A printed field guide to bird vocalizations? It’s an interesting idea, to be sure.

Indeed, at first glance I thought it was a bit… well, daft. However after spending a little more time looking through an advance copy of Nathan Pieplow’s forthcoming Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America, my curiosity is now piqued and I’m very eager to put it through its paces in the field.

(Oh, and for those wondering, all the spectrograms depicting the sounds included in the guide are referenced to online recordings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.)