James Wolcott Quotes

All I know of birds to this date is that sparrows are the ones that are not pigeons.

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I am not conscious of falling under any of those ornithological divisions.

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.

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.

Of all types of birds, birds of prey have always fascinated people.

A bird in the open never looks Like its picture in the birdie books - Or if it once did, it has changed its plumage, And plunges you back into ignorant gloomage.

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

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

People who record birdsong generally do it very early-before six o'clock-if they can. Soon after that, the invasion of distant noise in most woodland becomes too constant and too loud.

Birding, after all, is just a game. Going beyond that is what is important.

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

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.

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.

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.