Ornithologist Quotes

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

It’s hard to be an ornithologist and walk through a wood when all around you the world is shouting: ‘Bugger off, this is my bush! Aargh, the nest thief! Have sex with me, I can make my chest big and red!

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

...If you look at mainstream economics there are three things you will not find in a mainstream economic model - Banks, Debt, and Money. How anybody can think they can analyze capital while leaving out Banks, Debt, and Money is a bit to me like an ornithologist trying to work out how a bird flies whilst ignoring that the bird has wings...

Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes.

I am not an ornithologist—I am a bird.

Hell of an ornithologist you'd make.

All may be fair in love and war, but this is ornithology. Cheating is practically one of our scientific principles.

To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs. A roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical conservationist as an undrained one was to the empire-builders. Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes. Thus always does history, whether or marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

Angel was too feeble a word for her. She was heaven entire, embodied in a woman’s body. She was every superlative in every ridiculous emotional dictionary printed in a man’s heart.

I was an infant when my parents died. Thye both were ornithologists. I've tried So often to evoke them that today I have a thousand parents. Sadly they Dissolve in their own virtues and recede, But certain words, chance words I hear or read, Such as "bad heart" always to him refer, And "cancer of the pancreas" to her.

Just be aware,” he whispered, “that as soon as I can, I’m going to kiss you until your corset falls off.

I will always come for you, Beth. You are my sunlight.

Beth,” Devon whispered. “Beth.” He said her name again and again, kissing her throat or jaw or mouth each time, as if he were tasting something sweet. “You’re like a night full of bird stars and magical dreaming. I am so in love with you.

Beth quite simply bewitched him, beyond linguistic sobriety, beyond quantifiable data analysis. She was beauty. She was peace.

central problem is that birds rarely write more than ornithologists—Combining

Male nightingales need to influence the behaviour of female nightingales , and of other males. Some ornithologists have thought of song as conveying information: 'I am a male of the species Luscinia megarhynchos, in breeding condition, with a territory, hormonally primed to mate and build a nest.

You may wonder, as I have, whether U.S. ornithologists assigned “Canada” to the goose’s name for the same reason the Italians called syphilis “the French disease,” while the Poles called it “the German disease” and the Russians called it “the Polish disease.” The answer is no. Taxonomists first observed the geese in Canada.

He’d never fallen so fast for a woman before. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that she uplifted him, drawing him out of cynicism into a happiness he was enjoying wholeheartedly; a happiness that had taken him so off-guard, his usual defenses were useless against it. Then again, maybe he didn’t want to employ them anymore. Beth was welcome in.

Villain,” she said lightly. “Angel,” he retorted.

He wanted her, his clever angel, his rival, his friend.

You truly are an angel, aren’t you?” he whispered. “Not as much as you’d think,” she said.

We expected to see accounts of diligent, noble-minded scientists using research libraries and crouching in rain-soaked hides. But what do I read instead in the newspapers? *Romance*.

Every year, Australian ornithologists field calls about the strange behavior of the musk lorikeet population in the southeastern part of the country. These brilliantly colored parrots sometimes find themselves unable to fly. They stumble around on the ground and generally act like drunken louts. They even appear hung over the next day. It happens when their normal food source, eucalyptus nectar, ferments on the tree. This appears to be one of the only true accounts of wildlife being intoxicated by wild liquor.

I know what I’m talking about. People aren’t interested in romance. They want sober, informative reports that use complex words and make them feel stupid, thereby inspiring them to seek higher education.” A moment of silence followed this speech as Messrs. Fettick and Flogg tried to decide if it was satire.

The fastest extinction in New Zealand – possibly in the entire world – was the Stephen’s Island wren, which lived on tiny Stephen’s Island, in Cook Strait. It was discovered in 1894, when a new lighthouse keeper arrived on the island for the first time. One of his cats caught a bird he didn’t recognise, so he sent the little body to a friend in Wellington, who happened to be a professional ornithologist. By the time the excited friend sent news back that it was a species new to science, the cat had caught another fifteen. And that was it – there were none left. Stephen’s Island wren officially became extinct later the same year. The cat had eaten the first and last of the species, and all the others in between. Its owner, the lighthouse keeper, was the only person ever to have seen one alive.

And it might have been an offer, or it might have been just him dreaming. Either way, he could not seem to help himself. The narrative gravity drew them together slowly; so slowly, either one of them might have stepped back, packed their clothes, and left the room before the other moved an inch. But they did not leave. And so the momentum or some unknown magic kept going, until at last their lips met.

