Ornithology Quotes

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.

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

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,

[Audubon's works are] the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology.

Where did you hide your Mockingbirds?" he asks. "Ornithology," she replies. "You hid TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD with the bird books?" I ask. Elena shrugs. "I was being ironic.

Aesthetics is for the artists as ornithology is for the birds,

What melody will our rivers remember if songbirds forget how to sing?

The average sparrow is something of a bore and the trouble is that all sparrows are average.

But in the early 1970s, we were not birdwatching. We were birding, and that made all the difference. We were out to seek, to discover, to chase, to learn, to find as many different kinds of birds as possible — and, in friendly competition, to try to find more of them than the next birder. We became a community of birders, with the complications that human societies always have; and although it was the birds that had brought us together, our story became a human story after all.

Does everything have a father? Apparently so. A web search on “the father of” turned up fathers for vasectomy reversal, hillbilly jazz, lichenology, snowmobiling, modern librarianship, Japanese whiskey, hypnosis, Pakistan, natural hair care products, the lobotomy, women’s boxing, Modern Option Pricing Theory, the swamp buggy, Pennsylvania ornithology, Wisconsin bluegrass, tornado research, Fen-Phen, modern dairying, Canada’s permissive society, black power, and the yellow schoolbus.

What a remarkable phenomenon,” said the Professor of Ornithology as he was passing over the bridge. “A swallow in winter!” And he wrote a long letter about it to the local newspaper. Every one quoted it, it was  full of so many words that they could not understand.

MOCKINGBIRDS ARE THE TRUE ARTISTS of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.

Their jeans and T-shirts blended in, but Jo’s AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGICAL SOCIETY shirt certainly outed her.

The philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

There are still many unsolved problems about bird life, among which are the age that birds attain, the exact time at which some birds acquire their adult dress, and the changes which occur in this with years. Little, too, is known about the laws and routes of bird migration, and much less about the final disposition of the untold thousands which are annually produced.

A mown hay field appears, its blond stubble blackened by a flock of starlings. As I pass, the field seems to lift, peek to see what's under itself, then resettles. A pickup passes from the other direction. The flock lifts again and this time keeps rising, a narrowing swirl as if sucked through a pipe and then an unfurl of rhythm sudden sprung, becoming one entity as it wrinkles, smooths out, drifts down like a snapped bedsheet. Then swerves and shifts, gathers and twists. Murmuration: ornithology's word-poem for what I see.

He had met John Kieran at a Dutch Treat Club luncheon and had been impressed with the depth and scope of Kieran’s knowledge. Kieran was a sports columnist for the New York Times whose writings had earned him the title “sports philosopher.” He was fluent in Latin and a scholar of Shakespeare, knew music, poetry, ornithology and the other branches of natural history, and had a strong base of general knowledge. This was wrapped up in a Tenth Avenue New York accent, a streak of what one writer termed “pugnacity concealed by modesty.

Think of the following event: A collection of hieratic persons (from Harvard or some such place) lecture birds on how to fly. Imagine bald males in their sixties, dressed in black robes, officiating in a form of English that is full of jargon, with equations here and there for good measure. The bird flies. Wonderful confirmation! They rush to the department of ornithology to write books, articles, and reports stating that the bird has obeyed them, an impeccable causal inference. The Harvard Department of Ornithology is now indispensable for bird flying. It will get government research funds for its contribution.

looked longingly at the characteristic features he shared with the Guermantes, a race that retains its individuality in a world by which it is not submerged, and in which it remains isolated in its divinely ornithological glory, for it seems to have sprung, in the age of mythology, from the union of a goddess and a bird.

Father has good reasons on his side, since few people can afford to go through life listening to the birds sing, and the sooner the little boy starts his “education” the better.

Happy are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.”5

Kilgore Trout, incidentally, could never be President of the United States without a Constitutional amendment. He hadn’t been born inside the country. His birthplace was Bermuda. His father, Leo Trout, while remaining an American citizen, worked there for many years for the Royal Ornithological Society—guarding the only nesting place in the world for Bermuda Erns.

One of the most remarkable of all ornithological discoveries was the realisation that birds in temperate regions undergo enormous seasonal changes in their internal organs...Perhaps the most far-reaching discovery relating to these changes was the finding in the 1970s that parts of the brain also varied in size across the year...The centres in the avian brain that control the acquisition and delivery of song in male birds shrink at the end of the breeding season and grow again in the following year.

