At 10:13 AM 6/26/2003, Rudy wrote:
>Doug, you mentioned a few references that you thought were a good way
>for interested listeners to get over this hump. Would you care to
>reiterate that list?
Sure, I find the ones I use most are authored by two of our esteemed list
members - Kevin Colver and Lang Elliot. Kevin's are the Stokes Field Guide=
to Bird Song, Western Edition and Lang's is the eastern counterpart, Stokes=
Field Guide to Bird Song, Eastern Edition. Both are excellent in their
breadth - meaning they have several examples of most birds' songs and calls=
- enough to really give you the idea. The recordings on them are excellent,=
of course! For the neotropics I use David Ross's CDs, Voices of Costa Rican=
Birds and Voices of the Cloud Forest.
Cornell also has some excellent references, like those by Geoff Keller,
Bird Songs of California and
Bird Songs of the Rocky Mountain States and Provinces and Bird Songs of
Southeast Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.
For Frogs and toads, I use Lang's The Calls of Frogs and Toads and the old=
Smithsonian Folkways recordings' Sounds of North American Frogs.
My favorite resource, though is always the web - sites like Walter's for
frogs, mine for birds, and lots of others - there you will hear more
complete "vocabularies" and often some of the more unusual sounds a species=
makes.
The "hump" for most non-biologists or birders, is that it's necessary to
know at least something about birds or frogs to get started. Knowing at
least the family that the subject belongs to will usually be sufficient to=
get started. That's not as hard as it seems - we all know what a woodpecker=
is, or a duck, or maybe a flycatcher or a quail - with that basic info you=
can start searching through the references.
There are other resources, certainly, and I'd like to hear from anyone on
the list who likes a particular set of CDs or a web site, or has done one.=
It would be nice to have a list for the future FAQ of reference recordings=
from around the world.
By the way, I find it extremely useful to "rip" the reference CDs onto a
secondary hard drive and have them all at my fingertips as I edit my own
recordings. In CoolEdit if you select "open file" and then just click once=
on each file in a directory it will preview that sound without loading it -=
very handy for running through a bunch of possibilities quickly.
Doug
Doug Von Gausig
Clarkdale, Arizona, USA
Moderator
Nature Recordists e-mail group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/naturerecordists
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