Eric Berne once described it . . . A little boy sees and hears birds with delight. Then the “good father” comes along and feels he should “share” the experience and help his son “develop.” He says: “That’s a jay, and this is a sparrow.” The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. He has to see and hear them the way the father wants him to. Father has good reasons on his side, since few people can go through life listening to the birds sing, and the sooner the boy starts his “education” the better. Maybe he will be an ornithologist when he grows up. A few people, however, can still see and hear in the old way. But most of the members of the human race have lost the capacity to be painters, poets, or musicians, and are not left the option of seeing and hearing directly even if they can afford to; they must get it secondhand.5

So enticing is the red gape of a cuckoo nestling that it is not uncommon for ornithologists to see a bird dropping food into the mouth of a baby cuckoo sitting in some other bird's nest! A bird may be flying home, carrying food for its own young. Suddenly, out of the corner of its eye, it sees the red super-gape of a young cuckoo, in the nest of a bird of some quite different species. It is diverted to the alien nest where it drops into the cuckoo's mouth the food that had been destined for its own young. The 'irresistibility theory' fits with the views of early German ornithologists who referred to foster-parents as behaving like 'addicts' and to the cuckoo nestling as their 'vice'. It is only fair to add that this kind of language finds less favour with some modern experimenters. But there's no doubt that if we do assume that the cuckoo's gape is a powerful drug-like super-stimulus, it becomes very much easier to explain what is going on. It becomes easier to sympathize with the behaviour of the diminutive parent standing on the back of its monstrous child. It is not being stupid. 'Fooled' is the wrong word to use. Its nervous system is being controlled, as irresistibly as if it were a helpless drug addict, or as if the cuckoo were a scientist plugging electrodes into its brain.

Since they had established a household at Riverton, Beatrix had increased the size of her menagerie, and was constantly occupied with animal-related charities and concerns. She had also compiled a report for the newly established natural history society in London. For some reason it had not been at all difficult to convince the group of elderly entomologists, ornithologists, and other naturalists to include a pretty young woman in their midst. Especially when it became clear that Beatrix could talk for hours about migration patterns, plant cycles, and other matters relating to animal habitats and behavior. There was even discussion of Beatrix's joining a board to form a new natural history museum, to provide a lady's perspective on various aspects of the project.

In one such call to arms, at an 1897 Audubon lecture held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the ornithologist Frank Chapman spoke of the Birds of Paradise piled up in milliners’ workshops: “This beautiful bird is now almost extinct. The species fashion selects is doomed. It lies in the power of women to remedy a great evil.

Charles Darwin “could be considered a professional outsider,” according to creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton. Darwin was not a university faculty member nor a professional scientist at any institution, but he was networked into the scientific community. For a time, he focused narrowly on barnacles, but got so tired of it that he declared, “I am unwilling to spend more time on the subject,” in the introduction to a barnacle monograph. Like the 3M generalists and polymaths, he got bored sticking in one area, so that was that. For his paradigm-shattering work, Darwin’s broad network was crucial. Howard Gruber, a psychologist who studied Darwin’s journals, wrote that Darwin only personally carried out experiments “opportune for experimental attack by a scientific generalist such as he was.” For everything else, he relied on correspondents, Jayshree Seth style. Darwin always juggled multiple projects, what Gruber called his “network of enterprise.” He had at least 231 scientific pen pals who can be grouped roughly into thirteen broad themes based on his interests, from worms to human sexual selection. He peppered them with questions. He cut up their letters to paste pieces of information in his own notebooks, in which “ideas tumble over each other in a seemingly chaotic fashion.” When his chaotic notebooks became too unwieldy, he tore pages out and filed them by themes of inquiry. Just for his own experiments with seeds, he corresponded with geologists, botanists, ornithologists, and conchologists in France, South Africa, the United States, the Azores, Jamaica, and Norway, not to mention a number of amateur naturalists and some gardeners he happened to know. As Gruber wrote, the activities of a creator “may appear, from the outside, as a bewildering miscellany,” but he or she can “map” each activity onto one of the ongoing enterprises. “In some respects,” Gruber concluded, “Charles Darwin’s greatest works represent interpretative compilations of facts first gathered by others.” He was a lateral-thinking integrator.

