Bird Quotes: Eagles, Owls, Crows, Turkeys
Bird quotes pay tribute to the sounds, habits, and admirable qualities of our feathered friends.
There are approximately 10,000 species of birds, and as such, there’s a lot to say about them. We’ve gathered the best quotes, sayings, captions, and idioms into this collection for your enjoyment. Have a look and let us know what you think.
Best Bird Quotes
Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?
David Attenborough
I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
Charles Lindbergh
Birds are not free since Men have invented cages.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we’ll soon be in trouble.
Roger Tory Peterson
To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shorebirds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.
Rachel Carson

Inspirational Bird Quotes
Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
We think caged birds sing when indeed they cry.
John Webster
The presence of a single bird can change everything for one who appreciates them.
Julie Zickefoose
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.
Robert Lynd
Like the hummingbird sipping nectar from every flower, I fly joyfully through my days, seeing beauty in everything.
Amethyst Wyldfyre
“What kind of bird are you, if you can’t fly?” said he. To this, the duck replied, “What kind of bird are you if you can’t swim?” and dived into the pond.
Sergei Prokofiev
Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.
Henry Van Dykeen
The reason birds can fly and we can’t is simply because they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings. J.M. Barrie

Popular Bird Quotes
I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.
Joseph Addison
Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.
Rabindranath Tagore
A forest bird never wants a cage.
Henrik Ibsen
My heart is like a singing bird.
Christina Rossetti
Soft feathers cannot make a cruel bird kind.
Munia Khan
Poor indeed is the garden in which birds find no homes.
Abram L. Urban
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
William Blake
I like the idea of taking off like a bird.
Florence Welch
A bird is three things: Feathers, flight and song, And feathers are the least of these.
Marjorie Allen Seiffert
Beautiful Bird Quotes
It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.
Aesop
A heart without dreams is like a bird without feathers.
Suzy Kassem
The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.
Eric Berne
The bird is powered by its own life and by its motivation.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
A bird does not sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
Maya Angelou
Awesome Bird Quotes
Just as the bird needs wings to fly, a leader needs useful information to flow. Leaders learn.
Israelmore Ayivor
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.
Robert Wilson Lynd
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill, of things unknown, but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom.
Maya Angelou
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.
John Burroughs
Bird Song Quotes
A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.
Chinese Proverb
The sound of birds stops the noise in my mind.
Carly Simon
Some birds are poets and sing all summer.
Henry David Thoreau
Hear how the birds, on every blooming spray, With joyous music wake the dawning day.
Alexander Pope
Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still, she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.
Victor Hugo
I heard a bird sing in the dark of December. A magical thing. And sweet to remember. We are nearer to Spring than we were in September. I heard a bird sing in the dark of December.
Oliver Herford
In order to see birds, it is necessary to become part of the silence.
Robert Lynd
Why do birds sing in the morning? It’s the triumphant shout: “We got through another night!”
Enid Bagnold
My favorite weather is bird chirping weather.
Loire Hartwould
It was wonderful cycling through the woods this evening. I was deafened with bird song.
Noël Coward
Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?
Rose F. Kennedy
I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.
Willie Nelson
Check out Good Cow Quotes and Sayings
Owl Quotations
When the owl sings, the night is silent.
Charles de Leusse
An owl is the wisest of all birds because the more it sees the less it talks.
Christie Watson
There was a wise old owl who sat in a tree. The less he spoke the more he heard. The more he heard the less he spoke. Why can’t we be like that wise old owl in the tree? Speech must die to serve that which is spoken.
Paul Ricoeur
Owls are known as lonely birds, but it is not known that they have the forest as their best friend!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
The little owls call to each other with tremulous, quavering voices throughout the livelong night, as they sit in the creaking trees.
Theodore Roosevelt

Quotes About Eagles
There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
Carl Sandburg
The eagle has no fear of adversity. We need to be like the eagle and have a fearless spirit of a conqueror!
Joyce Meyer
And from Humming-Bird to Eagle, the daily existence of every bird is a remote and bewitching mystery.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
The Eagle has landed.
Neil Armstrong
Don’t quack like a duck, soar like an eagle.
Ken Blanchard
May you soar on eagle wings, high above the madness of the world.
Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitudes.
E. F. Schumacher
You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren.
William Henry Hudson

