Best 288 quotes in «birds quotes» category

But in the early 1970s, we were not birdwatching. We were birding, and that made all the difference. We were out to seek, to discover, to chase, to learn, to find as many different kinds of birds as possible — and, in friendly competition, to try to find more of them than the next birder. We became a community of birders, with the complications that human societies always have; and although it was the birds that had brought us together, our story became a human story after all.

But I remember thinking it seemed cruel that a bird should be punished for believing it could fly.

But those who caged her in order to protect her from monsters, didn’t notice that they are making a monster out of her too….

Cliff swallows come back to Capistrano Mid-March. It takes them 3 weeks to fly 7,000 miles from Goya, Argentina.

Did morning come? Were there birds singing? That's the only news I care to know.

Die Ornithomanie ist eine Passion, die oft mit wissenschaftlichem Ehrgeiz verquickt ist, und in ihren extremsten Erscheinungsformen - man mag hier wohl schon vom Bird-Stalking sprechen - wohl tatsächlich eine Krankheit. Dann, wenn alles andere im Leben zu kurz kommt, wenn man die Sorge um Mitmenschen und die finanziellen Grenzen vergisst, wenn Sammeln, Beobachten oder Fangen wichtiger wird als alles andere im Leben.

Doesn't look like much, does he?" murmurs Frederick. "Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire." The wagtail hops from twig to twig. Werner rubs his aching eyes. It's just a bird. "Ten thousand years ago," whispers Frederick, "they came through here in the millions. When this place was a garden, one endless garden from end to end.

Consider my Lover; the yellow church of his skin, the clean wells of his ears; How the notes of a song come to him like birds descending on a power line; How in his absence I am of two throats--each of them cramped.

Don't ask why the elephants wear such large shoes, And why the kangaroos are reborn kidnappers, And why the sailing birds are all Romantics.

Do you mean that Zane is some kind of bird magnet?

Consider the road, long and forked as the Devil’s own tongue. Consider the Devil, burning every bridge; Placing in every tree a black bird. In every bird a black thought.

Don't you think it's a small mystery that birds can twitter so loudly that they can hear each other's song from several miles away? Those tiny bundles are like living flutes, playing non-stop on themselves.

Eagle's flight of loneliness soars so high Around its sigh, no more alone the sky Other birds remain away, clouds pass by Between shrouds of life and haze sun rays die

Entomologists use that word 'foul' often when referring to the flavor of a caterpillar. They are rarely more specific than 'foul' or 'tasty.' I expect that is because they are leaving the assessment up to birds, and birds have a very binary approach.

Every morning before the birds start trilling me their stories, I give birth to a new love through my same old heart when a lake’s placidity finds life in the swans breath Only for you... From the poem 'Only For You

Every new day Our children's joy is as fresh as roses, Even the birds chatter at dawn.

Everywhere I go, your beauty spills into my day. The trees were never this verdant. The birdsong never this sweet.

Feeding birds means feeding yourself! Birds are part of nature and feeding nature is nothing but feeding yourself!

Facts swooped like swallows, darting across her mind; there was a rush of pride in things still remembered. Singing was limited to the perching birds, the order Passeriformes. Nearly half the birds in the world didn't sing, but they still used sound to communicate- calls as opposed to song. Most birds had between five and fifteen distinct calls in their repertoire; alarm and territorial defense calls, distress calls from juveniles to bring an adult to the rescue, flight calls to keep the flock coordinated, even separate calls for commencing and ending flight. Nest calls. Feeding calls. Pleasure calls. Some chicks used calls to communicate with their mothers while they were still in the egg.

Fly away,” sang little lark to the crow, “There is no home for you Among the broken promises and empty hearts. We drew the life we never mourned, away with fading dark. Your wings are fashioned from the cold, mindless lies of feathers tarred with pitch!

First came him, then came I, then he came again and then I was lost forever.

Flying is not only the art of the birds, but it is also the art of the artists!

Girl from the fifth floor, who feeds the birds every day, climbs up to the water tank and jumps off. I see her body on the road below, and feel absolutely nothing. Maybe because I expect her to get up and walk off. In a story, the birds would have joined forces in a show of gratitude and broken her fall, carried her to a faraway land of safety. As it is, they just gurgle foolishly and confer about the no-show of breakfast. I imagine myself in Pigeon girl's place - a split open bag of skin on tar.

for a poem Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clamorous Bright hawks that hover and dart headlong, and ungainly Gray hungers fledged with desire of transgression, salt slimed beaks, from the sharp Rock-shores of the world and the secret waters.

For the author as for God, standing outwith his creation, all times are one; all times are now. In mine own country, we accept as due and right – as very meet, right, and our bounden duty – the downs and their orchids and butterflies, the woods and coppices, ash, beech, oak, and field maple, rowan, wild cherry, holly, and hazel, bluebells in their season and willow, alder, and poplar in the wetter ground. We accept as proper and unremarkable the badger and the squirrel, the roe deer and the rabbit, the fox and the pheasant, as the companions of our walks and days. We remark with pleasure, yet take as granted, the hedgerow and the garden, the riot of snowdrops, primroses, and cowslips, the bright flash of kingfishers, the dart of swallows and the peaceful homeliness of house martins, the soft nocturnal glimmer of glow worm and the silent nocturnal swoop of owl.

Four years! My heart was glad as birds.

From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned a form of dangerous independence.

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for a time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds on the plain, even though they soar.

