Birds
Chickens, Ducks, Songbirds


Quotes for Gardeners and Lovers of the Green Way

Compiled by Karen and Mike Garofalo

Spirit of Gardening Website

 

 

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"Two birds disputed about a kernel, when a third swooped down and carried it off."
-  Proverb from the Congo  

 

 

"A crow
Perched on a withered tree
In the autumn evening."
-  Basho   

 

 

"Sweet bird!  thy bow'r is ever green,
Thy sky is ever clear;
thou has't no sorrow in thy song,
No winter in thy year."
-  John Logan  

 

 

"I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn."
-  Henry David Thoreau 

 

The Audubon Backyard Birdwatcher: Birdfeeders and Bird Gardens, by Robert Burton, 2002.

The Backyard Bird Feeder's Bible: The A-to-Z Guide To Feeders, Seed Mixes, Projects, And Treats (Rodale Organic Gardening Book), by Sally Roth, 2003.

 

"The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp."
-  John Berry  

 

 

"Today I am sure no one needs to be told that the more birds a yard can support, the fewer insects there will be to trouble the gardener the following year."
-  Thalassa Cruso  

 

 

"Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come."
-  Chinese Proverb  

 

 

"I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs."
-  Joseph Addison  

 

 

"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."
-  Robert Lynd  

 

 

"Perhaps it was Maggie, perhaps not. In solitary moments magpies will perch on a branch and mutter soft soliloquies of whines and squeals and chatterings, oblivious to what goes on around them. It is one of those things, I suppose, intelligence now and then does, must in fact now and then do, must think, must play, must imagine, must talk to itself. ... What, finally, intelligence could be for: finding your way back."
-  Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament, p. 86.  

 

 

"Let the farmer remember that every bird destroyed, and every nest robbed, is equivalent to a definite increase in insects with which he already has to struggle.  He will soon appreciate the fact that he has a personal interest, and a strong one, in the preservation of birds."
-  Henry Oldys  

 

 

"Be grateful for luck.  Pay the thunder no mind - listen to the birds.  And don't hate nobody."
-  Eubie Blake

 

 

"Spring would not be spring without bird songs."
-  Francis M. Chapman  

 

 

"I sincerely congratulate you on the arrival of the mockingbird. Learn all the children to venerate it as a superior being in the form of a bird, or as a being which will haunt them if any harm is done to itself or its eggs."
-  Thomas Jefferson  

 

 

"I hope you love birds too.   It is economical.  It saves going to heaven."
-  Emily Dickinson  

 

 

"At the sight of blackbirds
 Flying in a green light,
 Even the bawds of euphony
 Would cry out sharply."
-  Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, 1923  

 

 

 

 

"Coexistence ...  what the farmer does with the turkey - until Thanksgiving."
-  Mike Connolly  

 

 

"A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage."
-  William Blake, Auguries of Innocence  

 

 

One swallow does not make a summer.  

 

 

"To me, the garden is a doorway to other worlds; one of them, of course, is the world of birds.  The garden is their dinner table, bursting with bugs and worms and succulent berries."
-  Anne Raver  

 

 

"A bird in the hand is a certainty, but a bird in the bush may sing."
-  Bret Harte  

 

 

"Poor indeed is the garden in which birds find no homes."
-  Abram L. Urban  

 

 

"There are 8,600 species of birds in the world today.  They are found everywhere.  Birds play a vital role in the balance of nature. They eat insects, pests and small animals.  Fruit eating birds are best for scattering seeds for these plants.  Seed eating birds digest seeds and in so doing keep millions of weeds from the earth..."  Birds have between 1,000 and 25,000 feathers.
Birds,
U.C. Davis  

 

 

"There was a handsome male mockingbird that sang his heart out every morning during the nesting season from the top of a tall Norfolk Pine tree.  Last week the tree was cut down.  The mockingbird and his song are gone.  I can't put a dollar value on the tree nor on the mockingbird nor on his song.  But I know that I - and our whole neighborhood - have suffered a loss.  I wouldn't know how to count it in dollars."
-  Jacquelyn Hiller  

 

 

"The sound of birds stops the noise in my mind."
-  Carly Simon  

 

 

"Over the glittering, rattled ladders of shale the birds cross, tangential to the sea at night.  Hour upon hour you can sense the undulation of wings.   If you lift your cheek quite carefully you can feel the kiss and the wisp of air stirred by the inaudible glide."         
-  Jan Haag,
Birds Migrate at Night  

 

 

"That little bird has chosen his shelter.  Above it are the stars and the deep heaven of worlds.  Yet he is rocking himself to sleep without caring for tomorrow's lodging, calmly clinging to his little twig, and leaving God to think for him."
-  Martin Luther
    

 

 

"Two birds fly past.
They are needed somewhere."
-  Robert Bly  

 

 

 

Which
came first the
chicken or the egg?
Chickens and eggs always
exist at the same time. Don't
count your eggs before they hatch. 
In the middle of the pecking order. 
He had something to crow about. 
My allowance is chicken feed.
A deadly game of chicken.
Don't get your hackles up.
She's like a mother hen.
He is a chicken.
Chickens.
Eggs.



-  Mike Garofalo, Concrete Poetry

 


 

 

"There are two lasting bequests we can give our children: one is roots.  The other is wings."
-  Hodding Carter, Jr.  

