In my experience, birds are as fine and appropriate a lens through which to assimilate life as anything else. — Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Mayr became a mentor for many promising young men with an interest in birds. He urged them to pick a bird, to follow and study it, to learn the secrets of its breeding life, its winter habits, to take in small details that no one else knew because no one else had ever watched so closely. Mayr argued against a stream of ornithologists who hoped to make the science entirely academic, feeling that serious amateurs could make valuable contributions to the field of ornithology if they watched birds seriously and well.

Cormorants are hated. In one popular anti-cormorant treatise, the bird is blamed for its very existence: “A war is being waged between the interests of sport fishermen and a predatory bird that has no local natural enemy. The bird’s sole purpose is to reproduce and eat fish.” Of course, obtaining food and reproducing are two primary goals of any species, including our own.

Owls are not like other birds. I suppose one could say this about any avian tribe, but owls are particularly unlike, with layered dimensions of dissimilarity.