662 Quotes About Birds

The call of the yellow-billed cuckoo of North America is often mistaken for a bloodhound drinking a bowl of milk. He goes coulp coulp coulp.

That was the thing about Levantin: he loved the birds, but he really loved the places they brought him. When you spend your career in the confines of a gray suit, the pipits at dawn above timberline are even more wondrous.

THe church is full of flowers-yellow roses, lilies, blue hydrangeas spilling forth-and it is on these that Charlie trains his gaze and looks for his mother, who is nowhere to be found. Not even her ashes are in the church, and no coffin, but this is less hard to comprehend than the fact that she is not herself there, a thin old bird, an egret maybe, standing on one leg, head bobbing, long neck swiveling. Contradicting, adding and subtracting. poking fun. Peering out.

This country air, it really is for them, the birds.

Listen to the birds, their lyrics are not profane, yet the entire world wants to hear them sing.

I do my best, thinking of them one by one, releasing them like birds from the protective cages inside me, locking the doors against their return.

A flock of black birds flew by, screeching loudly. Passing through he clouds, they soared into the distant sky. "Do you know what kind of birds those are?" I asked. "They're a type of cuckoo," Honda said. "In Australia, they're called rainbirds. They're thought to sing before stormy weather--it has something to do with their migration patterns." So those were rainbirds.

Many biologists are like migratory birds---they nest and reproduce in the temperate zone, but regularly migrate to warmer climes in search of spiritual fodder.

I once made the mistake of uttering the phrase "kill two birds with one stone" in [Aunt Marti's] presence. She corrected me. The proper phrase is "liberate two birds with one gesture.