Did ya know that female birds only got one ovary?" "What're ya talking about?" "See. These drawings and notes show that female birds only got one ovary." "Dang it, Joe. We're not here for a biology lesson. Get back to work." "Wait a second. Look here. This is a male peacock feather, and the note says that over eons of time, the males' feathers got larger and larger to attract females, till the point the males can barely lift off the ground. Can't hardly fly anymore." "Are you finished? We have a job to do." "Well, it's very interesting." Ed walked from the room. "Get to work, man.

Rocks are space,” I thought, “and space is illusion.” I had a million thoughts. Japhy had his. I was amazed at the way he meditated with his eyes open. And I was mostly humanly amazed that this tremendous little guy who eagerly studied Oriental poetry and anthropology and ornithology and everything else in the books and was a tough little adventurer of trails and mountains should also suddenly whip out his pitiful beautiful wooden prayerbeads and solemnly pray there, like an oldfashioned saint of the deserts certainly, but so amazing to see it in America with its steel mills and airfields. The world ain’t so bad, when you got Japhies, I thought, and felt glad. All the aching muscles and the hunger in my belly were bad enough, and the surroundant dark rocks, the fact that there is nothing there to soothe you with kisses and soft words, but just to be sitting there meditating and praying for the world with another earnest young man—’twere good enough to have been born just to die, as we all are. Something will come of it in the Milky Ways of eternity stretching in front of all our phantom unjaundiced eyes, friends. I felt like telling Japhy everything I thought but I knew it didn’t matter and moreover he knew it anyway and silence is the golden mountain. “Yodelayhee,

After a careful look up and down the corridor, James ushered Cordelia down the stairs. But their covert escape was not to be: Will appeared suddenly on the landing, in the midst of fixing his cuff links, and beamed with delight to see Cordelia. “My dear,” he said. “A pleasure to see you. Have you come from Cornwall Gardens? How is your mother?” “Oh, very well, thank you,” Cordelia said, then realized that if her mother really were in peak condition, she had little excuse for staying away from James and the Institute. “Well, she has been very tired, and of course we are all concerned that she get her energy back. Risa has been trying to build her back up again with many…soups.” Soups? Cordelia was not at all sure why she’d said that. Perhaps because her mother had always told her that ash-e jo, a sour barley soup, could cure anything. “Soups?” “Soups,” Cordelia said firmly. “Risa’s caretaking is very thorough, though of course, my mother wishes me to be by her side as much as possible. I have been reading to her—” “Oh, anything interesting? I’m always seeking a new book,” said Will, having finished with the cuff links. They were studded with yellow topaz. The color of James’s eyes. “Ah—no,” said Cordelia. “Only very boring things, really. Books about…ornithology.” Will’s eyebrows went up, but James had already thrown himself into the fray. “I really must get Cordelia back home,” he said, laying a hand on her back. It was an entirely ordinary husbandly gesture, not at all remarkable. It felt to Cordelia like being struck by lightning between her shoulder blades. “I’ll see you in a moment, Father.” “Well Cordelia, we all hope you’ll be back before too long,” Will said. “James is positively pining away without you here. Incomplete without his better half, eh, James?” He went away up the stairs and down the corridor, whistling. “Well,” said James after a long silence. “I thought, when I was ten years old and my father showed everyone the drawings I’d made of myself as Jonathan Shadowhunter, slaying a dragon, that was the most my parents would ever humiliate me. But that is no longer the case. There is a new champion.” “Your father is something of a romantic, that’s all.” “So you’ve noticed?

As the driver pulled over to attend the injured animal, I sat and watched the sky - an oceanic mass of gray, with islands of steel blue - thinking, yes, certainly, birds must sleep at times while they fly. How ridiculous it was to think otherwise. Yet my brothers' tutor, a man from Oxford with red eyebrows, had informed me the previous morning that no such thing could occur. Such a thing, he'd opined, would be an affront to God, who had blessed birds with the ability to sleep and the ability to fly, but not the ability to sleep while flying or fly while sleeping. Absurd! Moreover, he went on, were it to be case, each morning we would find at our feet heaps of dead birds that had smashed into rooftops or trees in the night. Night after night we would be awakened by this ornithological cacophony, this smashing of beaks against masonry, this violence of feathers and bones. It will not do, he said, to too greatly admire the mysteries of nature. But I remembered that sparrow on the riverbank and secretly held that the world was not so easily explained by a tutor's reason. Indeed, it was then that I first formed the opinion - if childishly, idly - that a person should trust to her own good sense and nature's impenetrable wisdom.