Good morning! The sun is up! Wake up! Time to eat," said the birds. "Good morning," Ashlynn said back. There was a clink of glass slippers against the wood floor, and then her mother appeared in the doorway. She had the same strawberry-blond hair and green eyes as Ashlynn. Her mother was already dressed, but Ashlynn didn't notice the clothes she was wearing. As always, her eyes went right to the glass slippers. Oh, how she loved those shoes. "Chores, dear!" her mother said, leaning over to kiss the top of Ashlynn's head. "And then you should pack." "Yes, Mother!" Ashlynn washed her face, put on an apron, and then opened wide the door to her shoe closet. This princess wouldn't care if she wore a burlap sack every day, so long as she had dozens of footwear choices. Today she settled on a pair of scrappy teal wedges and went to start breakfast. Even though her father's grand house came fully stocked with servants, her mother believed in good, solid, character-forming chores. After all, Ashlynn would inherit her mother's story and become the next Cinderella someday, and there would be lots of floors to mop and hearths to sweep before her Happily Ever After.

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. p.33

Every bird has a style and each style has its own fate, just as it is in humans!

Hark, how the cheerful birds do chaunt their lays, and carol of love's praise.

Headaches were like birds. Starlings. They could be perfectly calm, then a single acorn could drop and send the entire flock to the sky.

Heat in her birds of prey fingertips, smoke of gilded flowers in her aureate gorging hair.

He’d been so sure he’d never cheat, contemptuous of friends and colleagues who risked perfectly good marriages because they couldn’t keep their pants zipped. Until that night at the new pub across from the courthouse, when Detective Jesca Ashton had grinned at him from down the bar, hair waving to her waist, China-doll teeth glinting in the dim light. When he was young he’d had a thing for long hair.

Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn: It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond Stares. And you sing, you sing. That star-enchanted song falls through the air From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound, Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground; And all the night you sing. My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee As all night long I listen, and my brain Receives your song, then loses it again In moonlight on the lawn. Now is your voice a marble high and white, Then like a mist on fields of paradise, Now is a raging fire, then is like ice, Then breaks, and it is dawn.

Here is the voice of my main Character in my Talon book series, I’ll let her introduce herself to you: My name is Matica and I am a special needs child with a growth disability. I am stuck in the body of a two year old, even though I am ten years old when my story begins in the first book of the Talon series, TALON, COME FLY WITH ME. Because of that disability, (I am saying ‘that’ disability, not ‘my’ disability because it’s a thing that happens to me, nothing more and because I am not accepting it as something bad. I can say that now after I learned to cope with it.) I was rejected by the local Indians as they couldn’t understand that that condition is not a sickness and so it can’t be really cured. It’s just a disorder of my body. But I never gave up on life and so I had lots of adventures roaming around the plateau where we live in Peru, South America, with my mother’s blessings. But after I made friends with my condors I named Tamo and Tima, everything changed. It changed for the good. I was finally loved. And I am the hero and I embrace my problem. In better words: I had embraced my problem before I made friends with my condors Tamo and Tima. I held onto it and I felt sorry for myself and cried a lot, wanting to run away or something worse. But did it help me? Did it become better? Did I grow taller? No, nothing of that helped me. I didn’t have those questions when I was still in my sorrow, but all these questions came to me later, after I was loved and was cherished. One day I looked up into the sky and saw the majestic condors flying in the air. Here and now, I made up my mind. I wanted to become friends with them. I believed if I could achieve that, all my sorrow and rejection would be over. And true enough, it was over. I was loved. I even became famous. And so, if you are in a situation, with whatever your problem is, find something you could rely on and stick to it, love that and do with that what you were meant to do. And I never run from conflicts.

He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flutter of wings. He tried to count them before all their darting quivering bodies passed: six, ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd or even in number. Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the upper sky. They were flying high and low but ever round and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right, circling about a temple of air.

He wagged his tail, and his whole body tingled. He realized the emptiness inside was not filled with happiness. Blue felt a glow within that was a result of more than just the warm sunshine on a spring day. It was more than just the gentle tumble of the waterfall, or the wind or the sound of birds. It was much, much more he knew. He looked about him and he knew he had found what he had been looking for. He had found more than his true heart's desire... He had found a forever home!

He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time.

Happier than a bird with a french fry.

Hey, ants!" she shouted. "Please help. Anteater is very hungry, but cannot find any food.

High above us, the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.

Hoverboarding looks so fun, like being a bird. But actually doing it is hard work." Shay shrugged. "Being a bird's probably hard work too. Flapping your wings all day, you know?

How can one deceive these dear little birds, when they look at one so sweetly and confidingly? I call them birds because there is nothing in the world better than birds!

How can i fit in a coop, When i am a bird Willing to fly and stop by.

Humans have better wings than birds: Human mind is a perfect wing and with this wing we can fly to some farthermost places no bird can ever dream! Yes, mind is a wing; and when it comes to flying man is the most sophisticated bird on earth!

I adore the sky wearing rainbow shawl of love for the birds so that they could fly free in warmth after the storm

I came to that wooden marching band. I stopped and looked. There was a trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and drum. Birds don't live alone, I told myself. They live in flocks. Like people. People are always in a group. Like that little wooden band.

If about a dozen genera of birds had become extinct or were unknown, who would have ventured to have surmised that birds might have existed which used their wings solely as flappers, like the logger-headed duck (Micropterus of Eyton); as fins in the water and front legs on the land, like the penguin; as sails, like the ostrich; and functionally for no purpose, like the Apteryx. Yet the structure of each of these birds is good for it, under the conditions of life to which it is exposed, for each has to live by a struggle; but it is not necessarily the best possible under all possible conditions. It must not be inferred from these remarks that any of the grades of wing-structure here alluded to, which perhaps may all have resulted from disuse, indicate the natural steps by which birds have acquired their perfect power of flight; but they serve, at least, to show what diversified means of transition are possible.