Finch Bird Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Finch Bird. Here they are! All 45 of them:

If I had to wish for something, just one thing, it would be that Hannah would never see Tate the way I did. Never see Tate's beautiful, lush hair turn brittle, her skin sallow, her teeth ruined by anything she could get her hands on that would make her forget. That Hannah would never count how many men there were, or how vile humans can be to one another. That she would never see the moments in my life that were full of neglect, and fear, and revulsion, moments I can never go back to because I know they will slow me down for the rest of my life if I let myself remember them for one moment. Tate, who had kept Hannah alive that night, reading her the story of Jem Finch and Mrs. Dubose. And suddenly I know I have to go. But this time without being chased by the Brigadier, without experiencing the kindness of a postman from Yass, and without taking along a Cadet who will change the way I breath for the rest of my life.
Melina Marchetta (On the Jellicoe Road)
I felt like one who wants to trap and cage a little bird, and after years of waiting and luring and baiting finds that she must do no more than hold out her hand, and the finch lands on her finger and does not fly. You scarcely dare to move. It rests on your hand whole and free, foolishly trusting and infinitely courageous. It will never be more beautiful.
Elizabeth Wein
And, in this staunch little portrait, it’s hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another. But who knows what Fabritius intended? There’s not enough of his work left to even make a guess. The bird looks out at us. It’s not idealized or humanized. It’s very much a bird. Watchful, resigned. There’s no moral or story. There’s no resolution. There’s only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
you are the yellow-breasted finch singing the sound of sunshine into my heart
D. Bodhi Smith (Bodhi Smith Impressionist Photography (#6))
It was as if someone had left the bird there as a kind of telegram of feathers, oily feathers that looked like they’d struggled, shuttered a little before letting go into flight forever.
Kristen Henderson (Drum Machine)
Medieval banquets show people eating all kinds of foods that are no longer eaten. Birds especially featured. Eagles, herons, peacocks, sparrows, larks, finches, swans, and almost all other feathered creatures were widely consumed. This wasn’t so much because swans and other birds were fantastically delicious—they weren’t; that’s why we don’t eat them now—but rather because other, better meats weren’t available.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
I want you to read ‘God Sees the Truth, but Waits,’ ” said Mother. “Tolstoy writes about a man, wrongly accused of a murder, who spends the rest of his life in a prison camp. Twenty-six years later, as a convict in Siberia, he meets the true murderer and has an opportunity to free himself, but chooses not to. His longing for home leaves him and he dies.” I ask Mother why this story matters to her. “Each of us must face our own Siberia,” she says. “We must come to peace within our own isolation. No one can rescue us. My cancer is my Siberia.” Suddenly, two white birds about the size of finches, dart in front of us and land on the snow.
Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place)
Proud Songsters The thrushes sing as the sun is going, And the finches whistle in ones and pairs, And as it gets dark loud nightingales In bushes Pipe, as they can when April wears, As if all Time were theirs. These are brand-new birds of twelve-months’ growing, Which a year ago, or less than twain, No finches were, nor nightingales, Nor thrushes, But only particles of grain, And earth, and air, and rain.
Thomas Hardy (Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres)
A population of organisms in the wild must have enough natural variation such that winners and losers can be picked. A flock of finches on an island, for instance, needs to possess enough intrinsic diversity in beak sizes such that a season of drought might be able to select birds with the toughest or longest beaks. Take that diversity away—force all finches to have the same beak—and selection comes up empty-handed. All the birds go extinct in a fell swoop. Evolution grinds to a halt. But
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
I'm sorry, she thought. But she said nothing. I can't save you or anybody else from being dark. She thought of Frank. I wonder if he's dead yet. Said the wrong things; spoke out of line. No, she thought. Somehow he likes Japs. Maybe he identifies with them because they're ugly. She had always told Frank that he was ugly. Large pores. Big nose. Her own skin was finely knit, unusually so. Did he fall dead without me? A fink is a finch, a form of bird. And they say birds die.
Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle)
Peter became very clever at helping the birds to build their nests; soon he could build better than a wood-pigeon, and nearly as well as a blackbird, though never did he satisfy the finches, and he made nice little water-troughs near the nests and dug up worms for the young ones with his fingers. He also became very learned in bird-lore, and knew an east wind from a west wind by its smell, and he could see the grass growing and hear the insects walking about inside the tree-trunks.
J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens)
this beautiful bird, a little yellow-breasted finch, landed on my windowsill...she just stopped my time flow...i looked at her, for i could see nothing else mattered in that moment, and she looked directly at me, and then turned her head slightly sideways, and then quickly back...she then sang to me a wonderful melody of tweets and chirps in harmony with the sound of sunshine glowing through her feathers...her wild and innocent essence warmed all my senses, to my core...and all of a sudden with an assured certainty, i knew everything was going to be alright
D. Bodhi Smith (Bodhi Simplique Impressionist Photography and Insights (#5))
Darwin had reasoned that evolution works via natural selection—but for natural selection to work, there had to be something natural to select. A population of organisms in the wild must have enough natural variation such that winners and losers can be picked. A flock of finches on an island, for instance, needs to possess enough intrinsic diversity in beak sizes such that a season of drought might be able to select birds with the toughest or longest beaks. Take that diversity away—force all finches to have the same beak—and selection comes up empty-handed. All the birds go extinct in a fell swoop. Evolution grinds to a halt.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
The cardinal directions are north, west, south, and east. The cardinal temperatures are 35º Fahrenheit, 67º Fahrenheit, 3º Celsius, and 10º Kelvin. The cardinal locations are a cave, a long-abandoned cabin, the bottom of an oceanic trench, and City Hall. The cardinal emotions are wild abandon, guarded affection, directionless jealousy, and irritation. The cardinal birds are hawk, sparrow, finch, and owl. The cardinal names are Jeremy, Kim, Trigger, and Jamie. And, finally, the cardinal sounds are a door slamming, slight movement in still water, popcorn popping, and a standard guitar G string being snipped with wire cutters. This has been the Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner.
Joseph Fink (The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe (Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, #2))
I asked Bernd Heinrich if he knew why feeder birds, like finches, discard so many seeds. It turns out he and other scientiests did research on this back in the 1990s - of course, he did -measuring discarded seeds with painstaking accuracy. The short answer: Songbirds prefer shorter, fatter unshelled sunflower seeds, more depth than length, because they contain more oil. They take half a second to judge the seeds, dropping the low-density ones, until they find a seed to their liking.
Amy Tan (The Backyard Bird Chronicles)
The richer we get in a consumer society, the more acutely we become aware of how many grades of value--of both leisure and labor--we have climbed. The higher we are on the pyramid, the less likely we are to give up time to simple idleness and to apparently nonproductive pursuits. The joy of listening to the neighborhood finch is easily overshadowed by stereophonic recordings of "Bird Songs of the World," the walk through the park downgraded by preparations for a packaged bird-watching tour into the jungle. It becomes difficult to economize time when all commitments are for the long run. Staffan Linder points out that there is a strong tendency for us to over-commit to the future, so that when the future becomes present, we seem to be conscious all the time of having an acute scarcity, simply because we have committed ourselves to about thirty hours a day instead of twenty-four. In addition to the mere fact that time has competitive uses and high marginal utility in an affluent society, this overcommitment creates a sense of pressure and harriedness.
Ivan Illich (Tools for Conviviality)
during his time in the Galápagos Islands, an interesting diversity in the beaks of finches. The story as conventionally told (or at least as frequently remembered by many of us) is that Darwin, while traveling from island to island, noticed that the finches’ beaks on each island were marvelously adapted for exploiting local resources—that on one island beaks were sturdy and short and good for cracking nuts, while on the next island beaks were perhaps long and thin and well suited for winkling food out of crevices—and it was this that set him to thinking that perhaps the birds had not been created this way, but had in a sense created themselves.