She knelt and scooped sand in her hands, sifting it through her fingers, examining organisms left squiggling in her palm. He smiled at the young biologist, absorbed, oblivious. He imagined her standing at the back of the birding group, trying not to be noticed but being the first to spot and identify every bird. Shyly and softly, she would have listed the precise species of grasses woven into each nest, or the age in days of a female fledgling based on the emerging colors of her wing-tips. Exquisite minutiae beyond any guidebook or knowledge of the esteemed ecology group. The smallest specifics on which a species spins. The essence.

Facts swooped like swallows, darting across her mind; there was a rush of pride in things still remembered. Singing was limited to the perching birds, the order Passeriformes. Nearly half the birds in the world didn't sing, but they still used sound to communicate- calls as opposed to song. Most birds had between five and fifteen distinct calls in their repertoire; alarm and territorial defense calls, distress calls from juveniles to bring an adult to the rescue, flight calls to keep the flock coordinated, even separate calls for commencing and ending flight. Nest calls. Feeding calls. Pleasure calls. Some chicks used calls to communicate with their mothers while they were still in the egg.

4.1 Introduction A flying bird generates lift forces to counteract gravity and thrust forces to overcome drag. The magnitude of these forces can be crudely approximated using elementary physical principles. Steady flight in still air at a uniform speed and at one altitude is the simplest case. It requires balanced forces where lift equals weight and thrust equals drag as well as balanced moments of these forces about the centre of gravity. Under these relatively simple conditions the magnitude of the mechanical power involved in the generation of lift and thrust in relation to speed can be estimated. The power to generate lift is inversely proportional to flight speed and the power needed for thrust increases with the speed cubed. The total mechanical power is the sum of the lift and thrust powers and hence follows a U-shaped curve if plotted against speed. A U-shaped power curve implies that there are two optimal speeds, one where the power is minimal and a higher one where the amount of work per unit distance reaches the lowest value. The question is, does this U-shaped power curve really exist in birds?

And he is an owl He is an owl, "Man" tattooed in his armpit Under the broken wing (Stunned by the wall of glare, he fell here) Under the broken wing of huge shadow that twitches across the floor. He is a man in hopeless feathers.

interested in a subject like ornithology. Such scenarios sound innocent enough, but when we hear these comments over and over, the messages go in. This is where negative self-talk, such as I’m a bad person, I’m so stupid, Why can’t I do this better? Why are they mean to me? and What did I do wrong? comes from. We began to replay other people’s words in our heads and started believing them. This can create a lifetime habit of thought and feeling, of doubting oneself, questioning things, and being fearful of what others may say. People who struggle with such self-doubt are still attuned with themselves, but they have lost the connection to their sense of who they really are, their authenticity. They close down to their authentic self because they have given so much power to other people. They have come to believe this cloudy and incorrect perception of themselves. There is dissonance between the illusion of themselves they adopted along the way and their authentic self.

I have the greatest respect for conservation biologists. I care very much about conserving the rain forest and the wildlife in Indonesia, but I also found it disheartening. It often feels like you are fighting a losing battle, especially in areas where people depend so heavily on these natural resources for their own survival. After graduation, I decided to return to the original behavioral questions that motivated me. Although monogamy—both social and genetic—is rare in mammals, social monogamy is the norm in birds. Plus, birds are everywhere. I figured that if I turned my attention to studying our feathered friends, I wouldn’t have to spend months on end trying to secure research permits and travel visas from foreign governments. I wouldn’t even have to risk getting bitten by leeches (a constant problem in the Mentawais*). Birds seemed like the perfect choice for my next act. But I didn’t know anyone who studied birds. My PhD was in an anthropology department, without many links to researchers in biology departments. Serendipitously, while applying for dozens of academic jobs, I stumbled across an advertisement for a position managing Dr. Ellen Ketterson’s laboratory at Indiana University. The ad described Ketterson’s long-term project on dark-eyed juncos. Eureka! Birds! At the time, her lab primarily focused on endocrinology methods like hormone assays (a method to measure how much of a hormone is present in blood or other types of biological samples), because they were interested in how testosterone levels influenced behavior. I had no experience with either birds or hormone assays. But I had spent the last several years developing DNA sequencing and genotyping skills, which the Ketterson lab was just starting to use. I hoped that my expertise with fieldwork and genetic work would be seen as beneficial enough to excuse my lack of experience in ornithology and endocrinology. I submitted my application but heard nothing back. After a while, I did something that was a bit terrifying at the time. Of the dozens of academic positions I had applied to, this felt like the right one, so I tried harder. I wrote to Dr. Ketterson again to clarify why I was so interested in the job and why I would be a good fit, even though on paper I seemed completely wrong for it. I described why I wanted to work with birds instead of primates. I explained that I had years of fieldwork experience in challenging environments and could easily learn ornithological methods. I listed my laboratory expertise and elaborated on how beneficial it could be to her research group, and how easily I could learn to do hormone assays and why they were important for my research too. She wrote me back. I got the job.

