The Songs of Insects
By Charlie • April 28, 2007 • 1 comment
Lang Elliott and Wil Hershberger (Houghton Mifflin, May 2007)
A book and CD on North American “singing insects” (the crickets, katydids, grasshoppers, and cicadas) being reviewed on a bird blog. What’s going on Charlie…?
I’ll tell you what: I think that ‘inside every birder is a naturalist trying to get outside’, and every birder I know loves a good well-illustrated natural history book - and “The Songs of Insects” is not just a good, well-illustrated book, it’s an excellent, stunningly illustrated book that deserves space on bookshelves everywhere…
The blurb on the back of this beautiful book, which goes on sale for the first time this month, says that it “is a celebration of the chirps, trill, and scrapes of seventy-seven species…native to eastern and central North America” and goes on to state that “the photographs in this book will surprise and delight all who behold them”. Blurb on the back of books sometimes present a glossy version of what’s actually inside (like the way promoters cherry-pick quotes from film reviews to make their product seem better than it really is), but in this case those two phrases are entirely accurate and truthful: the authors - Lang Elliott and Wil Hershberger - quite plainly really like these often-overlooked little insects (describing them in the glowing terms us birders usually reserve for dendroica or tanagers, and going into ecstasy when describing the different songs they heard when researching this book), and the photographs are just so exquisite that amateur insect photographers everywhere will either throw their cameras away in despair or (hopefully) be driven on to reach the levels that these remarkable images show can be attained.
I hope I’m not doing the authors a disservice as a huge amount of research has gone into writing the text of this book, but it is the photographs that will catch the eye first (I suspect they won’t mind as Lang Elliott and Wil Hershberger took all the photos too!). I’m not usually taken aback by wildlife photography - we’ve all been so spoilt by the standard of photographs in many recent magazines and books that it takes something very special to stand out these days - but these images are simply superb. Subtly lit so that every detail and every colour shade of every insect is revealed, there isn’t a poor photo here. Each species is given a full-page portrait (8.5 x 8.4ins/21.5 x 21.3cms) in a natural setting, and a second smaller portrait above the species account taken against a white card (a trick the authors admit in their disarmingly honest preface - “we are not trained entomologists or experts on insect song” one passage candidly states! - taken from Robin Laughlin’s Backyard Bugs). That may sound like duplication, but of course most are taken at different angles from each other and thus nicely illustrate different features: besides which the effect of showing the insects on these two completely opposite backgrounds is so striking that I can’t see anyone complaining. How long it must take to build up a collection of photographs this good is anyone’s guess, but I’m very grateful that the authors decided to go down the old-fashioned route and publish them in a glossy book rather than at low-res on a website (where they still look pretty good actually)…
Red-headed Meadow Kaydid Orchelimum erythrocephalum.
Slightly Musical Conehead Neoconocephalus exiliscanorus.
(Both photos reduced in size and resolution. © Lang Elliott and Wil Hershberger)
And we are talking about “authors” here too of course. The bulk of the book is given over to the gorgeous photographs and the text may seem little more than supplemental at first look, but it’s been skilfully written and there’s very little of the “This lovely insect has red feet with greenish toes and blue wings with a black body shell - just like the photograph illustrates” that some books serve up, and plenty of life-history and interesting facts instead (eg the Robust Conehead calls so loudly it can set off car alarms, or you can work out the temperature by counting the number of chirps the Snowy Tree Cricket makes in 30 seconds and adding forty). The short opening chapters are especially well worth reading, covering “Classification”, “The Biology of Insect Song” (who knew that similar-looking insects could have evolved so many different ways to make sound?), “Human Perception of Insect Song” (with its unhappy reminder that those of us approaching middle-age are losing our ability to hear the high frequencies many insects produce), and the self-deprecatory “Preface” already referred to.