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
In that moment, watching the flock of finches, I was allowing myself to become lost and absorbed in the sights in front of me. In these early days of my interest in birdwatching, I was still burdened by an inability to manage and regulate my mental health. Birdwatching quickly became my escape route and I started to notice that when I was out, on my own, experiencing nature and birds in a personal and intimate way, I was more relaxed than I'd ever been before. My breathing rate slowed and I closed my mind to repetitive thoughts and worries. My only focus was observing birds and learning about them. I was losing myself in birds, in a positive way.
Joe Harkness (Bird Therapy)
When we first arrived at Auschwitz there were birds. I didn't know what kind, just brown birds, like the finches. They came for about a week and then the Nazis electrified the fences. I was out early the first morning they had the power on. A whole flight of these little birds came in and as they settled on the wire they made quick bright bursts of flame and smoke. The others did not know what was happening and they kept coming in and getting incinerated. The next day the birds did not come close to the camp. We saw them in the distance for a few days, but they never came close. At first I thought they had just naturally learned a lesson, but then I realized they had become sensitive to evil.
Lawrence Thornton (Imagining Argentina)
THE COUGHBALL of an owl is a packed lump of everything the bird can’t digest—bones, fur, teeth, claws, and nails. An owl tears apart its catch, gulps it down whole, and nourishes itself on blood and flesh. The residue, the undissolvable, fuses. In the small, light, solid pellet, the frail skull of a finch, femur of a mouse, cleft necklace of vertebrae, seed-fine teeth, gray gopher and rabbit fur. A perfect compression of being. What is the essence, the soul? my Jesuit teachers used to ask of their students. What is the irreducible? I answer, what the owl pukes. That is also the story—what is left after the events in all their juices and chaos are reduced to the essence. The story— all that time does not digest.
Louise Erdrich (Four Souls)
However, Rothschild was easily the most scientific collector of his age, though also the most regrettably lethal, for in the 1890s he became interested in Hawaii, perhaps the most temptingly vulnerable environment Earth has yet produced. Millions of years of isolation had allowed Hawaii to evolve 8,800 unique species of animals and plants. Of particular interest to Rothschild were the islands’ colorful and distinctive birds, often consisting of very small populations inhabiting extremely specific ranges. The tragedy for many Hawaiian birds was that they were not only distinctive, desirable, and rare—a dangerous combination in the best of circumstances—but also often heartbreakingly easy to take. The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a show of welcome. The last of the species vanished in 1896, killed by Rothschild’s ace collector Harry Palmer, five years after the disappearance of its cousin the lesser koa finch, a bird so sublimely rare that only one has ever been seen: the one shot for Rothschild’s collection. Altogether during the decade or so of Rothschild’s most intensive collecting, at least nine species of Hawaiian birds vanished, but it may have been more. Rothschild was by no means alone in his zeal to capture birds at more or less any cost. Others in fact were more ruthless. In 1907 when a well-known collector named Alanson Bryan realized that he had shot the last three specimens of black mamos, a species of forest bird that had only been discovered the previous decade, he noted that the news filled him with “joy.
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
In 1972, Bayber's work underwent another metamorphosis, yet refused to be defined by or adhere to any specific style. Elements of abstract expressionism, modernism, surrealism, and neo-expressionism combine with figurative art to create works which remain wholly original and highly complex, both delighting and terrifying at a subconscious level. There is nothing fragile here, nothing dreamlike. No protections are offered, not for the artist himself and not for those viewing his work. All is called forth in a raw state, human values finessed on the canvas, softened and sharpened, separated and made aggregate. While there are certain motifs in these works- often a suggestion of water, the figure of a bird- and various elements are repeated, aside from an introverted complexity, the context in which they appear is never the same from one piece to the next. What ties these works together is the suggestion of loss, of disappearance, and of longing ( see figs. 87-95)" The figure of a bird. He had forgotten his own writing. Finch took the book back to his desk and pulled a magnifying glass from the top drawer to study the color plates. Thomas had completed six paintings in 1972, four of them after July. In each of those four, Finch managed to find what he had seen long ago, the figure of a bird. Was it Alice, flown away from him?
