Edward Lear's lines of flight

‘Verily I am an odd bird’, Edward Lear wrote in his diary in 1860. This article examines a range of odd encounters between birds and people in Lear’s paintings, illustrations, and poems. It considers how his interest in birds—an interest at once scientific and aesthetic—helped to shape his nonsense writings. It is suggested that poetic and pictorial lines of flight became, for Lear, a means of exploring the claims that art might make on our attention.