Each group of insects is also given a page of introductory text which will provide about as much information as most non-specialists will need, giving general identification pointers and neat summaries of characteristics common to the group. One page I did turn quickly to, incidentally, was one that I hoped might explain the derivation of katydid, the popular term to describe various long-horned grasshoppers. According to “The Songs of Insects” there are numerous stories, but the one Elliot and Hershberger favour goes, “A young woman by the name of Katy was in love with a handsome young man. However, he dumped her, married someone else, and moved into a cabin in the woods. Shortly after, the couple was found dead in their bed…No-one knew who did it and there was no evidence to convict anyone. But the crime was committed in late summer at night, when the insects were active, and they saw the whole thing. And every night, they say, “Katy did, katy did, katy did…”.
As an explanation it’s not entirely convincing (and of course isn’t meant to be), but it does neatly allude to the fascination that the authors have with these “singing insects” that are just so evocative of the long hot afternoons or drowsy summer nights spent listening to a distant chorus drifting over from the grasses and trees…It’s a sound we’ve largely lost here in the UK as our grasslands and meadows disappear under housing or lie soaked in pesticides, but the region covered by this book seems spectacularly endowed with six-legged musicians (with fantastic names like Handsome Meadow Katydid, Fast-calling Tree Cricket, Slightly Musical Conehead, and Dog-day Cicada), and the song of every species featured in the book is visually described with the aid of a sonogram and has also been lovingly captured on the accompanying seventy-minute CD. Introduced with the minimum of fuss by Wil Hershberger, the recordings are hiss-free, clear and great to listen to: I’ll probably never hear more than a fraction of the species involved in real life, but I still wanted to sit and listen all the way through, drifting in and out of various habitats and warm evenings in a delightfully relaxed state as I did so.
This whole review may seem overly laudatory, but this is a genuinely excellent publication and how it’s on sale for just USD19.95/GBP10.00 I’ll never know. With the exchange-rate so favourable for us Europeans at the moment, there’s really no reason not to buy “The Songs of Insects” even if you think you might never visit North America and have never even looked at a grasshopper before. Kudos for the tiny price you’ll pay to own this lovingly-crafted package presumably have to go to Houghton Mifflin, the publishers. Books packed with colour photographs are expensive to produce, and I can just imagine what the initial conversation between publisher and authors must have been like - “Look, we’re not trained entomologists or experts on insect song, but we want to do this book on crickets and cicadas, with a free CD, and we’ve got all these photos, and we want it to look really beautiful…”, “‘Crickets’ you say? ‘Photos’ you say? ‘Free CD’ you say. Hmm…”.
The appeal obviously feel on very supportive ears - and I’m glad it did. “The Songs of Insects” is the sort of niche natural history publication that I’ve often wondered I’d ever see again and this book genuinely deserves adjectives like ’sumptuous’, ’stunning’, and ‘remarkable’ applied to it. I have no idea how many HM hope to sell (or need to sell) to recoup costs, but at the almost give-away price they must be taking a gamble: I for one sincerely hope that the gamble pays off, and they are encouraged to publish niche books of this quality long into the future.
Summary:
Softback (2007), 228 pages, about 200 colour illustrations, and 77 sonograms. “The Songs of Insects” is a wonderful book for identifying - and appreciating - a good selection of the region’s crickets, katydids, cicada etc. Beautifully designed, packed with information, and illustrated with the most remarkable insect photographs I’ve ever seen, this book is highly recommended. If you’ve ever wondered just which musicians make up the nighttime chorus of singing insects pick up this book, settle back, and have your questions answered. Buy it now before stocks run out!
UPDATE MAY 2007: If you’d like to read other reviews or find out more information about this book (and about insect song in general) the author’s have set up an excellent website at http://www.musicofnature.com/songsofinsects/index.html, which includes the novel “insect jukebox” pasted below!
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Dear sir
Your page is amazing and i did find what i vave been looking for for a long time .please forward to me the glossary of both insects and birds sounds.
Best wishes