The Dive

When I finally see it this is what I see:

It’s near the end of May and I’m out at Bells Neck, chasing after birds. The weatherman says rain, but it holds off, though the day grows steadily colder and windier. Earlier I biked up the short section of road near Scargo Tower, climbing up, coasting back down, over and over, like a hamster on a treadmill, trying to simulate one of the steep rides Nina and I used to take in Colorado. Then, my brain flushed clean, I listened to my instincts. They told me to come here, so I pedaled up Old Bass River Road to the bike path. Now I ride along the Herring River again, over familiar paths that cut through poison ivy, back to Swan Lake, the place where I saw the night herons roost and the kingfisher dive. I smile at the sight of three ospreys hunting in the sky above river and lake, interthreading like the hunting party I watched not long ago above Wing Island. While most raptors hunt alone, ospreys will occasionally hunt near one another, bunched up just like their prey.

Used to being alone out here, I start at the intrusive rumbling of a car over the dirt road. I’m on a footbridge, staring at the sky, when three teenage boys pull up in an old Cadillac and watch me watch. The boys get out of the car and speak Spanish to one another. After a minute I walk over to them and point out a nearby nest. I spread my arms wide and describe an osprey, and they again speak to one another in Spanish. As they talk I only hear one English word. It’s “eagle.”

His two friends look bored, but one of the boys, who wears a thick metal necklace of chains, seems impressed by what I tell him. He’s seen one before, he’s sure of it. Before they climb back in his car he points at me.

“That’s what I gotta get, man. Binoculars.”

Alone again, I catch sight of one of the birds, wishing the kid were still here so he could see it, too. But the osprey doesn’t wait around long. With a slight movement of his wings, just a mild alteration of a few feathers, he banks and rides the wind almost out of sight to the west. I’m guessing that, hunting this late in the nesting season, he’s a male, since most females are settled on their nests. I’m also guessing he’s off to hunt the shallows that lead into Swan Lake. Following this hunch, I hop on my bike and pedal up the dirt road, then ride down the hill to another, larger bridge that crosses the river. I stop there and find what I’m pretty sure is the same bird.

He’s in full hunting mode, hovering, unconsciously adjusting his flight feathers, searching. The bird, starkly brown-black and white, with his bandit mask over a white eagle head, looks magnificent, pulling his wings in, letting them out, then beating hard, staying in one place despite the blustery wind. At times the preparation for a dive surges like music—building up, building up, then a near plunge, then building again, themes that increase in power with repetition, as in a Beethoven symphony. My own mood rises and falls with the hunt. Today my mind is clear of everything except the bird’s pursuit, and I’m sure we are truly building toward something. I’m going to see it, I think, I’m going to see it, I’m going to see it …

Unfortunately, a red-winged blackbird, emboldened by territorial instinct, interrupts the osprey’s symphonic buildup. The blackbird calls these reeds home and won’t stand for interlopers, no matter their size. He dives right at the osprey, spearing him squarely on the back. Much smaller and more fluttery, the blackbird actually herds the osprey closer to me and the bridge, until, having protected his turf, he leaves the larger bird alone.

Then I see it. The bridge stands maybe twenty feet high and the osprey floats right in front of me, another thirty feet up. Suddenly he notices something. Hovering, adjusting, he stays stock-still in the air. Then he rears back, flapping wildly, kicking his white pantalooned legs forward. I hold my breath as the tension builds, the air filled with fluttering and circling and anticipation. I root the bird on: Yes, yes, yes, go, go, go. Next comes the part when the birds I’ve watched always pull up, but not now—not this time. This time he sees what he’s looking for somewhere down there in the copper-colored water. He draws his wings into his sides, taking away that which kept him floating in the air. He tucks and dives and I see the whole thing right in front of me as clearly as if he were putting on a show: the tucking of the wings, the sudden acceleration, the violent splash and immersion.