Tracy Guzeman (The Gravity of Birds)
When zebra finches are raised by Bengalese finch foster parents, the juvenile birds retains the silent gaps characteristic of zebra finch song patterns, which is distinct from the shorter gaps of the Bengalese song. Thus, the syntactic rules are genetically inherited species-specific patterns, just like brain rhythms in mammals, whereas the variable content of the syllables and words can be acquired by experience. The pattern and content are processed by dissociable neuronal circuits in the bird's brain. In the auditory cortex, slow-firing neurons are mainly sensitive to the acoustic features, such as timbre and pitch. In contrast, faster firing, possible inhibitory, neurons encode the silent gaps and rhythm of the song, and they are insensitive to acoustic features. This division of labor between the inherited temporal patterns that serve as the syntax and the flexible content may be similar to the way human speech is organized.
György Buzsáki (The Brain from Inside Out)
Much of Darwin’s theory of evolution, in fact, comes from observing the techniques of pigeon breeders. Most of the first chapter of On the Origin of Species is about pigeons. His editor actually suggested he chuck the rest and focus on the birds: “Everyone is interested in pigeons,” he told Darwin. It makes a better Hollywood story to say that Darwin’s revelations came as epiphanies in strange lands, but he really made most of his discoveries at home. On the Beagle he made some acute observations of finches, but it wasn’t until Darwin made a close examination of the utterly unexotic pigeons of England that he was able to articulate a detailed mechanism explaining how evolution worked. In a very real way, the folk knowledge of pigeon fanciers is the foundation of our understanding of biology.
Nathanael Johnson (Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness)
There was no way I could explain that it had all happened so fast, that I wasn’t smiling away at the cats chewing the birds. It was that my happiness about the sweet peas and the finches hadn’t had time to fade. As
Lucia Berlin (A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories)
Never your bird, never finch never graceful feathered thing.
Krysten Hill (How Her Spirit Got Out)
I’m bird watching.” The lie slips off my tongue almost effortlessly. The tightness in my chest keeps me from wanting to share my true feelings. I’m a little on edge. Mom beams! “Ooh, I love ornithology! What did you find? A hummingbird? A gold finch? A purple martin?” She shuffles toward me in her fuzzy pink bunny slippers. I turn back toward the window helplessly, my eyes scanning the yard in a desperate zigzag. “Um, no—none of those. I was watching that beautiful blue jay.” Mom follows my gaze and then gives me a look. “Sweetie, that bird is a robin.
Meg Kimball (Corey Takes a Leap! (The Advice Avengers: Volume 4))
Sometimes the strength will be less obvious. Consider Charles Darwin's finches, a subject you may vaguely remember from high school biology class. When Darwin first encountered these birds on the Galapagos Islands, he gathered numerous specimens, not quite realizing what he had discovered. Upon his return, he presented these specimens to the famous English ornithologist John Gould for identification. Gould's analysis revealed that the specimens Darwin had submitted were in fact highly variable. What at first glance were all just "finches" turned out to be twelve different species. There were similarities, but evolution had allowed each to develop a distinctive strength. Each species had a novel beak structure that allowed it to exploit a specific food resource. Some evolved to eat seeds, others fruit, others insects, and others grubs. In business terms, they all had similar core competencies (feathers, wings, feet, beak), but it was a distinctive, seemingly subtle strength—the type of beak—that allowed the finches to effectively compete for a specific type of food.
Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
BIRDS MAKE TRICKY ESCAPES WHEN THINGS GO AFOWL
Lynn Byk (The Fearless Moral Inventory of Elsie Finch)
A man was arrested at a Cuban airport with birds sewn into his pants. 64 were alive, but the 2 that were sewn next to his groin were dead. The birds were rare finches and hummingbirds with beaks taped shut; prior to a strip-search, the man claimed that the bulge was a pigeon, who was a gift from his grandson.
