Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Interpretation
Naturalists develop their skills through innate talent and extensive observation over time.
This quote emphasizes that the craft of being a naturalist, much like that of a poet, combines both inherent ability and long-term dedication to observation and understanding of nature. It suggests that while some individuals may have a natural inclination towards these disciplines, the true mastery comes only through years of careful and deliberate study.
In practice
A speaker at a nature conservation event might use this quote to highlight the importance of both passion and diligence in studying the environment.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.
Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle's weather, and not merely because of it's ambivalence. He liked it's subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive.
I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon.
The mountain gorilla faces grave danger of extinction - primarily because of the encroachments of native man upon its habitat - and neglect by civilized man, who does not conscientiously protect even the limited areas now allotted for the gorilla's survival.
The apple blossom exists to create fruit; when that_x000D_ comes, the petal falls.
Yes, I am well aware that nature - or what we call nature: that totality of objects and processes that surrounds us and that alternately creates us and devours us - is neither our accomplice nor our confidant.
The two most beautiful sights I have witnessed in my life are a full blown ship at sail and the round-bellied pregnant female.
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