Turkey Quotes
I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. The turkey is a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America.
Benjamin Franklin
Most turkeys taste better the day after, my mother’s tasted better the day before.
Rita Rudner
Turkeys know their names, come when you call and are totally affectionate. They’re better than teenagers.
Elayne Boosler
Coexistence: what the farmer does with the turkey – until Thanksgiving.
Mike Connolly
I hate turkeys. If you stand in the meat section at the grocery store long enough, you start to get mad at turkeys. There’s turkey ham, turkey bologna, turkey pastrami. Someone needs to tell the turkey, ‘man, just be yourself.
Mitch Hedberg

Crows
And the crow once called the raven black.
George R.R. Martin
If the crow had been satisfied to eat his prey in silence, he would have had more meat and less quarreling and envy.
Horace
The crow wished everything was black, the Owl, that everything was white.
William Blake
As the crow flies a popular and picturesque expression to denote a straight line.
William Henry Maule
If you have to eat crow, eat it while it’s young and tender.
Thomas Jefferson
The wing of the Falcon brings to the king, the wing of the crow brings him to the cemetery.
Muhammad Iqbal

Bird Quotes: Hummingbirds
I’d like to be like a hummingbird. You see them every now and then. You don’t see them everywhere.
Shailene Woodley
Charm is the enchanted dart, light and subtle as a hummingbird. But it is deceptive in one thing: like a sense of humor, if you think you’ve got it, you probably haven’t.
Laurel Lea
Quick as a hummingbird… she darts so eagerly, swiftly, sweetly dipping into the flowers of my heart.
James Oppenheimer

Cardinals
When a cardinal appears in your yard, it’s a visitor from heaven.
Unknown
Cardinals appear when angels are near.
Unknown
Quotes About Birds
Tame birds sing of freedom. Wild birds fly.
John Lennon
I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.
E. E. Cummings
Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
Salvador Dali
What law, what reason can deny that gift so sweet, so natural that God has given a stream, a fish, a beast, a bird?
Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Birds were created to record everything. They were not designed just to be beautiful jewels in the sky, but to serve as the eyes of heaven.
Suzy Kassem
I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecotes.
Henry David Thoreau
Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.
Douglas Coupland
The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
Henry David Thoreau
Bird Idioms
1.) Free as a bird.
2.) An albatross around the neck.
3.) Like a duck to water.
4.) Proud as a peacock.
5.) Free as a bird.
6.) As the crow flies.
7.) Ugly duckling.
8.) Happy as a lark.
9.) Crazy as a loon.
10.) Take someone under your wing.
11.) A birds-eye view.
12.) Birds of a feather.
13.) A sitting duck.
14.) A night owl.
15.) Wild goose chase.
Popular Bird Sayings
A.) God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.
Jacques Deval
B.) A talkative bird will not build a nest.
C.) A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
D.) The early bird catches the worm.
E.) If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck.
F.) The eagle does not catch flies.
G.) The arrow strikes one bird down, but the flock remains.
H.) What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
I.) The summer does not start with a single swallow.
J.) No matter how high a bird flies, it has to come down for water.
Bird Captions for Instagram
1.) Guess who is a bird nerd?
2.) Is this where I tweet?
3.) Be yourself unless you can be a bird.
4.) The bird is the word.
5.) Toucan play at this game.
6.) As long as it’s not much of a bird’en.
7.) I have no egrets.
8.) Bird puns are always Hawkward.
9.) I could barely see this bird. Yeah, it was in da skies.
10.) Duckingham Palace.
11.) Brrrrd! (For a cold-weather shot of a bird.)
12.) Why do hummingbirds hum? They don’t know the words.
13.) I feel Ostrich-sized.
14.) Owl you need is love.
15.) Hoot and holler.
16.) Winging it.
17.) Crow up!
18.) I wanna fly away.
How To Use These Bird Quotes, Sayings, Idioms, Captions
Here are a few ideas for putting these bird quotes to use:
1.) Post them along with a photo of a bird on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest.
2.) Use a favorite quote below your sign off in emails and letters.
3.) Ask your children about the meaning of some of the bird idioms.
4.) Compare an approach in a business setting to a bird in nature.
5.) Post an inspirational bird quote on your fridge, bulletin board, or office cubicle wall.
By Brenna O’Halloran
Brenna is a naturalist living among the redwoods in California where she sees many a woodpecker, Steller’s jay, and hawk.
Encore
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