Avian Ecology Quotes

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.

Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.

My father told me all about the birds and the bees, the liar - I went steady with a woodpecker till I was twenty one.

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.

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

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.

My background is in biology. Before getting into the family business, I worked at the Predatory Bird Research Group at the University of California at Santa Cruz, fundraising for them.

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.

For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman;... but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.

What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.

The shots had dispersed the birds; there remained only two marabous, standing between ten and twenty paces away and plunged in reverie. They were like two old men with bald heads pressed between the shoulders.

The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.

As a teenage fisherman, I watched and followed terns to find fish. Later, I studied terns for my Ph.D.