As he hits the water I yell something foolish—“Hoooo!” I think—a kind of instinctive letting go. A second later comes the ascension, the heavy flap of wet wings and silvery rising up. He flaps into the sky not a hundred feet from me, shaking off water, the silver tint of a fish, a herring, snared in his talons. He adjusts the fish, turning it forward, and flaps steadily over to an oak tree about a quarter mile away. I can still see him clearly through the binoculars: he ignores the fish awhile, keeping it pinned in his talons.

While he rests and readies himself to eat, I indulge in a few postdive celebrations. I let go with another little victory hoot and raise my hands up over my head, as if I’d caught the fish myself. Of course, this is an everyday occurrence for the bird—it has to be for him to survive—but for me there’s nothing everyday about it. The moment has unwrapped itself like the most generous of gifts, and I respond to it with a heady mixture of emotions: the excitement of witnessing the dive itself, the satisfaction of achieving a goal, and, finally, a dramatic relief. Alan Poole describes the dive as a “release of tension.” He’s talking about the bird, of course, but it’s a release I’m experiencing, too, after so many false starts. My spring-long sense of inadequacy lifts. Now I don’t have to spend every day running around like a crazed great white hunter, pedaling, paddling, searching. It doesn’t mean I’ll stop watching for dives—but it instantly takes the edge of desperation off.

The osprey perches in a slow-budding oak. He seems content to wait, holding off on his well-earned meal, and I find myself thinking that the Spanish-speaking kids were right: from this distance, perched in the tree, the osprey looks almost exactly like a bald eagle. Finally he tears into the fish, starting with the head. To the victor goes the herring.

The osprey’s way of getting food is just one of many evolutionary possibilities, and others soon present themselves. A crow lands a couple of branches down, demonstrating another feeding strategy, trying to horn in on the fish. Then two more crows land close, like a group of hyenas, or like nothing so much as crows. The first crow nudges closer, hopping to within two branches; then a gull lands, and before long the osprey has attracted a small convention of gulls and crows. The fish hawk looks noble among the other scavenging birds, a king among fawners, beggars, and jesters. Not to entirely put down the crows: they’re smart and they thrive on opportunism and adaptability. You can see this demonstrated, for instance, in the way they’ve learned the rules of the road, barely hopping to the other side of the yellow line when a car drives up. Crows know all the angles and will be around for a long, long time.

But ospreys may be around for a while yet, too, and with all due respect to corvids, I’ll take the way the fish hawk gets his dinner. Evolution has shaped something far different for him than for the other birds, something far better, in my judgment. What a supremely athletic way to find food. Of course for this particular osprey, the dive I witnessed will need to be just one of at least two or three daily victories, meaning he needs to do something astounding with regularity. On top of my osprey books, I’ve been reading a biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Robert Richardson. Richardson writes of Emerson’s “workaday exaltation.” This is a quality that ospreys have in spades. Everyday daring and dash.

I watch until the hunter finishes feeding and flies off, the scavengers moving in, scraping for leftovers. Below me herring gather under the bridge, and pale beige phragmites hiss. Just before I’m ready to leave I hear a sound that I first mistake for the hissing reeds. Then it grows louder behind me, as if the phragmites were moving closer. I turn to see two mute swans flying toward the bridge, their wings beating out a strange noise, an unearthly humming and vibrating—hunnhhh, hunnhh, hunnhhb. Silky gray undersides, slightly soiled whites pass close to my head.

I push off on my bike, riding along the edge of the lake. Swallows dart among sunken tree stumps, and painted turtles, sunning on logs, plop off when I get close. All of a sudden I hear another odd noise—the sound of myself laughing out loud. I saw a dive! Despite having spent all these hours out here, it still seems a fluke. How did I get so lucky? I ask myself. Yes, people see ospreys dive every day, but so what? I do feel as if I got lucky. It may be pushing the metaphor, but if Thoreau could rhapsodize about making love to an oak tree, maybe I can be forgiven for feeling like lighting up a cigarette after seeing a dive. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll now experience a new degree of intimacy with the birds. I’ll likely see more spectacular dives during the spring and summer—sharper-angled dives from greater heights, and larger fish caught, wings flapping violently with water—but as I pedal home I know that, no matter what I see, I won’t forget my first time.

