Quotes About Ornithologist

I had forgotten the number one truth I had discovered last year in Stockholm, and which should be axiomatic for anyone having to interview or get tangled up with royal persons: it is courtiers who make royalty frightened and frightening; taken neat like whiskey they are perfectly all right. This does not mean that they are as others, but you can get on to plain terms with the species, like an ornithologist making friends with some rare wild duck.

He is recognized as the world authority on big American game mammals, and is an ornithologist of some note. Stooping to pick a speck of brown fluff off the White House lawn, he will murmur, "Very early for a fox sparrow!"84

The distribution of plants in a given locality is not more marked and defined than that of the birds. Show a botanist a landscape, and he will tell you where to look for the lady's-slipper, the columbine, or the harebell. On the same principles, the ornithologist will direct you where to look for the greenlets, the wood-sparrow, or the chewink.

St John Philby was a notable scholar, linguist, and ornithologist, and he did achieve fame of a sort, but he might have found more lasting appreciation had he not been so profoundly irritating, willful, and arrogant. He was a man who regarded his opinions, however briefly adopted, as revealed truth: he never backed down, or listened, or compromised. He was equally swift to give and take offense and ferociously critical of everyone except himself.

He made a noise like an owl. Since Moist was no ornithologist, he did this by saying "woo woo.

One of the bibles of my youth was 'Birds of the West Indies,' by James Bond, a well-known ornithologist, and when I was casting about for a name for my protagonist I thought, 'My God, that's the dullest name I've ever heard,' so I appropriated it. Now the dullest name in the world has become an exciting one.

My wife determined that my genius should prevail, and that my final success as an ornithologist should be triumphant.