DVD Review: Watching Sparrows
Review by Andy Birch
andyrbirch AT yahoo.com
February, 2004
DVDs have the potential to be a perfect compliment to field guides. Artists' paintings are a good way to show a species in a controlled environment, showing off colors, size and the shape of a bird impartially. However, there will always be a limit to how much you can convey about the personality/jizz of a particular species in a still painting. Photographic guides, on the other hand, may be able to give you a better representation but can be misleading in conveying size or accurate colors. This is where a good quality DVD (with its pausing and chapter skipping abilities) may be able to overcome some of the limitations of conventional ID guides. I'm not saying you can bring the DVD into the field with you but it could be an excellent source of reference back home.
I have never been much of a collector of birding videos and CD Roms. I had bought an Audubon video guide to North American Warblers several years ago and was mightily disappointed. Many species were either distant silhouettes flitting through the canopies of the trees or were still images taken from a photographic guide! I felt conned. That was just a video version of a field guide.
For a DVD to be useful, it needs to offer something the traditional ID guide cannot. Good footage from many angles with good audio can really help fill in the missing pieces that a field guide cannot cover. In the world of identification, there is no alternative to field experience and a good DVD may help you get closer to that field experience before you've seen the bird. This is especially true for a tricky group of birds such as North American sparrows. The proverbial "little brown job" streaky, brown and mostly secretive, this group can give many an expert a headache.
There are no such worries about quality in the latest offering from the partnership of Judy Fieth and Michael Male. Watching Sparrows on DVD is slick and professional with superb footage of every species of sparrow found in North America. Each species is lovingly shot in frame-filling close-up, worthy of a National Geographic or BBC documentary. I couldn't find one species that had footage that was anything less than excellent.
What I particularly like about this DVD is also the attention to habitat. Each species is placed in its surrounding environment often with a nifty focus pull that may take you from an Alaskan mountain-side straight into the mouth of a singing Golden-crowned Sparrow. Or the pan across the SE Colorado grassland to a fence-wire, choreographed as a Cassin's Sparrow hops up on to the wire and starts singing. Even in Hollywood a take that perfectly timed would take you several days! I could go on. The Bachman's Sparrow singing in a Texas grassland. You can see the twigs quivering next to it as it sings. Or the McCown's Longspur and Lark Bunting performing their aerial "skylarking" display against the backdrop of the Great Plains. Everybody will have their favorite.
Audio is also first rate and it is worth getting the DVD for this alone. All species are recorded singing and many subspecies songs are recorded too. Playing this DVD before you go in search of your target species will pay dividends. Here you have an identification guide and audio CD all rolled into one.
I also found this DVD useful for discovering the jizz of a species. The footage of the LeConte's Sparrow running through the grass like a mouse was remarkable. You could tell the cameraman had to be on high alert to follow this bird around!
I thoroughly recommend this DVD and hope that Male and Fieth tackle some other tricky groups like empidonax flycatchers next!
The 2nd disc in the box features bonus material. The pieces on this 2nd disc show you the effort the film-makers went through to get their footage. The focus is searching for Black-chinned and Sharp-tailed Sparrows . "Having fun with songs" is interesting and also emphasises the attention to detail in the audio portion of the DVD.
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