Jake Jacobs (The Giant Book Of Strange Facts (The Big Book Of Facts 15))
Preoccupied by whipping egg whites with a whisk and ruminating about what she must deal with today, she's startled by an ominous thud against an upstairs window. "Please, no," she exclaims in dismay, setting down the whisk and run ning to the door. She disarms the alarm and hurries out to the garden patio where a yel low finch flutters helplessly on old brick. She gently picks it up, and its head lolls from side to side, eyes half shut. She talks soothingly to it, strokes its silky feathers as it tries to right itself and fly, and its head lolls from side to side. It's just stunned, will suddenly recover, and it falls over and flutters and its head lolls from side to side. Maybe it won't die. Foolish wishful thinking for someone who knows better, and she carries the bird inside. In the locked bottom drawer of the kitchen desk is a locked metal box, and inside that, the bottle of chloroform.
Patricia Cornwell (Book of the Dead (Kay Scarpetta, #15))
Falken navigated the veil of hedgerow and shrubs beside the trail where they’d stopped and found a copse in the meadow. There, he undid his britches and sighed in relief as he broke his warm, golden seal upon the taupe bark of his chosen tree. A finch landed on a low strung branch next to the boy and regarded him. “Don’t watch me. Shoo!” The bird chirped in defiance and Falken waved his hand at it, distracting him from the fine, universal art of not peeing on himself. “Shoo, birdie!” The bird remained still. Falken looked down at a wet patch on his woad-dyed trousers. “Now look what you made me do!” he cursed, and the bird took off, satisfied.
Peter Hackshaw (The Shadow Sect (Netherdei #1))
Chapter XV The Gathering of the Clouds Now we will return to Bilbo and the dwarves. All night one of them had watched, but when morning came they had not heard or seen any sign of danger. But ever more thickly the birds were gathering. Their companies came flying from the South; and the crows that still lived about the Mountain were wheeling and crying unceasingly above. “Something strange is happening,” said Thorin. “The time has gone for the autumn wanderings; and these are birds that dwell always in the land; there are starlings and flocks of finches; and far off there are many carrion birds as if a battle were afoot!” Suddenly Bilbo pointed: “There is that old thrush again!” he cried. “He seems to have escaped, when Smaug smashed the mountain-side, but I don’t suppose the snails have!” Sure enough the old thrush was there, and as Bilbo pointed, he flew towards them and perched on a stone near by. Then he
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit (The Lord of the Rings, #0))
But there was some surprising tenderness as well. Forbidden from shooting any birds or animals while in Tibet, the climbers were as amazed by the different kinds of avian life—magpies, linnets, and finches, Brahminy ducks, bar-headed geese, and crazily crowned hoopoes—as they were by the birds’ curiosity and lack of fear of humans. “It is an never-ending joy to find the birds of Tibet so tame,” Hugh Ruttledge wrote. “The place is a paradise for the ornithologist.” Even wild goats would approach them without fear. And on many of the high passes, they found “a little forest of prayer flags,” Frank Smythe recalled, “with their stiff, dry rustling.” Here was a land of harsh but surprising beauty,
Scott Ellsworth (The World Beneath Their Feet: Mountaineering, Madness, and the Deadly Race to Summit the Himalayas)
In fact, I think they should be called Lack's finches and not Darwin's. Darwin didn't see the significance of the birds. He thought there was just one species per island. He didn't even try to pull it together - he didn't do a bloody thing with them except collect them.
