Lost Among the Birds Quotes

“There's enough joy in birding to fill a lifetime.”
― Neil Hayward, Lost Among the Birds: Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year

“Watching the Greater Sage-Grouse stomping and popping, as they had done for millennia before, I could feel the urgency of their individual efforts together with that irony peculiar to life: despite the knowledge of one's own ultimate and bloody mortality, we need to dance like there will always be a tomorrow.”
― Neil Hayward, Lost Among the Birds: Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year

“to”
― Neil Hayward, Lost Among the Birds: Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year

“there was something therapeutic and necessary about the birding. I suspected it had to do with the intense focus and the way it brings you to the present. When I was birding, I didn’t worry about the past and lament all those best years being over, or fear the future, empty and rapidly disappearing. The present was different, like my brain had declutched from the competing anxieties and I was free to coast in neutral.”
― Neil Hayward, Lost Among the Birds: Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year

“Slate-throated Restart”
― Neil Hayward, Lost Among the Birds: Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year

“I felt that combination of excitement at what lay ahead and panic at potentially missing the bird. That pit in the stomach is a common feeling for birders, whose lives are defined by that short distance between emotional extremes of jubilation and “that’s it—I’m never doing this again!”
― Neil Hayward, Lost Among the Birds: Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year

“It’s the curse of the birder to never stop birding, however remote the possibility of seeing or hearing a bird. Our eyes and ears are always primed. It’s a kind of personal schizophrenia, hearing voices no one else can hear and seeing ghosts among the trees that somehow the normals ignore or can’t perceive.”
― Neil Hayward, Lost Among the Birds: Accidentally Finding Myself in One Very Big Year