“There will always be pigeons in books and museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and all delights. Book pigeons cannot dive out of cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book pigeons cannot breakfast on new mown wheat in Minnesota and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons, they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.”
From Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac:
On a Monument to the Pigeon
By Aldo Leopold, 1947
Published in A Sand County Almanac © 1953, Oxford Univ. Press