Jonathan Weiner (The Beak of the Finch)
Silent morning Quiet nature in dim light It is almost peaceless of the chirping of birds Waiting for the sunrise Feeling satisfied with pure breath Busy life- in pursuit of livelihood, running people In the intensity of the wood-burning sun, astray finch Sometimes the advent of north-wester I’m scared The calamitous heartache of the falling Caesalpinia pulcherrima! Listen to get ears Surprisingly I saw the unadulterated green weald Vernal, yellow and crimson colors are the glorious beauty of the unique nature An amazing reflection of Bengal The housewife’s fringe of azure color sari fly in the gentle breeze The cashew forest on the bank of flowing rivers white egret couple peep-bo The kite crookedly flies get lost in the far unknown The footstep of blustery childhood on the zigzag path Standing on a head-high hill touches the fog Beckoning with the hand of the magical horizon The liveliness of a rainy-soaked juvenile Momentary fascinated visibility of Ethnic group’s pineapple, tea, banana and jhum cultivation at the foot of the hill Trailer- shrub, algae and pebble-stone come back to life in the cleanly stream of the fountain Bumble bee is rudderless in the drunken smell of mountain wild flower The heart of the most beloved is touched by pure love In the distant sea water, pearl glow in the sunlight Rarely, the howl of a hungry tiger float in the air from a deep forest The needy fisherman’s ​​hope and aspiration are mortgaged to the infinite sea The waves come rushing on the beach delete the footprint to the beat of the dancing The white cotton cloud is invisible in the bluey The mew flies at impetuous speed to an unknown destination A slice of happy smile at the bend of the wave The western sky covered with the crimson glow of twilight Irritated by the cricket’s endless acrid sound The evening lamp is lit to flickering light of the firefly The red crabs tittup wildly on the beach Steadfast seeing Sunset A beautiful dream Next sunrise.
Ashraful
And Cuicui--Cuicui was thinking about so many things, amid the calls of the finches and cuckoo birds in the mountains and the chop of lumbermen, felling bamboos in the valley.s Stories of tigers eating people, and the mountain songs people sang to belittle and make fun of each other, the square pit in which papermakers mixed their pulp, the molten iron that flowed out of a foundry smelting furnace--she felt compelled to recollect everything her ears had heard and her eyes had seen. It seemed to be her way of putting aside the present matter and wishing it away. And yet she misunderstood what was really going on. (91)
Shen Congwen (Border Town)
Just a few years ago, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis’s Department of Ecology and Evolution determined that many species of birds, including juncos, finches, and warblers, have ventriloquial abilities. (Her research focused on a yellow-rumped warbler and a stuffed owl.) Other studies followed, all demonstrating that birds can adjust their “acoustic directionality” in order to beam their alarm calls in chosen directions.
Jon Young (What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World)
I learned . . . to read and interpret the country: the ground underfoot, the coming and going of creatures, the arrival and departure of birds, the seasonal flowering and fading of plant life. These things — the physical evidence of them — constitute a language, a grammar , and a syntax; they represent in some way the original perception we may have acquired of a fundamental order in things, in their relationships and significant connections. Ad by this I mean (among other things) story, narrative, the thread of sequence and consequence [John Haines, "The Creative Spirit in Art and Literature", The Norton Book of Nature Writing, Robert Finch, editor].
Robert Finch (Norton Book of Nature Writing)
Outback birds need regular water, and many of these are thriving. Those doing better than ever include zebra finches, wood ducks, Bourke's parrots and possibly emus. On the other hand many insect-eaters are doing badly, because grazing stock destroy the plants on which insects breed. Seed-eaters themselves suffer when grasses are grazed too low to set seed. Dams create plenty of losers as well as winners, and that's something to keep in mind.
Tim Low (Radio Volume 2)
Learning to Speak" As a child running loose, I said it this way: Bird. Bird, a startled sound at field’s edge. the sound my mouth makes, pushing away the cold. So, at the end of this quiet afternoon, wanting to write the love poems I’ve never written, I turn from the shadow in the cottonwood and say blackbird, as if to you. There is the blackbird. Black bird, until its darkness is the darkness of a woman’s hair falling across my uptunred face. And I go on speaking into the night. The oriole, the flicker, the gold finch.
