A précis of the concerns, puzzles and conundrums set by the natural world to a group of amateur birders meeting over twenty years in a pub in Poole. Read how tens of thousands of birds secretly migrated through the area, and get tips for seeing them, or finding similar migrant corridors near your home. Learn the flight calls of these migrant songbirds from original stereo recordings, illustrated and explained using annotated sonograms.
Explore the idea of the Dartford warbler being Britain’s first endemic species, along with the differences between Atlantic and Continental great cormorants, and the role of sound in common cuckoo conservation. Listen to the sounds of waders as they come and go with the tide, while enjoying the author’s stories of bird racing, year listing and being stopped by the police for possession of a super ray gun.
As usual, the book will come with two free audio CDs packed with great sounds.
"Mark Constantine and the Sound Approach team have produced a book so delectable in concept, so mouth-watering in production, and, ultimately, a text so wholesome it must have a calorific value"
– Sunday Express
"I just loved it. The authors need to be congratulated for this exceptional contribution to the library"
– Lee G.R. Evans, 400 Club
"The Sound Approach at its best"
– Martin Garner, Birding Frontiers
"Most readers of this journal will already have caught the bug. But if any of the unconverted are exposed to this latest opus from the Sound Approach team, they will surely become infected. Although it is modestly subtitled 'a guide to the birds of Poole Harbour', it is, in effect, a guide to better birding on anyone's local patch.[...]"
– Bryan Bland, Birding World 25(10), November 2012
"[...] I suspect the authors would be satisfied if this book made you want to visit Poole Harbour, but I imagine they'd be even happier if it inspired the reader to get out in the field and discover the same joys in their own local area. Anyone who owns any of the other The Sound Approach books will undoubtedly have this one on their bookshelf – or open on their desk – already; for those who haven't yet caught The Sound Approach bug, there's no better place to start than with this book."
– Stephen Menzie, Wednesday 14th November 2012, www.birdguides.com
"[...] Catching the Bug represents self-publishing at its very best: glorious in its extravagance, educational, inspirational, entertaining, robustly untroubled by concepts of self-effacement or doubt. Some chapters are superficial, and the whole ‘birding tribe’ aspect a bit vain, but few readers will fail to find something they didn’t know. As a whole the book successfully captures the highs and lows of intensive bird study at a single site."
– Martin Collinson, British Birds, 28-12-2012