Music of the Birds

A Celebration of Bird Song

 

Cover Notes by naturalist/author Ed Kanze:

 
 
An engaging and informative text, rare and glorious photographs, and an audio compact disc featuring the songs of more than seventy birds combine to make Lang Elliott's Music of the Birds: A Celebration of Bird Song a ground-breaking work.
 
A naturalist, wildlife photographer, sound recordist, and lover of bird song and poetry, Elliott brings all his formidable talents to bear on his favorite subject: the beautiful singing of North American songbirds. Informed by up-to-date scientific findings but never bogged down by them, the book introduces the reader to celebrated and little-appreciated songsters and the poets and prose writers inspired by them. Here Walt Whitman meets the Hermit Thrush, Alice Ball the Red-eyed Vireo, Henry Van Dyke the Veery, John Burroughs the Bicknell's Thrush, Henry David Thoreau the Winter Wren, Ralph Waldo Emerson the Black-capped Chickadee, and Emily Dickinson the American Robin. Elliott gives us Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Gilbert White, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, too, as well as the haiku poets Kobayashi Issa and Yosa Buson. The result is a text as multi-faceted as a diamond.
 
Dazzling the eye, Elliott's photos of singing birds, many rarely caught in the act of making music, run from cover to cover. They alone are worth the price of admission and include the Chestnut-sided Warbler, Baltimore Oriole, Bobolink, Indigo Bunting, Henslow's Sparrow, Worm-eating Warbler, and many more. Other books have concentrated on identifying bird songs, but none before Music of the Birds has ushered the reader straight into the realm of musical appreciatoin. "The sheer immensity of the dawn chorus," Elliott writes, "can nourish the spirit and lead us to a state of wonder and delight." Listen to the audio compact disc as you read, enjoy the photographs, head for a forest or meadow, and join in the author's celebration.
 


This page designed and copyrighted 1997 by Lang Elliott, NatureSound Studio, PO Box 84, Ithaca, New York 14851-0084. Telephone: 607-277-9034. Lang Elliott e-mail: lang@naturesound.com