I found a great way to avoid getting any writing done! Take all the bird identification cds I have amassed over the years and put them on my iPod, then start organizing them so I have a play list of all the warblers and in the play list I put all the calls from all the different cds together so that I'll have something like four different American redstart tracks. Actually, since I've started putting all my id stuff on the iPod, when I set it on random I'll get like a David Bowie song, a Depeche Mode song, Lang Elliot introducing a black-legged kittiwake, song from the Xanadu movie, etc.

For those that don't know, Lang Elliot is usually the male voice on quite a few of the bird identification cds out there. He also runs Nature Sounds Studios and is an expert in bird calls and has a ton of great cds that he produces himself. One of my favorite books is Music of the Birds (I always try to keep a copy in the store because it makes a good gift for someone who needs a gift for a birder but have no clue where to begin). It talks about some of the best bird songs out there and on one of the tracks he slows down the calls of a hermit thrush, Swainson's thrush, wood thrush and veery and you can hear just how complex and how many more notes are in the song than we hear. He sounds a little stiff and I would love meet him one day and see if he'll tell a dirty joke just to see what it would sound like. It's got to be hard to be in a sound booth and recite bird names for bird cds for hours on end. What's interesting is that on one cd he pronounces pileated woodpecker as PILL E a ted and on another cd he pronounces it PIE lee a ted--man that woodpecker's name needs to be changed!