 

 

"It is one of the first days of Spring, and I sit once more in the old garden where I hear no faintest echo of the obscene rumbling of London streets which are yet so little away.  Here the only movement I am conscious of is that of the trees shooting forth their first sprays of bright green, and of the tulips expanding the radiant beauty of their flaming globes, and the only sound I hear is the blackbird's song -- the liquid softly gurgling notes that seem to well up spontaneously from an infinite joy, an infinite peace, at the heart of nature and bring a message not from some remote Heaven of the Sky or Future, but the Heaven that is Here, beneath our feet, even beneath the exquisite texture of our own skins, the joy, the peace, at the Heart of the Mystery which is Man.  For man alone can hear the 
Revelation that lies in the blackbird's song."
-   Havelock Ellis, Impressions and Comments, 1918 

 

 

blue oaks
   leafed out -
    robins back

-  Mike Garofalo, Cuttings  

 

A Hummingbird in My House: The Story of Squeak, by Arnette Heidcamp, 1991. 

In the Company of Crows and Ravens, by John M. Marzluff, 2007. 

Stokes Beginner's Guide to Birds: Eastern Region (Stokes Field Guide Series),by by Donald Stokes and Lillian Stokes, 1996.

 

"Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled."
-  Jane Hirshfield, The Stone of Heaven  

 

 

Coming, going, the waterfowl
Leaves not a trace,
Nor does it need a guide.
-
 Dogen, Zen Poems of China and Japan, Lucien Stryk, p. 123  

 

 

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
and never stops at all."
-  Emily Dickenson  

 

 

"Gentle day's flower -
The hummingbird competes
With the stillness of the air."
-  Chogyam Trungpa  

 

 

  
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"Spirituality is like a bird:
If you hold it too closely, it chokes,
And if you hold it too loosely, it escapes."
-  Israel Salanter Lipkin  

 

 

"The inner - what is it? if not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming."
-  Rainer Marie Rilke  

 

Backyard Bird Secrets for Every Season: Attract a Variety of Nesting, Feeding, and Singing Birds Year-Round, by Sally Roth, 2009.

Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays, by Candace Savage, 1997.

Caw of the Wild: Observations from the Secret World of Crows, by Barb Kirpluk, 2005. 

 

"some delight through song
others with showy plumage
the hummer, with flight."
-   Jay Neville

 

 

"You are the miracle bird,
Risen
From the memory
Of the Sun's Womb
In the heart of the Earth.
Flutter,
flutter on,
my heart."
-  Mahmud Kianush,
Of Birds and Men  

 

 

"What is joy?
It is a bird
That we all want to catch.
It is the same bird
That we all love to see flying"
- Sri Chinmoy  

 

 

 

 

Recommended Reading

 

The Audubon Backyard Birdwatcher: Birdfeeders and Bird Gardens, by Robert Burton, 2002.


The Aviary  


The Backyard Bird Feeder's Bible: The A-to-Z Guide To Feeders, Seed Mixes, Projects, And Treats (Rodale Organic Gardening Book), by Sally Roth, 2003. 


Backyard Bird Secrets for Every Season: Attract a Variety of Nesting, Feeding, and Singing Birds Year-Round, by Sally Roth, 2009.


Backyard Nature Specialist:   Birds 


Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays, by Candace Savage, 1997.


Birding on the Web


Birding Stories, Poems, Art   Indexed by Christine Tarski.


Bird Poetry - Black Hills Audobon Society


Birds  -  A Net Resource Guide from Net Vet Zoo Resources


Birds - Yahoo Index


Caw of the Wild: Observations from the Secret World of Crows, by Barb Kirpluk, 2005. 


Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, 2009.


Crows! Strange and Wonderful, by Laurence Pringle, 2010.


Doves (Complete Pet Owner's Manual), by Gayle A. Soucek, 2006.


An E-Anthology of Avian Poetry


Electronic Resources on Ornithology   


Five Animal Frolics Qigong


Geese:  Our home in Red Bluff, California, is in the North Sacramento Valley.  During the winter months many thousands of ducks and geese come to this valley from Canada and Alaska. 
Wild Goose Qigong     Wild Geese Posters


How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers.  Text of 1907 illustrated verse by Robert W. Wood.


A Hummingbird in My House: The Story of Squeak, by Arnette Heidcamp, 1991. 


The Hummingbird Society


Hummingbird Web Site


Hummingbirds 


In the Company of Crows and Ravens, by John M. Marzluff, 2007. 


Magpie   The Western Yellow Billed Magpie, Pica Nutalli    A study by Mike Garofalo. 


The Mockingbird (Corrie Herring Hooks Series), by Robin W. Doughty, 1995.


Northern Cardinal (Wild Bird Guides), by Gary Ritchison, 1997.


The Nest Box


Ornithological Web Libraries


Peterson On-Line
   


Ringneck Doves: A Handbook of Care and Breeding, by K. Wade Oliver, 2005. 


Stokes Beginner's Guide to Birds: Eastern Region (Stokes Field Guide Series),by by Donald Stokes and Lillian Stokes, 1996.


That Quail, Robert, by Margaret Stanger, 1992.  


Wildlife in the Garden, Expanded Edition: How to Live in Harmony with Deer, Raccoons, Rabbits, Crows, and Other Pesky Creatures, by Gene Logsdon, 1999.


Your Chickens: A Kid's Guide to Raising and Showing by Gail Damerow, 1993.   

 


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The Spirit of Gardening Website

Over 3,800 Quotations, Poems, Sayings, Quips, One-Liners, Clichés, Quotes, and Insights
Arranged by Over 250 Topics
Over 15 Megabytes of Text
Over 21 Million Webpages (excluding graphics) Served to Readers Around the World
       From January 1, 1999 through March 1, 2011  
This webpage has been online since March 2001 
Compiled by Karen Garofalo and Mike Garofalo from Red Bluff, California
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Last Updated: March 1, 2011 

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