Quotes About Wildlife

What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children's parties—I daresay it would even give a merry toot—and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.

Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else.

Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, "Bear!" before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness.

Many fishermen "fin" sharks—that is, slice their fins off, then dump them back into the water to die.

The World Wildlife Fund estimated in 1994 that the number of sharks killed each year was between 40 million and 70 million. As

When they are not eating, rats are likely to be having sex. Rats have a lot of sex—up to twenty times a day. If a male rat can't find a female, he will happily—or at least willingly—find relief in a male.

Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it—its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers—looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is its almost boundless lack of intelligence.

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers. In

Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so.

It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it.

Tarka the otter

Goodness knows what the world is coming to when park rangers carry service revolvers.

were stealing eggs without breaking them, so one night an exterminator sat in hiding to watch. What he saw was that one rat would embrace an egg with all four legs, then roll over on his back. A second rat would then drag the first rat by its tail to their burrow, where they could share their prize in peace.

Twice I flushed grouse, always a terrifying experience: an instantaneous explosion from the undergrowth at your feet, like balled socks fired from a gun, followed by drifting feathers and a lingering residue of fussy, bitching noise. I

the beaver and bear nearly

Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail

Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia's Exotic Invaders

There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile block of eastern American forest holds almost 300,000 mammals—220,000 mice and other small rodents, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30 foxes, and 5 black bears.

Today the National Park Service employs a more casual approach to endangering wildlife: neglect. It spends almost nothing—less than 3 percent of its budget—on research of any type, which is why no one knows how many mussels are extinct or even why they are going extinct.

No less pertinent is that there is just something deeply and unquestionably wrong about killing an animal that is so sweetly and dopily unassuming as a moose. I could have slain this one with a slingshot, with a rock or stick—with a folded newspaper, I'd almost bet.

the trail just disappeared: smooshed into nonexistence by what seemed to have been a large herd of elephants suddenly deciding to take a group nap.

New Rule: Oil companies must stop with the advertisements implying they're friends of the environment. At Exxon Mobil, we care about a thriving wildlife. Please--the only thing an oil executive has in common with a seagull is they'd both steal french fries from a baby.

New Rule: Getting up close and personal with sharks doesn't make you a wildlife enthusiast--it makes you dinner. An Austrian tourist wanted to get face-to-face with sharks, so he went diving in waters baited with bloody fish parts. And he got ate. A friend was asked to describe the man. He needed only two words: Good chum.

New Rule: For at least the next generation, the Crocodile Hunter clan has to leave nature alone. This week, the late Steve Irwin's youngest son was bitten by a boa constrictor. Authorities don't know exactly what went wrong, but they think the accident might have happened when a bunch of idiots let a four-year-old fuck around with a giant snake.