The Sound Approach has written seven books dedicated to the understanding of bird sounds. Each is accompanied by state of the art recordings, accessed though App (for our latest book), CD or USB (for Morocco). For convenience, the electronic versions of these books are the easiest to listen to.

For beginners, we recommend The Sound Approach to Birding second edition (Mark Constantine, 2026). This is the perfect book for people wanting to expand their understanding of bird sounds, ranging from the basics to a more in-depth look at what bird songs actually mean and how to interpret them. A excellent follow on from this, Catching the Bug (2012) is a précis of the concerns, puzzles and conundrums set by the natural world to a group of obsessive birders who have been meeting in a pub in Poole over 20 years.

For birders wanting to improve their knowledge of specific groups, we recommend the award-winning Petrels: night and day (2008) a comprehensive exploration of the petrels of Europe and North Africa; Undiscovered Owls (2015), which explores the twilight world of owls and a lyrical investigation into their sounds; and Morocco: sharing the birds (2020), which is bursting with sounds of birds in the Maghreb area.

Birding From the Hip (2009) is a collection of forthright, entertaining and gloriously funny stories describing an obsessive Irish birder’s view of life. Anthony McGeehan wrote incorrigible tales about birdwatching for more than twenty years and this is his first book.