Gilbert White Quotes

I have trained my eye over and over ever since I was a kid. I was a bird watcher when I was a little boy. My grandmother gave me a bird book, and I got to like their colors.

In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?

Memphis—it’s just a bird. Birds fly around, brother. It’s what they do. It’s not following you, and it’s not a sign. Unless you really did give it candy and flowers, in which case you are one strange brother.

I'm not very interesting. Birds are interesting. I could stand there lip-synching all day long, but it would feel funny, and people would be able to tell. I'm not a good actress.

I'm not really a bird person or an Audubon guy who studies them, but as I was around them, they interested me.

I consider myself to have been the bridge between the shotgun and the binoculars in bird watching. Before I came along, the primary way to observe birds was to shoot them and stuff them.

I can recognize the calls of practically every bird in North America. There are some in Africa I don't know, though.

I spend a lot of time learning about bird watching.

The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.

The varying modes of flight exhibited by our diurnal birds of prey have always been to me a subject of great interest, especially as by means of them I have found myself enabled to distinguish one species from another, to the farthest extent of my power of vision.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

For most of my life, I didn't pay attention to birds.

I believe I saw a woodcock. He had a long bill like putting a fire hydrant into a pencil sharpener, then pasting it onto a bird and letting the bird fly away in front of me with this thing on its face for no other purpose than to amaze me.

My father said you can't make a living in birds, my relatives all went into business: bankers, stockbrokers. However, they eventually lost it all and died in wheelchairs. Sometimes you have to be a little aberrant.

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

I am a closet birdwatcher. I can identify Southern African species, but it irks me I can barely tell a jay from a blackbird in the U.K.

I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way I could.

Most of the birds of the Old World can be found here, as Oman is on a strategic route for migrating birds.

No man had ever heard a nightingale, When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred To study and define -- what is a bird.

Birds, except when broiled and in the society of a cold bottle, bored him stiff.

As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.

One day I'm going to write a book about osprey. It has really gotten deep into my bloodstream. So when you ask what else I do, I feel like this is part of what I do....is to watch these birds.

Grandmother walked up over the bare granite and thought about birds in general. It seemed to her no other creature had the same dramatic capacity to underline and perfect events - the shifts in the seasons and the weather, the changes that run through people themselves.

...as the day wore on I watched the birds all flying in one direction, and said, Land lies there.