If you live in Europe, mature deciduous trees offer a special service to help you: a short-term weather forecast brought to you by chaffinches. These rust-red birds with gray heads normally sing a song whose rhythm ornithologists like to transcribe as "chip chip chip chooee chooee cheeoo." But you'll hear that song only on a fine day. If it looks like rain, the song changes to a loud "run run run run run".

Roosevelt was a brilliant, vociferous, combustible man, not the type who ordinarily reaches the presidency. In his whirlwind career, which had taken him from college to the White House in less than twenty years, he had been many things: a historian, lawyer, ornithologist, minority leader of the New York State Assembly, boxer, ranchman, New York City police commissioner, naturalist, hunter, civil service reformer, prolific author, devoted husband and father, voracious reader, assistant secretary of the navy, war hero, empire builder, advocate of vigorous physical exercise, governor of New York, and vice president of the United States. He was a big, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man, with tan, rough-textured skin. His hair was close-cropped and reddish-brown in color, with bristles around the temples beginning to show gray, and his almost impossibly muscular neck looked as if it was on the verge of bursting his collar-stays. He wore pince-nez spectacles with a ribbon that hung down the left side of his face. When he smiled or spoke, he revealed two very straight rows of teeth, plainly visible from incisor to incisor, their gleaming whiteness sharply accented by his ruddy complexion.

To regain my equilibrium, I head for the corridor of bird skins. These are not taxidermied birds, not cute in any way. Still, it comforts me to open the wide, flat drawers and see them there, even if they are tied at the feet and devoid of the life conveyed in the average field guide. Ornithologists, it turns out, are both preservationists and murderers, learning how to scoop out a bird's innards and keep the feathers on. But as a bird skin, if properly prepared, can serve as a reference into the next century and beyond. Like this drawer full of cardinals: juveniles, males, females, specimens with winter plumage, summer plumage, and every variety within the varieties.

It was Christmas Eve in 1971 and more than anything in the world, 17-year-old Juliane Köpcke was looking forward to seeing her father. She was travelling with her mother Maria, an ornithologist. The flight in the Lockheed Electra turboprop would take less than an hour. It would leave Lima and cross the huge wilderness of the Reserva Comunal El Sira before touching down in Pucallpa in the Amazonian rainforest where her parents ran a research station in the jungle studying wildlife. The airline, LANSA, didn’t have the best safety reputation: it had recently lost two aircraft in crashes. The weather forecast was not good. But the family desperately wanted to be together for Christmas, so they stepped on board. For the first twenty-five minutes everything was fine. Then the plane flew into heavy clouds and started shaking. Juliane’s mother was very nervous.

I was an infant when my parents died. They were both ornithologists. I've tried So often to evoke them that today I have a thousand parents. Sadly they Dissolve in their own virtues and recede, But certain words, chance words I hear or read, Such as 'bad heart' always seem to him refer, And 'cancer of the pancreas' to her.

an ornithologist told me that birds have to eat grit to aid in digestion.

Well-honed attention—as evidenced in trackers, mindfulness practitioners, athletes, hunters, artists, writers, ornithologists, and more—is something quite different. It can be focused narrowly or distributed across the entire visual field at will. Its focus can be internal (on the contents of mind) or external, and it can be sustained for long periods. It is penetrating, quick, and efficient, picking up signals that are altogether unseen by the untrained eye.

It was my ornithologist, calling to remind me that I'm a ptarmigan and must be careful of falcons!