Peter Everwine (Collecting the Animals)
Darwin found that if you looked closely enough, nature conveyed a very different message. How could, for instance, the Galápagos Islands serve as home to thirteen separate species of finches, each similar to the other, yet each peculiarly adapted with different-shaped beaks for their particular island habitats? Clearly these finches had migrated over time from the mainland and from one island to another, and then, once separated, had begun to diverge and to become distinct from one another. But how? And why? Why did the giant sloths, whose bones Darwin recovered on his voyage, go extinct, while other creatures thrived in the same environment at the same time? And how was it that some animals seemed poorly designed for their environments, in defiance of Paley’s perfect watchmaker—woodpeckers that lived on treeless terrain, land birds with webbed feet—yet they managed to adapt and survive through makeshift means that no divine designer would ever have intended? Why did pythons have vestigial legs, and why did the bones inside the wings of a bat parallel the bones in the human hand and arm? This was evidence not of a master design, Darwin realized, but of a slow and gradual change in existing forms, spread across the ages, inherited from remote—and shared—ancestors. The evidence he painstakingly assembled on his voyage, then presented, bit by bit, in his classic book, pointed to very slow, very gradual changes in living things over millions of years, to creatures suddenly dying out and disappearing when their forms no longer allowed them to survive in a changing climate or environment, and to new forms of life that emerged and thrived in their place.
Edward Humes (Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul)
Bodega Bay was the same harbor where Alfred Hitchcock had filmed his 1963 horror classic, The Birds, the movie that made the world think twice about backyard feeders. Hitchcock knew the worst shocks came from the mundane, and few creatures were as widespread, and as taken for granted, as birds. So the great director had western gulls dive-bombing children at an outdoor birthday party, raspberry-dipped house finches pouring into a living room through the fireplace, and American crows slashing at Tippi Hed-ren while she cowered in a bedroom. Suffice to say, The Birds was not a popular movie with birders on board this tour boat. After lifetimes of weekends in the field, they knew birds didn’t attack humans. The only way Hitchcock had got ravens to chase actors was to sprinkle their hair with seed. Crows lurked on the gutters of the old schoolhouse because he affixed magnets to their feet. Children fleeing swarms of blackbirds in the movie were actually running on a studio treadmill with birds tied to their necks. It all seemed silly to Levantin. The only menacing thing birds ever did to him was poop on his patio.
Mark Obmascik (The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession)
Is your mom dead?” he asked, immediately regretting it. “Sorry.” “It’s okay. Yes, she died.” Somewhere a bird chirped, and he thought maybe it was a finch from the sound of it, and he said, “My mom died too,” as he looked at his feet, such weird little feet, and he wished they were wings. “That’s who I was talking about. She called me her Kit and I called her my Dakota because we belonged to each other.” But his feet were just feet, sadly, not the flying kind, and so he tossed his thoughts into the air instead, watched them glide around, blossom into breezes, little I-see-yous floating this way and that, landing like a soft quilt on all the world’s small forgotten things.
David Arnold (The Electric Kingdom)
Such professors as are at this moment, in almost every newspaper in the country,—scientific journals among the number,—abusing and ridiculing the poor farmer for destroying the birds that destroy his grain; and telling him, if he were to let the birds alone, they would eat the insects that commit far greater devastation on his precious cerealia! Conceited theorists! it has never occurred to them, that the victims of the farmer’s fowling-piece—the birds that eat corn—would not touch an insect if they were starving! The farmer does not make war on the insect-eating birds. Rarely, or never, does he expend powder and shot on the swallow, the wagtail, the tomtit, the starling, the thrush, the blackbird, the wren, the robin, or any of the grub and fly-feeders. His “game” are the buntings and Fringillidae,—the larks, linnets, finches, barley-birds, yellowhammers, and house sparrows, that form the great flocks afflicting him both in seed-time and harvest;
Walter Scott (The Greatest Sea Novels and Tales of All Time)