“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
— Charles Darwin
Calypte anna
Fiercely territorial and dazzling in the right light.
The male Anna's Hummingbird is one of the first birds I ever watched closely — a flash of iridescent magenta in the winter light of northern California. He defended his perch with the zeal of a general and the beauty of a poet.
Unlike most of its family, it does not flee the cold. It winters where others will not, singing a thin, scratchy song from the bare tops of the winter garden.
Ptilonorhynchus violaceus
Watch ObservationHe collects not for need, but for beauty. A devotion to blue. A stage in the forest cleared, swept, and adorned. And she — the quiet critic — decides.
The mockingbirds here surpass our European thrushes in both vigor and voice.
Observed a singular finch with a curious beak — perhaps a clue to adaptation?
Crossed the Pampas. Clouds of birds on the wing — life in motion.
A hummingbird held still against the wind, and for a moment the whole world held still with it.
Before the camera, there was the patient hand. These hand-coloured plates — by Audubon, by Gould, by the engravers who bent over them for months — are as much an act of love as any photograph. We keep them here in gratitude.
“How infinitely various are the creatures which inhabit this world!”— Charles Darwin About the Project
Birds conceal more than they reveal. Their instincts — architects, navigators, mourners, performers — are written in behaviors so subtle we often mistake them for nothing at all.
To watch a bird for a full hour is to be humbled. The preening is not vanity; it is maintenance of the only machine that will carry it a thousand miles. The song is not idleness; it is a map, a warning, a courtship, a name.
We built this journal to slow the looking down — to sit with one bird, one plate, one morning of field notes, until the secret life begins, faintly, to show itself.
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