Quotes About Wildlife

Most animals show themselves sparingly. The grizzly bear is six to eight hundred pounds of smugness. It has no need to hide. If it were a person, it would laugh loudly in quiet restaurants, boastfully wear the wrong clothes for special occasions, and probably play hockey.

This is not wilderness for designation or for a park. Not a scenic wilderness and not one good for fishing or the viewing of wildlife. It is wilderness that gets into your nostrils, that runs with your sweat. It is the core of everything living, wilderness like molten iron.

We guard our bodies until they are old and tasteless, when we could have fed ourselves to claw and fur, been literally reincarnated in the cells of a lion sleeping in the sun, the wall of muscle that is a bear crashing through a rotten log in search of ant eggs. Why not return again and again, glistening, gilded every time?

Kids: If a bear is wearing a ranger hat, it's because he ate the ranger!

It 's the time of year when Canadians mate.

Besides, humans aren't prey. They are our natural enemies. They are to be avoided.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

The quoll is like the Australian version of the honey badger. It's a little mongrel that gets around and is pretty fierce and will take on a few things. You don't want to get that in your campsite.

The question of one versus two species of African elephants isn't about settling an arcane DNA argument; it's about life or death for these majestic, extraordinary creatures.

I'm an avid animal lover. When I was 16, I wanted to be a vet or a zookeeper. I grew up with animals. At one time we had between five and eight dogs in the house, with four cats. We're menagerie people.

My mom was a rescue veterinarian, and I grew up helping her nurse injured animals back to health. Any deer hit by a car, fox caught in a trap, whatever it was that got hurt, everyone brought them to my mom.

I don't know anything about the Chicago Bears, but I know a few things about bears. I know they eat fish out of rivers sometimes. They like salmon. They're cuddly-looking, but they're very vicious.

Maybe our best family trip started at Victoria Falls, which drenches you with spray and is so vast that it makes Niagara Falls seem like a backyard creek. Then we rented a car and made our way to Hwange National Park, which was empty of people but crowded with zebras, giraffes, elephants and more.

I didn't grow up playing video games. I grew up catching crawdads in the creek and minnows and lizards and snakes.

free as the Canada geese that pass by

She wears chunky gold neck jewelry like battle armor and carries a leather briefcase for which some crocodile or snake probably gave its life.

Coyotes began yipping, their chorus of cries echoing into the distant Marble mountains.

A sign warned her to keep a lookout for river otters, osprey—what the heck were osprey?—and bald eagles.

An ostrich egg is bigger than its brain.

A pair of dolphins swept by us in the water, flicking their heads out to get a look at us as they went. One of them made a chittering sound that wasn't very melodic. The other twitched its tail and splashed a little water our way, all in good fun. They weren't the attractive Flipper kind of dolphins. They were regular dolphins that aren't as pretty and don't get cast on television. Maybe they just refused to sell out and see a plastic surgeon. I held up a fist to them. Represent.

Ever heard a pack of wolves growling in anger? It's less than restful.

I saw a doe and a fawn but Sonia chased them away, roaring as if they meant us harm. I rehearsed my entire life and I heard my heart for the first time. In the morning I had fantasies of love and laughter, even creating the image of Duane and my father riding horseback up the drawn toward me.

Three hundred yards away, a mule deer that had already browsed its fill and been to water, rested in the shelter of a dry wash. Long-eared jack rabbits went about their various affairs. Gophers ventured a few yards from their dens, then squeaked and scurried back. A heavy-bodied rattlesnake, just emerged from its winter's den, coiled near a clump of cholla cactus and waited for a pack rat to venture from its spiny nest.

Drifting out of the black sky, it was a far-carrying and haunting cry. The first hairy man who heard that sound had tilted his head to search out its source, and it has touched a sensitive chord in human beings ever since. It was the voice of freedom unlimited, the incarnation of nature itself, the sound and song of fond dreams: the cry of the northbound wild geese.