The closer the bird is to the surface of the water, the firmer and more inelastic is the uplift of the rising air. The bird appears to almost feel the surface with the tip of its weather wing.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If you direct your attention to the position of a bird with regard to the wave surface, it will speedily be noticed to be nearly always on the rising side or face of the wave and moving apparently at right angles to the wave's course, but really diagonal to it.
Birds have wings; they're free; they can fly where they want when they want. They have the kind of mobility many people envy.
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
I think it is the fact that birds are two-legged, like us, which gives them something of our balance and gesture and makes them nearer to us.
The most ordinary conditions for observing sailing birds are then the wind and sea are both aft.
In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Most birds are very stiff-necked, like the robin, and as they run or hop upon the ground, carry the head as if it were riveted to the body. Not so the oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as the cow-bunting, or the quail, or the crow. They move the head forward with the movement of the feet.
When a trout rises to a fly, it does not swim as much as tilt its fins and jet skyward.
Everywhere on the Continent, the tourist is looked upon as a bird to be plucked, and presently the bird himself feebly comes to regard plucking as his proper destiny and abjectly holds out his wing so long as there is a feather left on it.