"Curlew" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... looking very splendid in its black, white, and red plumage, in the bright light of the morning. It haunted the reach for some days, and was not shot. Among other visitors to this part of the river and its island during spring were a curlew, which fed for some time on the eyot during the early morning, and a pair of pheasants, one of which, an old-fashioned English cock bird, was subsequently captured unhurt. A flock of sandpipers remained there for some weeks, and during the summer numbers of sedge-warblers have nested ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... many countries where the conditions seem suited to their requirements. Nevertheless, in September, and even as early as August, they begin to arrive on the pampas, the golden plover often still wearing his black nuptial dress; singly and in pairs, in small flocks, and in clouds they come—curlew, godwit, plover, tatler, tringa—piping the wild notes to which the Greenlander listened in June, now to the gaucho herdsman on the green plains of La Plata, then to the wild Indian in his remote village; and soon, further south, to the houseless ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... of an owner calls her the Petrel. It's not that I'm superstitious, but to give a boat a name of bad augury to sailors appears to me . . . however, I 've argued it with him and I will have her called the Curlew. Carrying Dr. Shrapnel and me, Petrel would be thought the proper title for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nothing but the brow of a hill, a great tree, or the common approach of night, had interposed between me and the destructive hands of the cannibals, who would devour me with as good an appetite, as I would a pigeon or curlew; surely all this, I say, could not but make me sincerely thankful to my great Preserver, whose singular protection I acknowledge with the greatest humility, and without which I must inevitably have fallen into the ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... the iris, all gray with the hovering, misty wings of moths—that was her fate—with the sky a canopy of fire above her, and the curlew calling through the kindling dusk, and the blue processional of the woods lining the ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... water-fowl, including several varieties of duck, also shag, divers, pigmy geese, small teal, grebe, red-headed plover, spur-wing plover, curlew, sandpipers, snipe, swamp hen, water-rail, and many other birds. The red-headed plover were especially numerous, and ran about on the surface of the lake, which was covered with the water-lily leaves and a thick sort of mossy weed. All the birds ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... the shore and the hills, Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three, The lovely visible earth and sky and sea, Where what the curlew needs not, ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... whom. Whan, when. Whang, a shive. Whang, flog. Whar, whare, where. Wha's whose. Wha's, who is. Whase, whose. What for, whatfore, wherefore. Whatna, what. What reck, what matter; nevertheless. Whatt, whittled. Whaup, the curlew. Whaur, where. Wheep, v. penny-wheep. Wheep, jerk. Whid, a fib. Whiddin, scudding. Whids, gambols. Whigmeleeries, crotches. Whingin, whining. Whins, furze. Whirlygigums, flourishes. Whist, silence. Whissle, whistle. Whitter, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... female bird, beautifully marked. I put her in my game-bag. During our two-mile walk to the village she behaved in a disgusting manner, and so befouled herself (after the manner of a young Australian curlew when captured) that she presented a repellent appearance, and had such a disgusting odour that I was at first inclined to throw her—game-bag and all—away. However, my native boy washed her, and then we put her in a native pigeon cage. In ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... David's, Muirtown, was so spiritual that he left his voice at the foot of the pulpit stairs, and lived in the Song of Solomon, with occasional excursions into the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and it was thoughtless not to have told Mr. Curlew that two or three dogs—of unexceptionable manners—attended our kirk with their masters. They would no more have thought of brawling in church than John himself, and they knew the parts of the service as well as the Doctor, ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... hospitable god, Jove, joy'st when guests make their abode To eat thy bullocks thighs, thy veals, thy fat Wethers, and never grudged at. The pheasant, partridge, gotwit, reeve, ruff, rail, The cock, the curlew, and the quail, These, and thy choicest viands, do extend Their tastes unto the lower end Of thy glad table; not a dish more known To thee, than unto any one: But as thy meat, so thy immortal wine Makes the smirk face of each to shine, And spring fresh rose-buds, while the salt, the wit, ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... shrill, And he was answered from the hill; Wild as the scream of the curlew, From crag to crag, the ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... birds that way were flying, Heron and curlew overhead, With a mighty eagle westward floating, Every plume ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... however, in their faces and legs. The very birds seemed to shun these wastes, and no wonder, since they had an easy method of escaping from them;—at least I only heard the monotonous and plaintive cries of the lapwing and curlew, which my companions denominated the peasweep ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... day we saw many geese, cranes, small birds common to the plains, and a few pheasants. We also observed a small plover or curlew of a brown color, about the size of a yellow-legged plover or jack-curlew, but of a different species. It first appeared near the mouth of Smith's River, but is so shy and vigilant that we were unable to shoot it. Both the broad and narrow-leaved ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... may thus be read without resorting to a book. Count the fauna: Eagle River, Bald Eagle, Buffalo Lake, Great Bear Lake, Salmon Falls, Snake River, Wolf Creek, White Fish River, Leech Lake, Beaver Bay, Carp River, Pigeon Falls, Elkhorn, Wolverine, Crane Hill, Rabbit Butte, Owl, Rattlesnake, Curlew, Little Crow, Mullet Lake, Clam Lake, Turtle Creek, Deerfield, Porcupine Tail, Pelican Lake, Kingfisher, Ravens' Spring, Deer Ears, Bee Hill, Fox Creek, White Rabbit—can any one mistake the animals haunting these places in earlier days? Trapper's Grove tells a story ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... and Aillinn were lovers, but Aengus, the Master of Love, wishing them to be happy in his own land among the dead, told to each a story of the other's death, so that their hearts were broken and they died. I hardly hear the curlew cry, Nor the grey rush when wind is high, Before my thoughts begin to run On the heir of Ulad, Buan's son, Baile who had the honey mouth, And that mild woman of the south, Aillinn, who was King Lugaid's heir. Their love was never drowned in care Of this or that thing, nor grew cold Because their ...
