Henry David Thoreau Quotations: Birds
See two ducks flying over Ministerial Swamp.—Journal, 12 March 1859
Seeing at that moment three little red birds fly out of a crevice in the ruins, up into an arbor-vitae tree, which grew out of them, I asked him their names, in such French as I could muster, but he neither understood me or ornithology . . .—A Yankee in Canada
So is not shade as good as sunshine—night as day? Why be eagles and thrushes always, and owls and whippoor-wills never?—Journal, 16 June 1840
Sometimes we sat on the beach and watched the beach birds, sand-pipers, and others, trotting along close to each wave, and waiting for the sea to cast up their breakfast. The former (Charadrius melodus) ran with great rapidity and then stood stock still remarkably erect and hardly to be distinguished from the beach.—Cape Cod
The birds seem to flit through submerged groves, alighting on yielding sprays, and their clear notes to come up from below.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
The hawk is the aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea.—Walden
The sharp whistle of the blackbird, too, is heard like single sparks or a shower of them shot up from the swamps and seen against the dark winter in the rear.—Journal, 2 March 1859
The wood-thrush sang on the distant shore, and the laugh of some loons, sporting in a concealed western bay, as if inspired by morning, came distinct over the lake to us, and, what was remarkable, the echo which ran round the lake was much louder than the original note; probably because, the loons being in a regularly curving bay under the mountain, we were exactly in the focus of many echoes, the sound being reflected like light from a concave mirror.—The Maine Woods
There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest.—Walden
To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds,—think of it!—Walden
