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“I don't feed the birds because they need me; I feed the birds because I need them.”
― Kathi Hutton

“The presence of a single bird can change everything for one who appreciates them.”
― Julie Zickefoose, Saving Jemima: Life and Love with a Hard-Luck Jay

“Some people are very competitive in their birding. Maybe they'll die happy, having seen a thousand species before they die, but I'll die happy knowing I've spent all that quiet time being present.”
― Lynn Thomson, Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir

“You could do worse than to spend your days staring at blue jays.”
― Julie Zickefoose, Saving Jemima: Life and Love with a Hard-Luck Jay

“I sat there and my love to him poured out more and more, and, lo, he flew down to a stump, and then to my knee. I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that the important thing is the love that goes out from oneself.”
― Agnes Grinstead Anderson, Approaching the Magic Hour: Memories of Walter Anderson

“The sharp thrill of seeing them [killdeer birds] reminded me of childhood happiness, gifts under the Christmas tree, perhaps, a kind of euphoria we adults manage to shut out most of the time. This is why I bird-watch, to recapture what it's like to live in this moment, right now.”
― Lynn Thomson, Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir

“This Byrd wants a Wren.”
― Leslea Tash, Bird After Bird

“To be standing together in a frosty field, looking up into the sky, marvelling at birds and revelling in the natural world around us, was a simple miracle. And I wondered why we were so rarely able to appreciate it.”
― Lynn Thomson, Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir

“Every bird at the marsh filled us with a little light. I wondered if I was just so simple that this was all it took. But then I thought, I'm lucky that this is all it takes, and knew that I was especially lucky that this was all it took for my teenaged son, too.”
― Lynn Thomson, Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir

“This landscape consists of Pablo Casals' cello and four turkey vultures riding the ribbon of warm air rising from the highway. Concrete forms for abstractions my mind can only grope at: the wings and blood, the blue and black and float and soar, the aching beauty.”
― Anne Batterson, The Black Swan: Memory, Midlife, and Migration

“For Zugunruhe is the word describing what's inside a bird that makes it want to spread its wings and cherish flight above all things.”
― Michael C. Kinsey, Dreams of Zugunruhe

“I see reason for hope, but I also make a plea for vigilance on behalf of wild nature. More citizens' action, undertaken by more of us working in concert, can lead us to a new and better world. Let's all raise the flag for wilderness, wood warblers, and all the wild things.”
― Bruce M. Beehler, North on the Wing: Travels with the Songbird Migration of Spring

“A native landscape enters a child’s mind through a meld of sensations: the smell of seaweed or hay, the sound of cicadas, the cold grit of stone. It is all heart and magic, confusion rather than order, but the feeling it evokes is wholly satisfying and lasting. Gaining this kind of deep familiarity with a landscape other than your native one is like learning to speak a foreign language. You can’t hope for quick or easy fluency. You work from the outside in, by accumulating a vocabulary of observed details. You learn where things happen in the rhythmic revolutions of the days and the year, which shrubs harbor families of grackles, which stands of beach plum send out sprays of August bloom, where the hog-nose snake waits for its toad, and the toad for its fly. Slowly the strange becomes familiar; the familiar becomes precious.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, Birds by the Shore: Observing the Natural Life of the Atlantic Coast

“A nice piece of one-upmanship is to festoon your bins with rings �� bird rings that is, not diamond rings or earrings (I think that would be considered dude). The rings are supposed to have come from corpses of rare birds found along the tide line, but if necessary, you can nick them from bird observatory ringing rooms �� but you really shouldn’t.”
― Bill Oddie, Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book

“Another impressive postscript which you can tag on to a description is: ‘Observer familiar with the species�� (this is supposed to denote that you’ve seen one before, either in this country or abroad and so can be reliably expected to recognise it again) but it isn’t infallible �� the record may well come back with a reject slip marked: ‘Committee familiar with the observer��!”
― Bill Oddie, Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book

“Downy woodpecker.�� “Northern mockingbird.�� “Orchard oriole.�� “Prairie warbler.�� “Gyrfalcon.”“You’re making these up,�� she said, poking him with her elbow. “No, I swear I’m not.�� “Then birds are the best-named animals in the entire universe.”
― Casey Wells, Dead Boy

“Beginning around 1910, The Great Migration saw some 6 million black people surge Northward, out of the states of the former Confederacy, spurred by the same thing that lies behind the yearly migration North in the spring for so many bird species: improved prospects for the next generation.”
― Christian Cooper, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

“Not all birds need fresh water to drink. Some can stay hydrated through their food. Desert-dwelling Black-throated Sparrows, for example, obtain water from their diet of juicy insects and succulents. Others, such as gulls and albatross, have salt glands that allow them to drink seawater and expel the salt.”
― Heather Wolf, Find More Birds: 111 Surprising Ways to Spot Birds Wherever You Are

“Not all birds need fresh water to drink . . . gulls and albatross have salt glands that allow them to drink seawater and expel the salt.”
― Heather Wolf, Find More Birds: 111 Surprising Ways to Spot Birds Wherever You Are

“[Birds'] lives parallel our own in so many ways and are so filled with humorous and tragic incidents as to fascinate us when once we have learned to observe them intelligently. If only we could sit down and talk things over with any one of them, I am sure that bird would be a valued friend for life.”
― Arthur A Allen

“Birding shifts your perceptions, adding new layers of meaning and brokering connections between sounds and seasons, across far-flung places, and between who we are as people and a wild world that both transcends and embraces us.”
― Christian Cooper, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

“Once you tune in to one aspect of nature, you eventually become aware of the whole connected network of life around us.”
― Christian Cooper, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

“The suburbs can seem anti-septic. Nature mowed and manicure to Better Homes and Gardens conformity. But wild things roam there that can't be tamed.”
― Christian Cooper, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

“How do you describe how the presence of a creature can take you outside yourself, to a most exalted place?”
― Christian Cooper, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World