Wildlife Study Quotes

Chimpanzees have given me so much. The long hours spent with them in the forest have enriched my life beyond measure. What I have learned from them has shaped my understanding of human behavior, of our place in nature.

I have examined the stomach contents of seven aardvarks.

One of the basic steps in saving a threatened species is to learn more about it: its diet, its mating and reproductive processes, its range patterns, its social behavior.

I think like the species I am studying, whatever it is. If I am watching a lizard, I become the lizard. Gazing ath the water at a pike, I become the pike.

I cannot remember a time when I did not want to go to Africa to study animals.

The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.

Zoology, eh? That's a big word, isn't it." "No, actually it isn't," said Tiffany. "Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.

My study of the wild gorilla is not yet finished, and even when it is complete, it will contribute only a small part toward man's understanding of his closest animal relatives, the great apes. But one conclusion is already clear: The gorilla is one of the most maligned animals in the world.

I was even accused of teaching the chimps how to fish for termites which I mean that would have been such a brilliant coup.

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.

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

I certainly wasn't the kind of kid that grew up collecting bugs and spiders.

I was a reasonably good student in college ... My chief interests were scientific. When I entered college, I was devoted to out-of-doors natural history, and my ambition was to be a scientific man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or Baird, or Coues type-a man like Hart Merriam, or Frank Chapman, or Hornaday, to-day.