Writing here this cloudy morning, with a great confused roaring of breakers in my ears, I call to mind the Wilson’s warbler, the female I saw a fortnight ago, and I wonder where it was that she forsook her familiar earth for the grey ocean, an ocean she perhaps had never seen. What a gesture of ancient faith and present courage such a flight is, what a defiance of circumstance and death–land wing and hostile sea, the fading light behind, the unknown and the distant articulate and imperious in the bright, aërial blood.
― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod