Lab of O's coffee table book mixes sights and sounds in 3-D
Lab of O's coffee table book mixes sights and sounds in 3-D
When you open the first page of Birdscapes, an elaborate, three-dimensional scene of the Sonoran Desert springs to colorful life—tall saguaros, flowering cacti, craggy mountains, a dozen birds. Then chirps, twitters, and cackles erupt from the pages: the raspy song of a cactus wren, the call of a phainopepla, the high-pitched bark of an elf owl. The desert scene is one of seven diverse habitats depicted in the intricate pop-up book, conceived by Miyoko Chu and colleagues at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "One of the goals of this book was to make people say, 'Wow,'" says Chu, the lab's director of communications.
Chu wrote the book to celebrate the diversity of bird sounds, which she calls as much a defining feature of a landscape as a mountain or tree. (In addition to the Sonoran scene, Birdscapes depicts a Pacific seabird colony, an Eastern deciduous forest, the Arctic tundra, a cypress swamp, Great Plains grasslands, and a Pacific rain forest.) The hand-crafted hardcover, which measures about a foot square and three inches thick and weighs almost four pounds, was published in August by Chronicle Books. With a cover price of $60 (discounted to $48 on Amazon.com), the book has been featured in Oprah magazine and included in the New York Times holiday gift guide.
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Birdscapes runs on three AAA batteries, which power digital playback of recordings from the lab's Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds, which comprises some 175,000 audio clips of birds, whales, elephants, and more. The book is part of the lab's mission to protect biodiversity through education and citizen science, Chu says. "The idea is to introduce people to landscapes through sound and the pop-up scenes," Chu says. "We hope to raise awareness of how sounds are evocative of these special places."
Five pages at the back of the book are devoted to information about the landscapes and detailed descriptions of each bird—coloring, feeding habits, nesting routines, and more. They also chronicle threats to each habitat, such as oil exploration and rising temperatures in the Arctic and the degrading of cypress swamps by agriculture and logging. "These landscapes need our attention and protection," Chu says. "If we lose these marvelous places, we're going to lose the sounds as well."
— Aeriel Emig '09