What melody will our rivers remember if songbirds forget how to sing?

But in the early 1970s, we were not birdwatching. We were birding, and that made all the difference. We were out to seek, to discover, to chase, to learn, to find as many different kinds of birds as possible — and, in friendly competition, to try to find more of them than the next birder. We became a community of birders, with the complications that human societies always have; and although it was the birds that had brought us together, our story became a human story after all.

[Audubon's works are] the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology.

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.