Wildlife Quotes

“Crocodiles are easy. They try to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first.”
― Steve Irwin

“Josh gathered his sense of injustice and faced Rodan Man-to-man, or rather, elk-to-elk, no, Netah-to-Netah.”
― Lisa Kaniut Cobb, Down in the Valley

“We hunt as we've always done, part sport, part grocery shopping.”
― Lisa Kaniut Cobb, Down in the Valley

“The only good cage is an empty cage.”
― Lawrence Anthony, The Elephant Whisperer

“If we can teach people about wildlife, they will be touched. Share my wildlife with me. Because humans want to save things that they love.”
― Steve Irwin

“Crocodiles are easy,' Steve said. 'They try to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first.”
― Terri Irwin, Steve & Me

“Wild animals are less wild and more human than many humans of this world”
― Munia Khan

“That's what people do when they find a special place that wild and full of life, they trample it to death.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Flush

“Every creature was designed to serve a purpose. Learn from animals for they are there to teach you the way of life. There is a wealth of knowledge that is openly accessible in nature. Our ancestors knew this and embraced the natural cures found in the bosoms of the earth. Their classroom was nature. They studied the lessons to be learned from animals. Much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“The smaller the creature, the bolder its spirit.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“A male frigate bird blows up a wild red pouch on his neck. He can keep it puffed up for hours. It is his way of impressing the girls.”
― Julie Murphy, Sea Birds

“Sometimes, I am the beast in the darkness. Sometimes, I am the ghost.”
― Heather Durham, Going Feral: Field Notes on Wonder and Wanderlust

“The dangerous temptation of wildlife films is that they can lull us into thinking we can get by without the original models -- that we might not need animals in the flesh.”
― Doug Peacock, Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness

“In this image-driven age, wildlife filmmakers carry a heavy responsibility. They can influence how we think and behave when we’re in nature. They can even influence how we raise our kids, how we vote and volunteer in our communities, as well as the future of our wildlands and wildlife. If the stories they create are misleading or false in some way, viewers will misunderstand the issues and react in inappropriate ways. People who consume a heavy diet of wildlife films filled with staged violence and aggression, for example, are likely to think about nature as a circus or a freak show. They certainly won’t form the same positive connections to the natural world as people who watch more thoughtful, authentic, and conservation-oriented films.”
― Chris Palmer, Shooting in the Wild: An Insider's Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom

“We forget, in a world completely transformed by man, that what we’re looking at is not necessarily the environment wildlife prefer, but the depleted remnant that wildlife is having to cope with: what it has is not necessarily what it wants.”
― Isabella Tree, Wilding

“It may be underfunded and at times mismanaged, but the [Endangered Species] Act is an unprecedented attempt to delegate human-caused extinction to the chapters of history we would rather not revisit: the Slave Trade, the Indian Removal Policy, the subjection of women, child labor, segregation. The Endangered Species Act is a zero-tolerance law: no new extinctions. It keeps eyes on the ground with legal backing-the gun may be in the holster most of the time, but its available if necessary to keep species from disappearing. I discovered in my travels that a law protecting all animals and plants, all of nature, might be as revolutionary-and as American-as the Declaration of Independence.”
― Joe Roman, Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act

“Imagination is haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain - eagle and peregrine falcon, red deer and mountain hare. The reason for their swiftness is severely practical: food is so scarce up there that only those who can move swiftly over vast stretches of ground may hope to survive. The speed, the whorls and torrents of movement, are in plain fact the mountain's own necessity. But their grace is not necessity. Or if it is - if the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings achieve their beauty by strict adherence to the needs of function - so much the more is the mountain's integrity vindicated. Beauty is not adventitious but essential.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

“Remember that even just watching animals has an impact. Intrusion into their living space can expose them to predation, keep them from feeding or other essential activities, or cause them to leave their young exposed to predation or the elements. No photo or viewing opportunity is worth harassing or stressing wildlife. In appreciating and watching them, we have a responsibility to protect and preserve the animals that share our state.”
― Mary Taylor Young, The Guide to Colorado Mammals

“A trademark of something that works well, the cat body has hardly changed since its inception. Like with today's cats, their digestive systems could handle only flesh. The lesson of the cat is that if you are to become a full-fledged carnivore, you have to commit everything to it. A house cat fed vegetarian food will shrivel and die.”
― Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

