bird
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs.
“The Littlest Birds,” The Be Good Tanyas, Blue Horse (Nettwerk Records, September, 2001).
My peachicken has turned out to be a cock which means that in three years if he survives dogs, foxes, weasels, mink, and internal worms, he will have a tail-spread of four feet. He has one trick: he runs up to anyone holding a cigaret [sic] and snatches it away and eats it. He has eaten two hot cigarets so far.
letter to Elizabeth Fenwick, February 12, 1954, in The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 67–68.
I was going to bring you some peacock feathers to go against your yellow walls. I think they are too long to mail. Next year I will have 7 cocks shedding tails instead of one and I should be able to go into some kind of business. My mother claims the feathers we have sitting around create moths. I claim they do not. Impasse.
Letter to Brainard and Frances Neel Cheney, December 10, 1957, in The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and the Brainard Cheneys, ed. by Ralph Stephens (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 63.
Nothing looks more disheveled than a thoroughly rained-on redbird, do you think? I’m looking at one. (He’s looking at me.)
Letter to William Maxwell dated January 8, 1968, in What There Is to Say We Have Said, ed. by Suzanne Mars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), 237.
Found three huge mushrooms when I went out before breakfast to fill the bird feeder. So far only jays come, but the word will get around.
Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 37.
One well-documented use of tools on a grand scale by crows around the world is the dropping of nuts on the road to be shelled by passing cars. The crows will swoop in, drop their nuts, and wait on a wire for a vehicle to pass. They will then swoop down again to see whether their nuts have been crushed open.
Crow Planet (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 72.
One day Mr. Mallard decided he’d like to take a trip to see what the rest of the river was like, further on. So off he set.
Make Way for Ducklings (New York: Viking, 1941).
Swallows, I have noticed, never use any feather but a white one in their nest-building, and they always leave a lot of it showing, which makes me believe that they are interested not in the feather’s insulating power but in its reflecting power, so that when they skim into the dark barn from the bright outdoors they will have a beacon to steer by.
“Home-Coming,” in Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 12.
…Innocent as my dog Patch,
Barking at his echo…
“Flying Scrolls,” in The Skylark: and Other Poems (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959), 72.
A sparrow in a snowstorm with a feather in his bill: that is Faith.
“Flying Scrolls,” in The Skylark: and Other Poems (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959), 74.
It is lonely without the birds to-day, for it rains badly, and the little poets have no umbrellas.
The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1955), 471.