Strong text and great illustrations. The main reason for buying this book, though, should be the excellence of the calls and songs. My complaint is that for most of the 200 species, the book provides a very short clip (about 1 second) that is played four times. You can even hear the player cutting on and off after each repetition. So you may think you're hearing a phrase as the bird would phrase it, but really you are hearing repeated mini-clips. I'm guessing in real life the birds may be more likely to make each repetition slightly different. It is also important to know how long a bird pauses before repeating a phrase, but in this book all the pauses seem to have been equalized. I don't know much about how one produces a bird song book like this, but I can't help but think the book would be better if the clips were maybe seven seconds long and not short clips repeated several times.