“Audiences see personalities on shows interacting with wild animals as if they were not dangerous or, at the other extreme, provoking them to give viewers an adrenaline rush. Mostly, the animals just want to be left alone, so it’s not surprising that these entertainers are seriously hurt or even killed on rare occasions. On one level, it’s that very possibility the shows are selling.”
― Chris Palmer, Shooting in the Wild: An Insider's Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom

“I spent my summers at my grandparents’ cabin in Estes Park, literally next door to Rocky Mountain National Park. We had a view of Longs Peak across the valley and the giant rock beaver who, my granddad told me, was forever climbing toward the summit of the mountain. We awoke to mule deer peering in the windows and hummingbirds buzzing around the red-trimmed feeders; spent the days chasing chipmunks across the boulders of Deer Mountain and the nights listening to coyotes howling in the dark.”
― Mary Taylor Young, The Guide to Colorado Mammals

“There are halibut as big as doors in the ocean down below the town, flapskimming on the murky ocean floor with vast skates and rays and purple crabs and black cod large as logs, and sea lions slashing through the whip-forests of bull kelp and eelgrass and sugar wrack, and seals in the rockweed and giant perennial kelp and iridescent kelp and iridescent fish and luminous shrimp too small to see with the naked eye but billions of which feed the gray whales which slide hugely slowly by like rubbery zeppelins twice a year, north in spring and south in fall.

Salmonberries, thimbleberries, black raspberries, gooseberries, bearberries, snowberries, salal berries, elderberries, blackberries along the road and by the seasonal salt marshes north and south.

The ground squirrels burrow along the dirt banks of the back roads, their warren of mysterious holes, the thick scatter of fine brown soil before their doorsteps, the flash of silver-gray on their back fur as they rocket into the bushes; the bucks and does and fawns in the road in the morning, their springy step as they slip away from the gardens they have been eating; the bobcat seen once, at dusk, its haunches jacked up like a teenager's hot-rodding car; the rumor of cougar in the hills; the coyotes who use the old fire road in the hills; the tiny mice and bats one sometimes finds long dead and leathery like ancient brown paper; the little frenetic testy chittering skittering cheeky testy chickaree squirrels in the spruces and pines - Douglas squirrels, they are, their very name remembering that young gentleman botanist who wandered near these hills centuries ago.

The herons in marshes and sinks and creeks and streams and on the beach sometimes at dusk; and the cormorants and pelicans and sea scoters and murres (poor things so often dead young on the beach after the late-spring fledging) and jays and crows and quorking haunted ravens (moaning Poe! Poe! at dusk) especially over the wooded hills, and the goldfinches mobbing thistles in the meadowed hills, and sometimes a falcon rocketing by like a gleeful murderous dream, and osprey of all sizes all along the Mink like an osprey police lineup, and the herring gulls and Caspian terns and arctic terns, and the varied thrushes in wet corners of thickets, and the ruffed grouse in the spruce by the road, and the quail sometimes, and red-tailed hawks floating floating floating; from below they look like kites soaring brownly against the piercing blue sky, which itself is a vast creature bluer by the month as summer deepens into crispy cold fall.”
― Brian Doyle, Mink River: A Novel

“In the pages of a book, you can find the universe within a single heartbeat.”
― Umesha Chathurangi Handapangoda, Jungle Heroes Leo and Panther - Adventures in the Wild

“To protect and preserve our shared planet, it is our responsibility to save species which are about to be extinct.”
― Tariku Bogale

“chop wood carry water”
― Jordan Montemurro

“Humans evolved in nature. Our sense of beauty evolved to attract us to environments in which our ancestors thrived, such as grasslands with trees and water, where herbivores are plentiful, or the ocean’s edge, with its rich marine resources. The great evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson said that humans are ‘biophilic’, by which he meant that humans have ‘the urge to affiliate with other forms of life’. This is why people travel to wondrous natural destinations.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“My attraction to wild places is, in part, an attempt to relive the innocence and imagination lost after youth. To be submersed in the innocence of a forest, the ungoverned landscape, to exist by my own laws and no one else’s, even if only briefly — this is one of the primary beacons that guides me back into wild places.”
― Daniel J. Rice, THE UNPEOPLED SEASON: A Journal of Solitude and Wilderness

“But what bear could resist ripe strawberries as a break from the ocean's wrack line smorgasbord of half-dead hermit crabs and rotting salmon carcasses?”
― Caroline Woodward, Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper

“What began, centuries ago, as a healthy safeguard against projection had become an insidious contributor to human exceptionalism, the belief that nothing else on Earth was like us in any way.”
― Richard Powers, Playground