20th-century Naturalist Quotes

Gerald Durrell
Joseph Wood Krutch
Diane Ackerman
Roger Tory Peterson
Richard Proenneke

One of the chief charms of collecting is its uncertainty. One day you will go out loaded down with nets and bags for the sole purpose of catching bats, and you will arrive back in camp with a python in the nets, your bags full of birds, and your pockets full of giant millipedes.

Gerald Durrell
Gerald Durrell
Bats eat so much food each evening that they have weighed in at as much as 50 percent heavier after one night's dining.

Diane Ackerman
Diane Ackerman
The question "How many legs does a normal man have?" should be answered by finding a statistical average. And since some men have only one leg, or none, this would lead inevitably to the conclusion that a "normal" man is equipped with one and some fraction legs.

Joseph Wood Krutch
Joseph Wood Krutch
Today I had lunch in the city with two scientists, a botanist and an ichthyologist. The botanist said he never kept a garden and the ichthyologist said he never went fishing.

More birds have adapted to a changing world than have failed. Very few have the narrow tolerance of the ivory-billed woodpecker or the Bachman's warbler.

Roger Tory Peterson
Roger Tory Peterson
Of all the astronomical events, the fall of a meteorite is the most unnerving and yet the most reassuring. Reassuring because it proves to us that the depths of space are inhabited by bodies made of the same elements we have here on earth, that, at rock bottom, a man and a star are built of the same stuff.

For what are the whales being killed? For a few hundred jobs and products that are not needed, since there are cheap substitutes. If this continues, it will be the end of living and the beginning of survival. The world is being totaled.

Learn to use an axe, and respect it and you can't help but love it. But abuse one and it will wear your hands raw and open your foot like an overcooked sausage.

Richard Proenneke
Richard Proenneke
Even if a scientific model, like a car, has only a few years to run before it is discarded, it serves its purpose for getting from one place to another.

Go out into the world where your heart calls you. The blessings will come, I promise you that. I wish for you the insight to recognize the blessings as such, and sometimes it's hard. But you'll know it's a blessing if you are enriched and transformed by the experience. So be ready. There are great souls and teachers everywhere. It's your job to recognize them.

Then it came again, thunderous, earthshattering, the longest, loudest and most superbly stupendous fart that I have ever heard in my life, a sound of such magnificent and prolonged volume as to appear utterly beyond human capability.