Though Newman has a day job, he has been an avid birder from a young age, and is particularly interested in bird calls and sound recording. He offers a guide to identifying birds in southern Africa by their call. Brief entries on each species describe the song, other sounds the birds make, regional variation, habitat, and similar sounding species. They also refer to the track on the audio disk, tell how long the track is, and describe the nature of the call--aggression, pair interaction, breeding colony, and so on. Other chapters explain such matters as bird anatomy, true songbirds, mimicry, and the dawn chorus. Distributed in the US by International Publishers Marketing. Annotation ©2014 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)