Audubon and Dillard

John James Audubon and Annie Dillard are both great writers with an arsenal of technique and imagination. In this case, they both put their skills to work on a passage about their observation of large flocks of birds in flight. The passages they have written are not just about flying birds, though. They contain a message, but it is a simple one: time is needed to sincerely acknowledge any one object or concept, but here it is the beauty of a part of nature. That being the purpose of the passages, it serves as the glue that brings them together. How Audubon and Dillard write their observations and the effects of them is what differentiates the works of the two writers.

Audubon’s passage contains a little more than Dillard’s, but they both portray the same idea on the birds and the same purpose for their ideas. Audubon stands outside for only twenty-one minutes and Dillard a half an hour, but they both experience flocks of birds and what they are doing. If either one of them had not waited outside and took in all nature had to offer, they would have never made the keen observations that they did. Not only was time needed for the observations, but also for the unique ideas that are made about them. Those ideas would not be a thing if time was not dedicated to the observations, and without the observations there would be no description. For example, Audubon wrote, “I observed the pigeons flying from north-east to south-west…found that 163 had been made in twenty-one minutes...they rushed into a compact mass”. Since he spent some of his time observing the birds, Audubon is able to make detailed observations that he had would not have occurred without that time he gave up. The same goes for Dillard. She stated that “It was the starlings going to roost…Each individual bird bobbed and knitted up and down in the flight...Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now”. Dillard, just like Audubon, shows herself and the readers that all one needs is time to appreciate...