George Mercer Dawson Quotes

Numbers of snipes breed every summer in some moory ground on the verge of this parish.

The lark that shuns on lofty boughs to build, Her humble nest, lies silent in the field.

Travelling through the breeding places of our species is far from being as interesting to me as it is to inspect the breeding places of the feathery tribes of our country.

Nature got it right with the cranes. They have been around since the Eocene, which ended 34 million years ago.

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

I saw a robin redbreast in Central Park today, but it turned out to be a sparrow with an exit wound.

Plumage features constitute a major component of courtship signals.

My first experience with film was through a still camera. I would sit, very much against my will, with my father in the game reserve, watching some elephant or rhino or whatever, through a 400 millimeter lens and wait, and waiting and waiting.

The impression left after watching the motions of birds is that of extreme mobility - a life of perpetual impulse checked only by fear.

For 'The Gift of Stones,' I spent an afternoon chasing a flock of Canadian geese.

The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.

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.

I lived with them in my studio in New York. And of course if I were doing that book today or even ten years, fifteen years later, I would have gone to where the wild ducks were and where I could study them - I would have gone to the country somewhere.

In Virginia all Geese are Swans

Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling, and who hurries out to see a golden plover that's been reported in the neighbourhood, just because it's a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska.

All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock.

If you sit down among hundreds of thousands of albatrosses in a field, pretty soon you'll be completely surrounded by them, as they come walking up toward us and nibble on our shoelaces and just look right at us out of curiosity.

As far as what I do love, I love birds; I love lavender.

I might find myself standing, transfixed, by the roadside, watching a sparrowhawk hunting among the bushes, astonished that other people could ignore it. But they might just as well be wondering how I could have failed to notice the new V6 Pentastar Sahara that just drove past.

I saw a cardinal when I was in Brooklyn, and I was almost moved to tears. I was, like, 'I can't believe this thing is legal. I can't believe this thing is in the wild. How did this happen? How has someone not killed them all? They're so conspicuous. They're gorgeous. How can they still be alive?'

As millions of people know, one of the great pleasures of walking in areas of the uplands managed for grouse is to see and hear large numbers of curlew, lapwing and golden plover - all ground-nesting birds largely absent or in rapidly declining numbers elsewhere.

For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.

Birds are settling down for the night, singing lullabies to their young.

How readily the bluebirds become our friends and neighbors when we offer them suitable nesting retreats!