raptors

"Live with vultures, become a vulture; live with crows, become a crow"

"What flocks of critics hover here to-day, As vultures wait on armies for their prey, All gaping for the carcass of a play!"

"I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge."

"A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble."

"The Vulture is a Patient Bird Like a Hole in the Head An Ace Up My Sleeve Want to Stay Alive"

"There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen."

"The [...] kills wild bulls in the foothills, and it kills the stags in the high mountains."

"If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture — that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves."

"For an author Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known, resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds, when they could pass as vultures and no questions asked."

"Spain stooped on South America, like a vulture on its prey. Every thing was force. Territories were acquired by fire and sword."

"There too huge Tityos, whom Earth that gendereth all things, Once foster’d, spreadeth-out o’er nine full roods his immense limbs. On him a wild vulture with hook-beak greedily gorgeth His liver upsprouting quick as that Hell-chicken eateth. Shé diggeth and dwelleth under the vast ribs, her bloody bare neck Lifting anon: ne’er loathes-she the food, ne’er fails the renewal."

"A vulture on board; bald, red, queer-shaped head, featherless red places here and there on his body, intense great black eyes set in featherless rims of inflamed flesh; dissipated look; a business-like style, a selfish, conscienceless, murderous aspect — the very look of a professional assassin, and yet a bird which does no murder. What was the use of getting him up in that tragic style for so innocent a trade as his ? For this one isn't the sort that wars upon the living, his diet is offal — and the more out of date it is the better he likes it. Nature should give him a suit of rusty black ; then he would be all right, for he would look like an undertaker and would harmonize with his business ; whereas the way he is now he is horribly out of true."

"I will love you ... as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture."

"The vultures to the conqueror’s banner true Who feed where Desolation first has fed, And whose wings rain contagion."

"The one term I don't like to be called is a 'vulture. Because to me, a vulture is a kind of asset-stripper that eats dead flesh off the bones of a dead creature. Our bird should be the phoenix, the bird that reinvents itself, recreates itself from its ashes. And that's much closer to what it is that we really do."

"He can wax poetic about pigeons and even has kind words for vultures. Vultures are homely, but they clean up all the garbage and that's good. And they're elegant in the sky."

"God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates."

"You have no idea how fortunate you are, because I'm a particularly loathsome guest and I eat like a vulture. Unfortunately, the resemblance doesn't end there."

"Vultures are one of the few bird species that are afraid of their own dead. But only when they're hung at the roost site. If you hang them anywhere else then they'll eat them."

"I am ... a friend of the mountain buzzards and feeder of seacoast vultures."

"Never stoops the soaring vulture On his quarry in the desert, On the sick or wounded bison, But another vulture, watching From his high aerial look-out Sees the downward plunge, and follows; And a third pursues the second, Coming from invisible ether, First a speck, and then a vulture , Till the air is dark with pinions."

"The eagle, soaring, clear-eyed, competitive, prepared to strike, but not a vulture. Noble, visionary, majestic, that people can believe in and be inspired by, that creates such a lift that it soars. I can see that being a good logo for the principled company."

"The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey."

"That wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain; Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore, Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore."

"I'm a culture vulture, and I just want to experience it all."

"There you are! Dad always said that milk is good for your eyesight. Vultures are good for one thing and one thing only - their talons. They make great mental acuity that I would care to call consciousness. But I am also confident—without wrapping myself in unresolvable arguments about definitions—that vultures and sloths, as close evolutionary relatives with the same basic set of organs."

"Prometheus, I have no Titan's might, Yet I, too, must each dusk renew my heart, For daytime's vulture talons tear apart The tender alcoves built by love at night."

"I'm not sure why many of us have a negative impression of s; perhaps it's their naked heads, or perhaps we find their diet of the dead and desiccated unappealing. ... Instead of defending themselves with s or teeth, they vomit in the general direction of a threat, certainly not the most charming attribute. Above all, I think we dislike turkey vultures because they remind us of our own mortality and that life will continue after we die—and that, as with all animals, something will be waiting to consume our bodies."

"The screech-owl, with ill-boding cry, Portends strange things, old women say; Stops every fool that passes by, And frights the school-boy from his play."

"A Wise Old Owl Live In An Imagine Saving The Rainforest & In That Oak The More He Spoke The More He Heard Like Any Other Wise Old Bird."

"Smallest of the British owls, the is only 22 cm from head to tail, which is less than a centimetre larger than a . ... Although Little Owls may be seen during the day, most of their hunting takes place at dusk or the few hours after dark and again around dawn. They will catch small s and sometimes birds, but most of their food is s and s."

"While I am talking of owls, it may not be improper to mention what I was told by a gentleman of the country of Wilts. As they were grubbing a vast hollow pollard-ash that had been the mansion of owls for centuries, he discovered at the bottom a mass of matter that at first he could not account for. After some examination, he found that it was a congeries of the bones of mice (and perhaps of birds and bats) that had been heaping together for ages, being cast up in pellets out of the crops of many generations of inhabitants. For owls cast up the bones, fur, and feathers of what they devour, after the manner of hawks. He believes, he told me, that there were bushels of this kind of substance."

"The large white owl that with eye is blind, That hath sate for years in the old tree hollow, Is carried away in a gust of wind."

"The Roman senate, when within The city walls an owl was seen, Did cause their clergy, with lustrations * * * * The round-fac'd prodigy t' avert, From doing town or country hurt."

"In the hollow tree, in the old gray tower, The spectral Owl doth dwell; Dull, hated, despised, in the sunshine hour, But at dusk—he's abroad and well! Not a bird of the forest e'er mates with him— All mock him outright, by day: But at night, when the woods grow still and dim, The boldest will shrink away! O, when the night falls, and roosts the fowl, Then, then, is the reign of the Horned Owl!"

"St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold."

"The wailing owl Screams solitary to the mournful moon."

"Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit; Tu-who, a merry note."

"Then lady Cynthia, mistress of the shade, Goes, with the fashionable owls, to bed."

"When cats run home and light is come, And dew is cold upon the ground, And the far-off stream is dumb, And the whirring sail goes round, And the whirring sail goes round; Alone and warming his five wits, The white owl in the belfry sits."

"O you virtuous owle, The wise Minerva's only fowle."

"The clamorous owl, that nightly hoots and wonders At our quaint spirits."

"It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman, Which gives the stern'st good night."

"She rears her young on yonder tree; She leaves her faithful mate to mind 'em; Like us, for fish she sails to sea, And, plunging, shows us where to find 'em. Yo, ho, my hearts! let's seek the deep, Ply every oar, and cheerly wish her, While slow the bending net we sweep, God bless the fish-hawk and the fisher."

"Circling higher and higher At last the hawk pulls its shadow From the world."

"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."

"I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

"When I bestride him I soar, I am a hawk."

"No marvel, an it like your majesty, My lord protector's hawks do tower so well; They know their master loves to be aloft And bears his thoughts above his falcon's pitch."

"Between two hawks, which flies the higher pitch."