The public space of the museum is not my favorite, loud and full of tourists and school groups and hungry hordes. Their curiosity is endearing---they're acolytes for the natural world. And the marble gleams with architectural detail and precious objects all around. But on these, my gray days, entering the building carries the weight of death: all the specimens, thousands of carcasses of every species, stuffed or otherwise retrieved from oblivion so we can know them, yet all dead. The birds I draw and paint, all dead. On these days, my only defense is to imagine every pinned butterfly taking wing, every stuffed marsupial waking up, every preserved plant specimen blooming and carpeting the marble floor like a time-lapse forest, and every bird coming to life, flying up to the dome and away. On the days when the fog comes and hooks into my gut like a sharp-toothed parasite, these visions can save me. The steadier, more consistent salvation, of course, is the work. I can lose myself for hours drawing, for instance, the common loon, with its inky head, white banding at the neck, and an intricacy of pin dots and fractured rectangles cascading across the wings. With the right precision, I can bring the deadness of a bird skin to a striking facsimile of life.

As departments, we aren't very respectful of one another. The geologists are the Rock People and Delores and Ginger are the Plant People. Here in Ornithology, we're the Bird People, the ichthyologists are the Fish People, the entomologists are the Bug People, those in Paleo are the Bone People, and Anthro is just Antho, because otherwise we'd have to call them the People People.

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.

The word "gizz" would shock the Tallahassee Ladies Guild, but despite its homonym, it's a common usage among bird artists. Like "gist," but with more substance---a life force, the spirit that reaches beyond the brushstroke to the vitality of the bird.

Delores, the Wise Woman of Botany, told me while I was in Washington that every seven years, employees of my pay grade are entitled to a sabbatical, and I'm two years late in taking mine. She helped me fill out the form. I listed my purpose: "to study the birds of the southeastern United States with an emphasis on the marshlands of Florida." Hugh Adamson sputtered an objection, but he couldn't do a thing. Apparently, the sabbatical is a long-standing Smithsonian policy that would actually take an Act of Congress to reverse. I didn't write on the form of my other intention: to freelance, get my name out there, and see whether Florida is where I belong.

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON, the avid naturalist and artist, was best known for painting North America’s birds, and compiling those pieces into a seminal ornithological tome. But he was also responsible for seeding a centuries-long falsehood about birds through some truly abysmal experiments involving vultures.

THERE ARE CURRENTLY VERY CLOSE TO TEN thousand species of birds in the world, both beautiful and improbable, and they have contributed more to the study of zoology than almost any other group of animals (Konishi et al. 1989). The reasons are obvious: birds are diurnal, they are often easily observed and studied, and we like them.

In a final flourish, drawing on his extensive knowledge of avian anatomy, he presents a critique of the supposed morphology of divine beings: “If angels had any reality, they would be very clumsy and awkward fliers with a slow heavy flight, lacking as they are in aerodynamic shape.

In 2008 Prum’s graduate student Jakob Vinther, with Prum and two of their Yale colleagues, identified melanosomes (tiny organelles that contain melanin) in fossil feathers from the Lower Cretaceous (100–65 MYA) of Brazil and the Early Eocene (56–49 MYA) of Denmark. They were thus able to show that those feathers were colored with black and white stripes. Indeed, they concluded that most fossil feathers are actually preserved in such a way that it might be possible to determine the colors of extinct birds and feathered dinosaurs.

