Why Birds Matter

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of
animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice,
man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge
and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We
patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken
form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the
animal shall not be measured by the man. In a world older and more
complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions
of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never
hear. They are not breathren, they are not underlings; they are other
nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of
the splendour and travail of the earth.“

—Henry Beston, The Outermost House (1928)