Aldo Leopold Quotes

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.

Birds are the most popular group in the animal kingdom. We feed them and tame them and think we know them. And yet they inhabit a world which is really rather mysterious.

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

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 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.

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 spend a lot of time learning about bird watching.

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

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.

Robin is one of the most native and democratic of our birds; he is one of the family, and seems much nearer to us than those rare, exotic visitants, as the orchard starling or rose-breasted grossbeak, with their distant, high-bred ways.

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

No one would rather hunt woodcock in October than I, but since learning of the sky dance I find myself calling one or two birds enough. I must be sure that, come April, there be no dearth of dancers in the sunset sky.

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.

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

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

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.

You may depend on it that the bunting, emberiza miliaria, does not leave this country in the winter.

World Migratory Bird Day is an opportunity to celebrate the great natural wonder of bird migration - but also a reminder that those patterns, and ecosystems worldwide, are threatened by climate change.

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

Fowls, by winter forced, forsake the floods, and wing their hasty flight to happier lands.

I don’t know about birds nor do I know the history of fire. But I believe that my solitude should have wings