Peterson Field Guides: Backyard Bird Song (ISBN 039597528X)

An excellent starter:
This CD lives up to the high quality standards of the Peterson Field Guide series and is a marvelous introduction to bird songs. I have taught ornithology courses for a number of years and this is the CD I recommend to my students. To anyone just discovering the joys of birding, visual identification of birds can be overwhelming with over 650 species found in North America alone. If visual identification is difficult, audio identification can be nearly impossible. BACKYARD BIRD SONG comes to the rescue by focusing the listener's attention on 28 of the most common backyard birds. Learning these songs and calls will boost your confidence and enable you to identify nearly all of the birds you hear on a daily basis. The recordings are grouped into categories of similar sounds such as "sing-songers" and "whistlers." This clustering facilitates comparisons of potentially confusing bird vocalizations. The CD's one down side is that you cannot go directly to the song of a given bird. You are limited to selecting a song grouping and then waiting for the desired bird.

hearing is believing:
Because the approach of this splendid CD is so straightforward, its value may best be explained by a first-person account of a user. I've been enjoying backyard birds in my home in Costa Rica and now in Indiana for many years. Yet I've only rarely felt confident about linking a bird's song to its appearance. I guess I'm a visual guy. Birdsong sounded good but taught me almost nothing. Then a helpful attendant in a Wild Birds Unlimited store steered me towards this Peterson Field Guides cd. I'm an admirer of the Peterson Field Guide books, so this was an easy sale. Since then I've listened through the guide three or four times in my car. Already, I find my ears picking up on a particular birdsong when I'm not even paying attention. Typically, I look up and - mirabile dictu - there's the bird I've learned, almost unconsciously, to identify by its song before it appears before the eye. That's good pedagogy. This is a good product. Cheep. Cheep. And so much more.

Information Structured Well for new rookie bird watcher:
tape and book enhances the learning process.