Albert, friend to royalty,” Beatrix said later at the Rutledge Hotel, laughing as she sat on the floor of their suite and examined the new collar. “I hope you don’t get above yourself, and put on airs.” “Not around your family, he won’t,” Christopher said, stripping off his coat and waistcoat, and removing his cravat. He lowered himself to the settee, relishing the coolness of the room. Albert went to drink from his bowl of water, lapping noisily. Beatrix went to Christopher, stretched full length atop him, and braced her arms on his chest. “I was so proud of you today,” she said, smiling down at him. “And perhaps a tiny bit smug that with all the women swooning and sighing over you, I’m the one you went home with.” Arching a brow, Christopher asked, “Only a tiny bit smug?” “Oh, very well. Enormously smug.” She began to play with his hair. “Now that all this medal business is done with, I have something to discuss with you.” Closing his eyes, Christopher enjoyed the sensation of her fingers stroking his scalp. “What is it?” “What would you say to adding a new member to the family?” This was not an unusual question. Since they had established a household at Riverton, Beatrix had increased the size of her menagerie, and was constantly occupied with animal-related charities and concerns. She had also compiled a report for the newly established natural history society in London. For some reason it had not been at all difficult to convince the group of elderly entomologists, ornithologists, and other naturalists to include a pretty young woman in their midst. Especially when it became clear that Beatrix could talk for hours about migration patterns, plant cycles, and other matters relating to animal habitats and behavior. There was even discussion of Beatrix’s joining a board to form a new natural history museum, to provide a lady’s perspective on various aspects of the project. Keeping his eyes closed, Christopher smiled lazily. “Fur, feathers, or scales?” he asked in response to her earlier question. “None of those.” “God. Something exotic. Very well, where will this creature come from? Will we have to go to Australia to collect it? Iceland? Brazil?” A tremor of laughter went through her. “It’s already here, actually. But you won’t be able to view it for, say…eight more months.” Christopher’s eyes flew open. Beatrix was smiling down at him, looking shy and eager and more than a little pleased with herself. “Beatrix.” He turned carefully so that she was underneath him. His hand came to cradle the side of her face. “You’re sure?” She nodded. Overwhelmed, Christopher covered her mouth with his, kissing her fiercely. “My love…precious girl…” “It’s what you wanted, then?” she asked between kisses, already knowing the answer. Christopher looked down at her through a bright sheen of joy that made everything blurred and radiant. “More than I ever dreamed. And certainly more than I deserve.” Beatrix’s arms slid around his neck. “I’ll show you what you deserve,” she informed him, and pulled his head down to hers again.

the capercaillie, which the Swedes call tjäder, that remarkable bird that looks like a giant prairie chicken. The capercaillie is not only very good eating but is the Don Juan among birds. Not satisfied with his capercaillie mate, he mates with any bird of his own species, such as partridge, hazel hen, and even the ptarmigan, all of which are very much smaller than he. The result is that his variegated offspring are the despair of ornithologists. Never was there such a mixture as the illegitimate children of the capercaillie. So numerous and varied are they that one of Sweden’s natural-history museums has set apart a special room for capercaillie and company. At

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.

Your eyes are like a sky spun by wild and beautiful wings.

It was the lightest of kisses, but it reached deep inside her to stroke some exquisitely sensitive nerve and illuminate her inner darkness like the magical flash of some bird whose name she could not even begin to remember in that moment. She could barely remember her own.

She had just settled upon this when Mr. Lockley removed his gloves—despite not yet being seated to dine!

The bird life, was, as ever, of great interest to ship’s surgeon McCormick. On seeing hovering over the ship what he believed to be a new species of Lestris, or Arctic Yager, described by Audubon, the great American bird illustrator, as an ‘indefatigable teaser of the smaller gulls’, he took a pot-shot at it. His shot failed to despatch the bird cleanly and, after descending near the deck, it recovered and flew away with one leg broken. McCormick, unusually, felt compelled to justify himself: ‘For notwithstanding that my duties as ornithologist compel me to take the lives of these most beautiful and interesting creatures . . . I never do so without a sharp sting of pain and qualm of conscience, so fond am I of all the feathered race.’ So fond, indeed, that on the same night he recorded that ‘Between midnight and one a.m. I succeeded in adding two more of the elegant white petrel to my collection, one falling dead on the quarter-deck and the other on the gun-room skylight . . . a third I shot . . . fell overboard into the sea.

(For all the 007 references, though, the British press neglected to mention that Ian Fleming had found his spy’s name after stumbling across a copy of Birds of the West Indies, written by the American ornithologist James Bond.)

ornithologists

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,

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.

Ornithologists

This got me thinking that perhaps the granularity of attention we achieve outward also extends inward, so that as the perceptual details of our environment unfold in surprising ways, so too do our own intricacies and contradictions. My dad said that leaving the confined context of a job made him understand himself not in relation to that world, but just to the world, and forever after that, things that happened at work only seemed like one small part of something much larger. It reminds me of how John Muir described himself not as a naturalist but as a “poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc.,” or of how Pauline Oliveros described herself in 1974: Pauline Oliveros is a two legged human being, female, lesbian, musician, and composer among other things which contribute to her identity. She is herself and lives with her partner…along with assorted poultry, dogs, cats, rabbits and tropical hermit crabs.10 Of course, there’s an obvious critique of all of this, and that’s that it comes from a place of privilege. I can go to the Rose Garden, stare into trees, and sit on hills all the time because I have a teaching job that only requires me to be on campus two days a week, not to mention a whole set of other privileges.

