M Constantine, Arnoud van den Berg, Magnus Robb, Killian Mullarney
The Sound Approach, 2006

“The Sound Approach to Birding” has been sat on a shelf on my desk for about a month now unread and its two accompanying CDs unlistened to. I’d figured I would need to set aside some “serious” time before opening it, a wet day perhaps when I could really concentrate on the science, and the masses of sonograms, and the piles of detail that a cursory glance suggested I’d find inside …and I just didn’t have the time…

Well, it’s wet this evening and I’ve just read it - and, yes I needed to concentrate, but how wrong can you be about needing to be “serious” (and the furrowed brows and the constant re-visiting of paragraphs that “serious” suggests)? The subject matter is certainly worthy of concentration - a little bit of effort on our part is required - but Mark Constantine’s text is joyous and wonderfully conversational, his enthusiasm picks you up right from the beginning and carries you along right to the end. In fact, I read “The Sound Approach” in one sitting, in just a few hours - and reading it was a bit like sitting in the ‘Poole Pub’ Mark refers to in the book and hearing him tell his favourite stories as he lucidly explains a subject he is obviously passionately interested in. A great way to spend an evening really…

So what exactly is the subject that the author wants to tell us about?

Before I’d actually bothered to read it, I’d got the impression that “The Sound Approach” was more or less going to be an explanation why any of us who’ve been abroad probably have a lot more birds on our life-lists than we’d thought. Hidden away in remote canyons and forested vallies were lots of new species waiting to be named that the clever people involved with this book (Mark Constantine, Magnus Robb, Killian Mullarney, and Arnoud van den Berg) had realised were different because of the subtly different ‘weet’ calls that only sound-recordists of international stature were clever enough to distinguish…

Again, I was wrong. Whilst the team members gathered here are undoubtedly very clever, and there is a chapter looking at the assemblage of calls given by ‘Common Crossbills” that led Jeff Groth to suggest that were a large number of ‘cryptic species’ utilising different tree species across North America, “The Sound Approach” actually deals with something that many of us probably haven’t given much thought to: properly understanding bird sound.

And “understanding” and “listening to”, as this book expertly proves, are two very different things. Every field birder I’ve ever met will have studied guide books and learnt visual identification features, many will have learnt the calls and songs of the birds on their local patch, and a rare few will be able to identify most birds they hear. But what do those same people actually “understand” about what they’re hearing? I’m no expert, but until I read this book I thought I knew enough to at least identify the local spring migrants properly and that I had a handle on what the chatter coming from the trees or reeds was all about. However after reading (or taking part) in the discussions about ‘plastic songs’, the difference in songs given by first-summer and adult birds, and finally waking up to the fact that my perception of what I’m hearing not only changes as I get older (high-frequency loss means I’m probably not hearing the “whole” song anymore) but changes in weather conditions too, I’m beginning to wonder. As to whether I “understood” what those sounds meant or whether I even knew the difference between a ‘call’ and a ’song’ I’m in no doubt now that I’m a complete duffer…

Having so many notions about your own birding ability undermined in such a short time ought to be a disconcerting experience, but it really isn’t. Again Mark’s text comes to the rescue. He doesn’t set himself up as a learned professor lecturing to someone who really should have known better had they bothered to listen when they’d been out birding - rather, he invites you in, he’s been where you’ve been, he’s had to learn too (I felt very re-assured by the self-deprecatory passage about mis-identifying a calling Garden Warbler on Page 96), and the frequent referrals to his friends and the long chats they’ve had about concepts discussed in “The Sound Approach” (concepts ranging from call development to using bird song as a conservation tool) allow a fascinating and human story to unwind at a very well-judged pace.

There is of course a whole ‘other’ half of this self-published package - and that’s the recordings on the two CDs. As you’d expect when people like Mark Constantine, Magnus Robb and Arnoud van den Berg are involved the recordings are superb. They are crystal-clear (listen to the sublime resonance of the Ural Owl on CD1 for example), but they’re also still full of ambient background sound - other birds, rain falling, waves - that allow the listener to become really involved with what they’re hearing. Importantly the actual songs and calls themselves are also almost totally unedited. This may seem like a small point, but as the text explains some earlier collections edited their recordings by cutting out silences between calls (to save space) - and lost the natural rhythm of the calls by doing so.

The recordings though are far more than just well-captured sounds. As “The Sound Approach” is sub-titled “A guide to understanding bird sound” they were never going to be provided just for audio decoration, and every soundtrack has an accompanying sonogram and explanatory paragraph inside the book. Listen to the CDs while following along with the book and you get taken on a truly fascinating journey (I also ‘watched’ the soundtracks rising and falling in computerised spikes on ‘Musical Colours: Cut-out” on Windows Media Player, which was probably not what the authors intended, but it was great fun…). Deciphering sonograms is probably not many people’s idea of a good evening in, but it’s surprising how quickly (with the right tutelage) a bunch of what I’d lazily considered to be unnavigable squiggles and lines resolve themselves into something that’s actually comprehensible. So, there is a way to share the consistent differences between the calls of Richard’s and Blyth’s Pipits. I can even see why the Dutch decision to re-classify ‘hippolais’ warblers as ‘acrocephalus’ makes “sound” sense now…

I’m not entirely certain I could put all this new-found knowledge into practice in the field, but it’s nevertheless a satisying experience to realise that even middle aged dogs like me can still learn a few new tricks…

I could probably prattle on in a similar vein for several pages, but I won’t. Hopefully by now some of you reading this review will have already gone off on an online bookstore search anyway, and if you haven’t done then you really should. You know, when something this interesting, this entertaining, and this original comes along the accepted norm is to offer congratulations along with the recommendations, but somehow that doesn’t seem quite appropriate in this case. It’s not that congratulations aren’t deserved - there’s an abundance of hard work, skill, and knowledge gone into this relatively slim volume - but something so overt as ‘congratulations’ seems out of character with what is essentially a work that is just brimming with the author’s sheer joy of having had the chance to write it, but the convivial tone he uses to help us share that joy with him.

Perhaps the best way I can explain how I feel after reading “The Sound Approach” is that I would really, REALLY like the chance to sit down in that ‘Poole Pub’ with Mark and his team (none of whom I’ve ever met by the way) and wile away a fascinating evening or two just listening to them chat…and I’d even pay for the drinks…

Summary:
Hardback, 192 pages, 2 CDs (with over 200 recordings), and numerous superb photographs. Packed full with information and photographs this extremely well-written book and the accompanying two CDs aims (according to the blurb on the back cover) to “maximise the use of sound in ehancing your field skills…whatever your level of expertise” and it succeeds wonderfully. Buy it, put the CDs on, settle back, and enjoy.