Round Robin

The holiday season doesn’t start officially for another nine days or so, but there’s a new book on the horizon that might earn a place on your advance list. It’s the Bird Songs Bible, a hefty tome from Chronicle Books that also features hundreds of recordings from the Cornell Lab—built right in.

The book covers nearly 750 of North America’s breeding birds, offering fine illustrations, range maps, and habitat and behavior information. That’s a lot of material—so much in fact that the book comes with its own carrying handle.

Thanks to the built-in digital audio player, the included songs and calls for each of those 747 species add virtually no weight at all. Just type in the number of the species you’re looking at and you’ll hear the bird’s honks, clucks, rattles, whistles, warbles, and chatters, each drawn from our archives in the Macaulay Library. The book, edited by Les Beletsky, retails for $125.

Chronicle Books has even put together a jaunty demo video so you can see inside the book and hear a few of the recordings. Watch it after the jump.

(Image: Chronicle Books)