With all the snow the Northeast has endured this winter, it may feel as if the traditional harbingers of spring are too far away to even anticipate: Forget the crocus and the robin, pass that snow shovel again!
But once the walk is clear and you’re inside and warming up with a cup of hot chocolate, you can get a foretaste of spring with a peculiarly charming book from MIT Press: “Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds.”
Aside from the occasional chatty parrot, we don’t usually expect our birds to talk in human words, and if pressed to name some “bird words” we may haltingly offer up the generic cheep and tweet, or the children’s picture book cock-a-doodle-doo of the rooster or whoo whoo of the owl, or (slightly more ambitiously) the eponymous calls of the cuckoo or the chickadee.
But humans have been transliterating the songs of birds into our own languages for centuries. In English, one of the earliest is the 13th-century song “Sumer is icumen in,” where we hear the cuckoo: “Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes thu, cuccu.” In “The Words of Birds,” John Bevis has attempted to “collect, sift, and standardize” all the ways we’ve represented the calls of more than 1,200 birds over the years.
“The Words of Birds” is intended, in part, to be used as a supplement to bird-watching guides: e.g., queh queh queh, it must be a pinon jay. Some of these sounds are hard to imagine, given only the transcription on the page: Would the kddddrrddi of the summer tanager sound different with another d more or less? Likewise, distinguishing the br-r-r-r-rt of the dicksissel from the brrt of the bank swallow and the tsip of the lark sparrow from the tsiip of the chipping sparrow must take a practiced ear.
But even if you’re not a bird-watcher, “The Words of Birds” can be read for pure entertainment. The bird names are amusing all by themselves: the plain chachalaca, the least bittern, the long-billed dowitcher. When combined with the calls, the pairs have a pleasing oddity: kee-zee-ick kee-zee-ick, goes the sulphur-bellied flycatcher; Heerman’s gull gives out a surprised kwok (perhaps upon seeing Heerman for the first time); the pileated woodpecker might as well be the Muppet Fozzy Bear, in Bevis’s transcription, with its call of wuck-a-wuck-a-wuck-a.
There’s a whole second language of bird-watching, too, which Bevis spends some time with: the mnemonics, often-funny English phrases coined to communicate the rhythm and emphasis of the song instead of the pitch, such as the but-I-DO-love-you of the eastern meadowlark, the O sweet Canada Canada Canada of the white-throated sparrow, and the spit and see if I care, spit! of the white-eyed vireo.
On the surface, this is a book about birding. But in another sense, it’s really a book about a kind of language we don’t think about very often: the nonhuman kind. In fact scientists have long used bird song as a model for studying human language: Zebra finches, for instance, sometimes mistakenly repeat sections of their songs, which has been used to study human stuttering; the same birds also babble as chicks, the way human babies do before learning to speak in words.
Given that scientists have already found deep parallels between the development of bird song and the development of human language, it seems natural to treat bird song, as Bevis does, as more than a simple nature catalog. (Bevis even talks about travelers in the world of bird song using his book as a “phrase book.”)
Bevis tells us that naturalists divide the world of sounds that birds make into songs and calls; with songs being complex and distinctive, and calls being sounds that convey “unambiguous imperative messages.” The most prolific species may have a vocabulary of as many as 20 distinct calls. And there are dialects of bird song, too: Researchers have discovered that some urban-dwelling birds have shorter and faster-paced songs than do members of the same species that live in forests.
Bevis also covers the technical history of bird song research (did you know that the first radio transmission of bird song for recording purposes was of an emperor penguin in the Antarctic, in 1934?). More than 90 percent of the world’s bird species have been recorded, compared to about 97 percent of human languages. Bevis also offers a very animated discussion of the intersection of human musical performance and bird song, including the history of humans imitating birds (the first commercial disk being George W. Johnson’s The Mocking Bird, in 1896) or encouraging them to sing along (as Beatrice Harrison did for the BBC in the 1920s, getting nightingales to sing by playing her cello for them).
“Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds” does what we hope all books will do (and which not all manage to accomplish): It opens a window on a world that has been right alongside us, yet unexplored, and gives us the vocabulary to understand and discuss it with a newly awakened appreciation for its wonders.
Erin McKean is a lexicographer and founder of Wordnik.com. E-mail her at erin@wordnik.com. 
