Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds: North America, Britain, and Northern Europe (Mit Press)

The distinctive and amazing songs and calls of birds: a meditation and a lexicon.A miraculous little book: a compressed encyclopedia of our fascination with avifauna.The NationA charming, funny, and eccentric book.Times Literary SupplementAn elegant tribute to the beauty of its subject.Los Angeles TimesBirds sing and call, sometimes in complex and beautiful arrangements of notes, sometimes in oneline repetitions that resemble a ringtone more than a symphony. Listening, we are stirred, transported, and even envious of birds ability to produce what Shelley called profuse strains of unpremeditated art. And for hundreds of years, we have tried to write down what we hear when birds sing. Poets have put birdsong in verse (Thomas Nashe: Cuckoo, jugjug, puwe, towittawoo) and ornithologists have transcribed bird sounds more methodically. Drawing on this history of bird writing, in Aaaaw to Zzzzzd John Bevis offers a lexicon of the words of birds. For tourists in Birdland, there could be no more charming phrasebook. Consulting it, we find seven distinct variations of hoo attributed to seven different species of owls, from a simple hoo to the more ambitious hoo hoo hoohoo, ho hoo hoohoo; the understated cheet of the tree swallow; the resonant kreeaaaaaaaaaaar of the Swainsons hawk; the modest peep peep peep of the meadow pipit. We learn that some people hear the Baltimore oriole saying here, here, come right here, dear and the yellowhammer saying a little bit of bread and no cheese. Bevis, a poet, frames his lexiconsone for North America and one for Britain and northern Europewith an evocative appreciation of birds, birdsong, and human attempts to capture the words of birds in music and poetry. He also offers an engaging account of other methods of documenting birdsongfield recording, graphic notation, and mechanical devices including duck calls and the serinette, an instrument used to teach song tunes to songbirds. The singing of birds is nature at its most sublime, and words are our medium for expressing this sublimity. Aaaaw to Zzzzzd belongs in the bird lovers backpack and on the word lovers bedside table, an unexpected and sui generis pleasure.