Birds, Chickens, Ducks

Quotes for Those that Love
Gardens, Gardening and the Green Way

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

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

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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 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

Insects - Quotes for Gardeners

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

The Squaking Magpie

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

Chickens and Gardening ....

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.

cliches

concrete poems

A good read is:
Your Chickens: A Kid's Guide to Raising and Showing.
By Gail Damerow. Pownal, Vermont, Storey Books, 1993.

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

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

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

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Animals - Quotes for Gardeners

Links and References

The Aviary

Backyard Nature Specialist: Birds

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

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.

The Hummingbird Society

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

Hummingbird Web Site

Hummingbirds

Magpie Pica Nutalli - A study.

The Nest Box

Ornithological Web Libraries

Peterson On-Line

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Gardeners