When Ursa put away the butter, she surveyed the beer cooling in the refrigerator. “Are the ornithologists alcoholics?

From the shores of oval oceans in the oxidized Orient Onyx-eyed Odalisques and ornithologists observe the flight of Eros obsolete And “Immortality” mildews . . . in the museums of the moon.

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

Daedalus Winter 2002. Vol. 131, pg. 89 The Biology of Race and the Concept of Equality. Ernst Mayr There is a widespread feeling that the word "race" indicates something undesirable and that it should be left out of all discussions. This leads to such statements as "there are no human races." Those who subscribe to this opinion are obviously ignorant of modern biology. Races are not something specifically human; races occur in a large percentage of species of animals. You can read in every textbook on evolution that geographic races of animals, when isolated from other races of their species, may in due time become new species. The terms "subspecies" and "geographic race" are used interchangeably in this taxonomic literature. … In a recent textbook of taxonomy, I defined a "geographic race" or subspecies as "an aggregate of phenotypically similar populations of a species inhabiting a geographic subdivision of the range of that species and differing taxonomically from other populations of that species." A subspecies is a geographic race that is sufficiently different taxonomically to be worthy of a separate name. What is characteristic of a geographic race is, first, that it is restricted to a geographic subdivision of the range of a species, and second, that in spite of certain diagnostic differences, it is part of a larger species. No matter what the cause of the racial difference might be, the fact that species of organisms may have geographic races has been demonstrated so frequently that it can no longer be denied. And the geographic races of the human races established before the voyages of European discovery and subsequent rise of a global economy - agree in most characteristics with the geographic races of animals. Recognizing races is only recognizing a biological fact. from Wikipedia: Ernst Mayr Ernst Walter Mayr was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, philosopher of biology, and historian of science. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.

In the U.S., a woman is known as a 'broad' and, when there, I'm more broad-minded. In the U.K., a woman is known as a 'bird' and, when there, I'm an eagle-eyed if not avid avian attendee, in fact, quite the ornithologist.

Frank Sinatra proved he was an ornithologist when he sang, "Egrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention.

We did not know that within twenty years Ted would be recognized as one of the greatest field ornithologists of all time, the ultimate authority on the ultimate bird continent. Mercifully, we did not know that those twenty years would be all the time he had. His career would end abruptly against a mountainside in Ecuador while he was flying surveys for bird habitats, working to protect the birdlife he loved. We did not know any of those things; we were just kids, we thought we would live forever.

The American Ornithologists' Union, in a decision published earlier that year, had decreed that the White-winged was just a local variety, not a full specieis. So much for the Black Hills' only claim to birding fame. The juncos themselves, of course, did not seem to care; watching them, neither did I.

roots. Since the demise of the Carolina Parakeet, ornithologists have discovered that playing tape-recordings of large flocks calling out to each other can sometimes induce birds to breed. We could have tried that on remnant flocks of parakeets, but we didn’t have the science. In any case, there might have been something else in their plight at our hands that was driving them toward extinction. All the science in the world might not have been enough to save them.

Since the demise of the Carolina Parakeet, ornithologists have discovered that playing tape-recordings of large flocks calling out to each other can sometimes induce birds to breed. We could have tried that on remnant flocks of parakeets, but we didn’t have the science. In any case, there might have been something else in their plight at our hands that was driving them toward extinction. All the science in the world might not have been enough to save them.

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.

The frigate-bird, a true sea-hawk,—sea-eagle, it may be called, since its bold, noble qualities entitle it to the name,—makes its excursions so far from the shore that it is not unfrequently seen in the very middle of the Atlantic. Now, this is the most curious circumstance in its history, and one that has hitherto perplexed ornithologists. Since its feet are not provided with the “web,” it cannot swim a stroke; nor has it ever been seen to alight on the water for the purpose of taking rest. It is not likely that it can settle on the wave,—the conformation of its feet and body making this an impossibility. How, then, does it find rest for its tired wings? This is the question to which an answer is not easily given. There is a belief, as Ben alleged, that it returns every night to roost upon the land; but when it is considered that to reach its roost would often require a flight of a thousand miles,—to say nothing of the return journey to its fishing-ground,—the statement at once loses all vrai-semblance, Many sailors say that it goes to sleep suspended aloft in the air, and so high up as to be sometimes invisible.