Bird Sounds of Madagascar: An audio guide to the island’s unique birds

British Library NSACD 53
(shop.bl.uk or www.nhbs.com)

This exuberant riot of nature’s noise is the perfect remedy for cold-weather doldrums and a timely antidote for the much-hyped Dreamworks’s animated movie Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

The real — not the animated — Madagascar is an Indian Ocean island nation that is home to five percent of the world’s plant and animal species. This CD of 127 species of Madagascan birds includes some with legendary powers, like owls, or vorondolo (ghost birds), which enjoy local respect because their presence signifies witchcraft is afoot.

Birds have long had mythic dimensions in Madagascar; until the sixteenth century, it was home to the now-extinct elephant bird, which weighed more than 1,100 pounds, stood 10 feet tall, and laid 20-pound eggs.

Today’s surviving birds, from the call and response duets of Oxylabes to the amusingly disapproving tsk-tsk of the Drongo, evoke a rich communicative life. The communion with natural wonders on Bird Sounds of Madagascar is enlightening and invigorating.