To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.

The most important characteristic of an organism is that capacity for internal self-renewal known as health. There are two organisms whose processes of self-renewal have been subjected to human interference and control. One of these is man himself (medicine and public health). The other is land (agriculture and coservation). The effort to control the health of land has not been very successful.

No one would rather hunt woodcock in October than I, but since learning of the sky dance I find myself calling one or two birds enough. I must be sure that, come April, there be no dearth of dancers in the sunset sky.

For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.

When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.