— In The Seven Woods - Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age • William Butler (W.B.) Yeats
... same day we were put on board the brig Curlew, lieutenant Head, a polite and humane gentleman, and much beloved by his own crew. He is, I am informed, son of an English baronet. He is a plain, honest man, with easy, elegant manners, and very unlike the sputtering commander of the Tenedos: a ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... its thousand distracting voices, grew maddening to me. I felt the need of converse with solitude, that master and teacher of all the arts, and I bethought me of the Yorkshire Wolds, where a man may walk all day, meeting no human creature, hearing no voice but the curlew's cry; where, lying prone upon the sweet grass, he may feel the pulsation of the earth, travelling at its eleven hundred miles a minute through the ether. So one morning I bundled many things, some needful, more needless, into a bag, hurrying lest somebody ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... year's awaking, The fire's among the ling, The beechen hedge is breaking, The curlew's on the wing; Primroses are out, lad, On the high banks of Lee, And the sun stirs the trout, lad, From Brendon to ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... and Duncan,—were, it must be admitted, an idle and graceless set, living for the most part a hand-to-mouth, amphibious, curlew-like kind of life, and far more given to aimless voyages in boats not belonging to them than inclined to turn their hand to any honest labour. But this must be said in their excuse that no boy or lad born in the village of Erisaig could by any means whatsoever be brought to think of becoming ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... appears, is a Lincolnshire word for the cry of the curlew, and so by removing the comma after call we get an interpretation which perhaps improves the sense and certainly gets rid of a very un-Tennysonian cumbrousness in the second line. But Tennyson had never, he said, heard of that meaning of "gleams," adding he wished he had. He meant nothing ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... golden plover, few of the wading birds resemble those of Europe. The snipe, the woodcock, the curlew, most of the sandpipers, together with the coot and the water-hen, are distinct from those of Europe, and are not only peculiar to America, but few of them have been found to the south of the line. One of the most magnificent ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... 1874. These pheasants do not rise in the jungle and are, therefore, uninteresting to the Borneo sportsman. They are frequently trapped by the natives. There are many kinds of pigeons, which afford good sport. Snipe occur, but not plentifully. Curlew are numerous in some localities, but very wild. The small China quail are abundant on cleared spaces, as also is the painted plover, but cleared spaces in Borneo are somewhat few and far between. So much for ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... through the window, it lay offensively resplendent against the vivid green of the grass. It served, however, for a time, ending its days honourably by capsizing a friend and me, guns and all, into the half-frozen water of the lower estuary while we were stalking some curlew. I had to run home dripping. My friend's gun, moreover, having been surreptitiously borrowed from my cousin's father, was recovered the following day, to our unutterable relief. Out of the balance of ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... manned by two Indians, overtook us at this place. It may be mentioned as a proof of the dexterity of the Indians and the skill with which they steal upon their game that they had on the preceding day, with no other arms than a hatchet, killed two deer, a hawk, a curlew, and a sturgeon. Three of the Company's boats joined us in the course of the morning and we pursued our course up Hill River in company. The water in this river was so low and the rapids so bad that we were obliged several times in the course of the day to jump into ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... the seat of government, was represented by specimens of gold-bearing rhyolite from the granite slopes north of the city, as well as by samples of fire clay of high quality; found partly within the city limits. From the Black Hornet and Curlew Creek districts came quartz specimens containing gold and silver. From Bear Creek were cuttings from the dike formation of low-grade ores that may mean much to Boise if ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... into the sedgy grass and the curlew continued to circle, vanishing and reappearing from behind the trees, always uttering those shrill cries. Little ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy |
