At a distance these little birds usually look drab, and the species are hardly distinguishable, but the binoculars show them to be beautifully colored and marked, and wonderfully various in their kinds. There is always something deeply enticing and pleasing to me in the sight of them. Perhaps because I was only dimly aware of them for so long, I always see them at first with a certain unexpectedness, and with the sense of gratitude that one feels for any goodness unearned and almost missed. In their secretive worlds of treetop and undergrowth, they seem among the most remote of the wild creatures. They see little of us, and we see even less of them. I think of them as being aloof somehow from common life. Certain of the most beautiful of them, I am sure, have lived and died for generations in some of our woods without being recognized by a human being. (Wendell Berry, “The Long-Legged House”)
