“Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.”

“[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,”

“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”

“Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.”

“One of the most remarkable of all ornithological discoveries was the realisation that birds in temperate regions undergo enormous seasonal changes in their internal organs...Perhaps the most far-reaching discovery relating to these changes was the finding in the 1970s that parts of the brain also varied in size across the year...The centres in the avian brain that control the acquisition and delivery of song in male birds shrink at the end of the breeding season and grow again in the following year.”

“It's probable that in the artistic hierarchy birds are the greatest musicians existing on our planet.”