In a similar vein, John Videler (2006) of Leiden University suggested the “Jesus Christ dinosaur” model of flight origins, whereby protobirds may have gained advantages for both escape and foraging by running over the surface of water rather than land.

The chicken lives as if in a dream. She has no sense of reality. All the chicken's fright comes because they're always interrupting her reverie. The chicken is a sound sleep. . . . The chicken has plenty of inner life. To be honest, the only thing the chicken really has is inner life. Our vision of her inner life is what we call "chicken.

respectively. Diane Claridge Dolphin and beaked whale researcher; wife and research partner of Ken Balcomb. Darlene Ketten Whale and human hearing expert; forensic pathologist, Harvard Medical School and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Roger Payne First cetologist to decode and promote humpback whale song and conservation. Chris Clark Director, Bioacoustics Research Program, Cornell University Lab of Ornithology; protégé of Roger Payne.

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.

In the presence of the physicians and academics who were Lyceum members his lack of formal education embarrassed him despite his hard-won ornithological expertise. "Among such people," he wrote, "I feel clouded and depressed; remember that I have done nothing, and fear that I may die unknown.

ornithological specimens of the same or similar plumage tend to habitually congregate in the closest possible proximity.” Or being translated, “birds of a feather flock together.

aesthetics is for the artists as ornithology is for the birds.

Well aware of how offensive I make myself, and with what loathing I may be regarded, in this sentimental age which pretends to be cynical, and in this poetical nation which pretends to be practical, I shall nevertheless continue to practice in public a very repulsive trick or habit--the habit of drawing distinctions; or distinguishing between things that are quite different, even when they are assumed to be the same. I cannot be content with being a Unionist or a Universalist or a Unitarian. I have again and again blasphemed against and denied the perfect Oneness of chalk and cheese; and drawn fanciful distinctions, ornithological or technological, between hawks and handsaws. For in truth I believe that the only way to say anything definite is to define it, and all definition is by limitation and exclusion; and that the only way to say something distinct is to say something distinguishable; and distinguishable from everything else. In short, I think that a man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

It took me some time to realize this was my family— this stoic, forthright little regiment of women, all exceptionally well read, well spoken, each one a skilled athlete —all staunch and devout members of the Audubon Society. Most weekends became, from dawn to dusk, one long bird-watching expedition as, armed to the teeth with picnic bas-kets, cameras and field glasses, they made their reverent way into the deep woods, treading as softly as Indians with me in tow. Not too much fun for yours truly. In spite of what the poets say, youth is not always the happiest of seasons. None of my aunts ever bothered to conceal their displeasure at my ignorance on the subject of ornithology and remained for the most part coolly disapproving. Until one day when I petulantly ran from an unfinished lunch to seek relief in the great outdoors —there, on top of a spruce which was bent over from the weight of it, sat an enormous bird with strange claws the likes of which I'd never seen. Forgetting all unsettled scores, I ran back inside and announced my discovery.

Birds are an early warning system that nature has provided us,” said John Fitzpatrick, director emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the hemisphere’s most influential voice of behalf of birds.

The next time you see a wee chickadee, calling contentedly and happily while the air makes you shiver from head to foot, think of the hard-shelled frozen insects passing down his throat, the icy air entering lungs and air-sacs, and ponder a moment on the wondrous little laboratory concealed in his mite of a body; which his wings bear up with so little effort, which his tiny legs support, now hopping along a branch, now suspended from some wormy twig. Can we do aught but silently marvel at this alchemy? A little bundle of muscle and blood, which in this freezing weather can transmute frozen beetles and zero air into a happy, cheery little Black-capped Chickadee, as he names himself, whose bravery shames us, whose trustfulness warms our hearts! And the next time you raise your gun to needlessly take a feathered life, think of the marvellous little engine which your lead will stifle forever; lower your weapon and look into the clear bright eyes of the bird whose body equals yours in physical perfection, and whose tiny brain can generate a sympathy, a love for its mate, which in sincerity and unselfishness suffers little when compared with human affection.

I felt sad for a parakeet the other day. He sings so much. Probably just wants a girlfriend.

Like most birds, gulls mate by aligning their cloacal openings. The ornithological term for this is “the cloacal kiss.” Which makes bird sex sound sweet and demure, until you remember that they also excrete through their cloaca.