Boo Boo’s Book List: The Little Book of Backyard Bird Songs

If you’re like me you hate waking up in the morning, but you love to hear the birds. So many bird songs are familiar to me, but I’ve not always been able to identify the birds that make them. It’s like when you listen to the radio and you know the song that’s playing but you definitely don’t know who is singing it. 

Each bird seems to have a different shift, and you hear different songs for different times of day, different times of the year, even different weather. There’s the bird you hear in the rain, the bird you hear in the early spring, the crack-of-dawn bird that you hear at the end of the spring semester as while you’re pulling an all-nighter to finish your finals. This particular birdsong spelled doom. It meant that you were running out of time to write your 20 page essay that you waited until three days ago to start, or that you finished your studying for your test that’s at 9 AM and you are just now sliding between the covers and now you won’t be able to fall asleep because of those damn birds. 

They are so happy to be awake, so noisy in their happiness, so wholesome in their early-to-bed early-to-rise way of life; it’s almost as if they’re shaming you and your slothful college lifestyle. Yes, the early bird gets the worm, and it also drives you crazy. And for the longest time I had no idea which bird it was. I could only describe it to people as “the bird that is up really early in the morning and it goes taweet taWEET tawoo tawoo taweet non-stop.” Some people referred to it as “that fucking bird.”  

The song itself is gorgeous but slightly manic sounding and the tune kind of reaches a crescendo at the second taweet, and it repeats this chorus this nonstop. Do you follow? Probably not, but if you’re ever up at five in the morning in the midwestern or northeastern part of the Northern Hemisphere in spring you’ve heard this bird. And now, thanks to The Little Book of Backyard Bird Songs, by Andrea Pinnington and Caz Buckingham, I finally know what this bird is. Yes, folks, it’s the robin. My namesake. 

Andrea Pinnington and Caz Buckingham are a writer/illustrator duo who founded Fine Feather Press Publishers together.

Boo Boo got this books from his grandma. Jer-bear’s mom did not get this book for me or him, but she might as well have. We have learned as much from it as Boo Boo. 

When Jer-bear, Boo Boo and I spend part of my maternity leave in Kansas City, I readjusted to waking up to the sounds of birds and crickets instead of 18-wheelers honking at each other on the BQE. Sometimes the birds woke us up, sometimes they woke up with us, depending on Boo Boo. Since we did not know their names they were referred to by their song. There was “the one that goes  WHIT-tooo WHIT-tooo Whit Whit Whit” and “the one that goes hooo hooo hoOOO oo oo,” among others. 

Now we know that the one that goes  WHIT-tooo WHIT-tooo Whit Whit Whit is a cardinal, and the one that sounds like hooo hooo hoOOO oo oo is a mourning dove (Jer-bear and I thought it was an owl). 

This was one of the first books Boo Boo got, and he was into it from the get-go. It is a board book, so one might think it’s only meant for toddlers, but the ornithology argot-studded prose would suggest that the text has been heisted from a middle-school science book. 

We’re not here for the text, though. I find it interesting, but I cannot read a whole paragraph to Boo Boo and expect him to pay attention. 

But there are twelve different birds in this book, including the american robin, the cardinal, the mourning dove, the bluejay and the crow. There is an audio button for each bird in the book, and this is the clincher for Boo Boo. 

He deigns to let me read a sentence or two of text about each bird, and we have relevant chit chat about each bird (Where are its wings? Where is its beak? What color is it? Have we seen this bird?) and then he pushes the button (sometimes with mommy’s help) to hear the song that each bird makes. 

It doesn’t always work out this way. Sometimes he wants to skip the facts and small talk and spend the entire time pressing the buttons. And that’s fine. 

This is one of the books he will often turn to if I’m busy cooking, I love looking over at him when I’m in the middle of chopping vegetables or scrambling eggs (often a dinner go-to) and catching him in a studious moment sitting on the floor with the book on his lap. He takes his time examining each bird, turning the pages slowly and deliberately. 

He is quiet but the book is not. Instead of a chorus of toddler chirps (Water? Food? Eat? Chair? Shoes?), there is a chorus of birdsong.