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People habitat has to take priority over bird habitat.

I often have deer on my property and there's a fox and owls. You're not going to see that in the city.

I thought, 'What if I were 17, and it was my small town of Springhill, Louisiana? How would I feel if people started flooding in to see some bird?'

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.

You were part of a parish life. It was a great community to grow up in. I just was impressed by our parish priests. After a while, I began to think maybe I could do that.

Numbers of snipes breed every summer in some moory ground on the verge of this parish.

The son of a Fife mining town sledder of coal-bings, bottle-forager, and picture-house troglodyte, I was decidedly urban and knew little about native fauna, other than the handful of birds I saw on trips to the beach or Sunday walks.

I mean, it is an extraordinary thing that a large proportion of your country and my country, of the citizens, never see a wild creature from dawn 'til dusk, unless it's a pigeon, which isn't really wild, which might come and settle near them.

I've got everything I need: a nice piece of land with hawks and owls and incredible sunsets, and the good will of my neighbors.

I can recognize the calls of practically every bird in North America. There are some in Africa I don't know, though.