bird « Quotenik

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bird

“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.”

Flannery O'Connor

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source: 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.

category: bird, feathers, peacock

medium: Letter

“Mother-love, in beasts and birds, can’t always be observed carefully, because of innate animal secrecy, but—to revisit an old Ohio highway for a moment—I once encountered a mother quail leading her young across the road in a single file. She diverted my attention from them by pretending to have a broken wing, and flopped around almost at my feet, in an exhibition of bravura acting something like that of the late Lionel Barrymore as Rasputin. When the small birds had disappeared into the deep grass, she flew calmly away and joined them.”

James Thurber

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source: “And So to Medve,” in Old Dogs Remembered, ed. by Bud Johns (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1993), 27–28.

category: bird, children, love, mother, nature, parenting, quail

medium: Essay

“Nothing looks more disheveled than a thoroughly rained-on redbird, do you think? I’m looking at one. (He’s looking at me.)”

Eudora Welty

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source: 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.

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category: bird, nature

medium: Letter

“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.”

May Sarton

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source: Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 37.

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category: bird, mushroom, nature

medium: Journal

“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.”

Lyanda Lynn Haupt

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source: Crow Planet (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 72.

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category: bird, crow, ingenuity, nature, nut, tool

medium: Nonfiction

“Everybody has a crow story.”

Lyanda Lynn Haupt

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source: Crow Planet (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 67.

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category: bird, crow, nature, story

medium: Nonfiction

“When I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks, & thrushes. As little did I know what sublime mornings & sunsets I was buying.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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source: Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 505.

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category: beauty, bird, farm, nature

medium: Journal

“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.”