Poetic Thoughts on Birds (Youniao shiyi 有鳥詩意) is an album consisting of twenty leaves, each of which contains a poem written on the left and its illustrated image on the right. The poems were composed by Prince Bao (Bao qingwang寶親王, 1711-99), the future Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-95), in the spring of 1732, and written by one of his tutors, Liang Shizheng 梁詩正(1697-1763) who was famous for his calligraphy. Jin Kun金昆, a court painter, finished the illustrations of these poems in 1735. In this album, Jin Kun depicts the birds in natural and architectural settings associated with the time-honored meanings of twenty species of birds in the Han culture. Jin Kun endeavored to produce diversified images and create a new type of bird-and-flower painting by emphasizing the culturally contextualized meanings of various birds. Focusing on Jin Kun’s Poetic Thoughts on Birds, this research aims to understand how Prince Bao presented himself as a learned and high-minded scholar. Meanwhile, the political messages conveyed in the album also demonstrate that Prince Bao was conscious of the political agenda and personal predilection of his father, the reigning Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723-35).