The line every birder repeats — trust the animal in front of you over the field guide — gets hung on John James Audubon, who died in 1851. The earliest sighting Quote Investigator can find is 1987, in Joseph Cornell’s Listening to Nature, where it sits as a section epigraph credited simply to a birdwatcher’s proverb. A saying about believing the bird over the book turns out to have no book behind it.