song recordings. Why imagine a bird's song based on a text description when you can actually hear a recording? Why juggle multiple CDs, a printed booklet, and a bulky CD player when you can replace them with something smaller than a pack of playing cards? With an iPod it is possible to scroll through an index of bird names, click the bird you want to hear, and play its songs and calls immediately. What previously might have taken a minute or more with audio CDs can now be accomplished in a few seconds with an iPod.
Looking up a bird alphabetically by name is fine if you know the name of the bird you want to hear, but what if you are trying to identify a bird you've heard whose name you don't know? By organizing groups of birds based on characteristics such as location, season, habitat, and sound category it is easy to play back a series of recordings of matching birds. Listening to a short list of relevant songs makes it significantly easier to identify a bird you have heard. Alternatively, listening to these short lists of recordings either at home or in your car before you get outdoors is a great way to review and learn what you are likely to hear, making it that much easier to identify a bird when you do hear it.
The introduction of the iPod has created an exciting way to offer field guides that can be used in the field. iFieldGuides™ is developing an interactive field guide to bird songs (iBirdSongs™) that runs on your desktop computer (using iTunes® for Windows® or Mac OS®) and on the iPod. It relies on the highly regarded Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs audio CDs for audio recordings and will include photos, sonograms, range maps, and song descriptions for all of the species on these CDs. It includes a variety of lists based on state/province, season, habitat, family, and sound category.