Quotes About Birdwatching

I'm always surrounded by crazy people, but when I come back to the country I'm into my plants, I love gardening, I love bird watching and I absolutely love nature.

These are the days when Birds come back—A very few—a Bird or two—To take a backward look.These are the days when skies resumeThe old—old sophistries of June—A blue and gold mistake.

When you have birds you stare at them a lot and their eyes are recessed on their head. When they look at something they tilt their head in a quizzical expression.

I am a bad birdwatcher. On the other hand, and taking one thing with another, when it comes to enjoying birds I am world-class.

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

The bottom line: higher-level taxonomy is usually unhelpful for birding. Species-level taxonomy is a matter of opinion. But in between, at the levels of family and genus, that's where taxonomy can be really helpful for birding.

Melbourne has great eateries and you can go birdwatching.

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 roll a magazine into a tube and peer at her through it as if it were a telescope...She pushes her beak into it as far as it will go, biting the empty air inside. Putting my mouth to my side of my paper telescope I boom into it: 'Hello, Mabel.' She pulls her beak free. All the feathers on her forehead are raised. She shakes her tail rapidly from side to side and shivers with happiness.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT this statement? "A backyard bird feeder will help take the stress out of your life." A friend of mine uses that line to promote her birding shop in Barnegat, New Jersey. It's warm, appealing, and will, with luck, help her turn a lot of people on to birding. However, with no offense to my friend, stress-free bird feeding falls into the same category as painless dentistry.

It's one of those birds which very helpfully calls out its own name when it is flying. "Kea! Kea! Kea!" Birdwatchers love them for that. It would be great if the Pallas's grasshopper warbler would learn the same trick. Make warbler identification a lot easier.

Why Do People Spend Insane Amounts of Money? Here's a little marketing secret for you: Almost everybody has at least one passion, one interest, one obsession where they'll gleefully spend irrational amounts of money. For some it's makeup or shoes. For some it's rock concerts. For some it's bowling. For some it's bird watching. For some it's skiing.