Pete Dunne Quotes

Hope is many things, but it throws itself against fact and shatters.

The bird is a mouse. A frustrating, feathered mouse, no more inclined to be seen by mortal eyes than your average leprechaun.

But since it was birders he was dealing with, there wasn’t any harm just letting us in on the honor system. There was no question in his mind (or ours) that we would ante up when departing. That’s just the way birders are.

Dawn was just getting serious. One of the rarely spoken advantages to being a birder are the number of sunrises you get to appreciate in the course of a lifetime. Most people come onto a day full blown—to a sun already high in the sky, a world already in motion, and the impossible task of catching up. They rarely see the tentative side of morning or appreciate the great struggle between light and darkness played out on a world stage. Some mornings come raging over the horizon, angry and red. Some are so subtle that the transformation of night and day seems like an afterthought. All are different and all are priceless.

The one thing you can’t do with binoculars is look back.

They were sport gunners, too—a class spawned by wealth and leisure who carried their “sport” to tasteless Victorian excess. Both professional and the sport hunter approached the killing of “game” with zeal and the conviction that North America’s wildlife was infinite. The faith was ill-founded. Not only is a continent’s wildlife finite, but, to the shock of many, by the turn of the century much of it was gone and a lot more was going fast.

Many condors were simply shot. No, they weren’t edible. No, their feathers weren’t prized adornments for ladies’ headgear. Despite their size, they posed no threat to humans or livestock. Yet there are nearly two hundred documented cases of condors that were killed for no better reason than to satisfy somebody’s perverted vanity.

To a child, there is nothing in the world quite so important as growing up.

Since Benjamin Franklin’s eloquent bad-mouthing of the bird when the time came to select a national emblem, the Bald Eagle has been an unjust target for abuse. Its taste for winter-killed fish has made it a “carrion eater.” Its talent for close-range aerial pursuit has made it a “thief.” Its penchant for sitting for long periods and not expending energy without need has made it “lazy,” and this is not fair. Only humans seem to equate frenetic activity with success. Eagles can and do sit for extended periods precisely because they are successful predators who can find food at need. Energy wasted is just that. A waste.

She didn’t ask why I left, because that’s a silly question. I left for the same reason all people leave home. Because one day you realize that all the old habits have become too familiar. Because there is a world of discovery waiting and the first step toward the future is a step away from the past. So you leave. Go chasing rainbows, never thinking that maybe one end of a rainbow is just as good as another.

In the free-for-all age before conservation, scientists were not the only ones “collecting” birds. Great numbers of birds were killed for sport and for market, and the myth of America’s inexhaustible resources sustained the slaughter past the point of reason.

So I came, in time, to disbelieve the Myth of Infinite because I know, now, that the resources of a continent are more finite than human greed. I discovered that freedom can be twisted, can mean that anything a person can grab is his and to hell with everyone else. I learned that the twisted freedom that allows people to destroy a place conflicts with my freedom to appreciate it and the freedom of other living things to survive.

It’s hard to recall now that this environmental beacon was once a battlefield and that there was a time when people did not understand the important role birds of prey play in maintaining natural balance. It’s difficult to believe that people’s ignorance was so complete that they thought of hawks as vermin and shot them on sight.

Zero impact in a fragile land. The only ethic that should be tolerated in the Arctic.

Very few works of art, however skillfully crafted, can approach the splendor of a living bird.