I shouldn’t make light of the sexual metaphor. While an osprey’s dive doesn’t arouse me, at least not carnally, the experience of watching it does share something with sex. In both cases what we are after is union, attempting to be part of something beyond, marrying ourselves to the world. And union begins with contact. We touch an arm, throw ourselves into the ocean, feel cold rain on our skin. Touch wakes us. Contact is the cornerstone, at once physical foundation and assurance that a world exists beyond—or at least apart from—us.

Contact need not be subtle. It can be as jarring and violent as the sinking of an osprey’s talons into the back of a herring. The other day my friend Brad Watson was jogging and heard a fluttering of wings. He looked up to see a mourning dove taking off from a phone wire. Despite the commonness of the sight, something in it held his eye. The dove hadn’t made it ten feet off the wire when it was taken out with a powerful thwunk in midair by a Cooper’s hawk. This is the same accipiter that we sometimes see from his back patio at cocktail hour, watching as it pirouettes across the lawn, hunting low over the bluff.

My own taste for contact, sometimes violent, comes out in a love of sports. As I get older, I find myself growing more critical of our country’s too passionate love affair with professional sports, but the thing itself—the joy of running, jumping, throwing, jostling, hitting—still brings me joy. Like a sudden rainstorm, like wild nature, like sex, sports insist on direct contact with the physical world, and with others. My own interest in sports was so intense that for thirteen or fourteen years, approximately the span of an average osprey life, I dedicated myself to being an athlete. My sport of choice was Ultimate Frisbee, considered on par with hula hoops or tiddledywinks by many, but serious and consequential to those of us who played. If the word Frisbee conjures up games of catch on the beach, this sport was anything but casual, combining the running of soccer with the positioning and contact of basketball. Best of all—the thing that hooked me and led me for years into the sport’s subculture—is the fact that a Frisbee floats. Because a plastic disc will seem to wait in the air, hovering at a plateau, the sport lends itself to diving horizontally and leaping high, “skying.” It’s these moments—the moments of leaving the ground and committing, moments of wildness and abandon—that led me, and thousands of others like me, to give up normal goals and dedicate myself obsessively to the game.

The first fall I played seriously, working as a carpenter while living on Cape Cod, I often trained on the beach, tossing a Frisbee ahead of me on the sand and diving after it. During those days I began to have flying dreams, and once, jumping off a dune during a hurricane, I really thought I’d managed to get some lift. The intensity of these feelings was enough to cause me to stick with the sport for over a decade, to the detriment of my career and relationships. At the time I often worried and fretted about what I was doing, but looking back, I like the choice I made: it seems to me now that it mirrored the osprey’s dive. A plunging, a full immersion, diving in and worrying about the difficulty of flapping out later on.

Of course, during the time I was playing Ultimate I knew there were thousands and thousands of better athletes in the world. Throw a Frisbee high in the air and put me up against an NBA player, and the results would be comic. And, as huge as the gap is between me and the best human athletes, it’s a hundred times greater between humans and animals. At our best we can jump forty-some inches off the ground, run twenty-five miles an hour for a short burst, climb fairly well. For a real athlete, I’ll take the osprey. They can migrate for thousands of miles at a speed as fast as our sprints, dive like an arrow, lift fish nearly their own weight high into the air.

“Ospreys are graceful fliers that seem capable of finding lift when other birds cannot,” I read in Hawks in Flight. “In a kettle of Broad-wingeds, they will rise almost twice as fast as the milling buteos and will begin their glides much earlier.” If migration is the great osprey feat of endurance, their marathon, then the dive is their sprint. In rare instances, ospreys have been known to begin their dives from as high as two hundred feet up. Think of the eyesight required to pick out a fish from that height and then the sheer daring of the plunge itself, hurtling down toward the water at forty miles per hour. Then imagine what we would call the hand-eye coordination; the eye must calculate the refraction of the water and anticipated route of the fish, like a quarterback leading a receiver, and once the plunge is made the talons can shut in 2/100ths of a second, “so fast they might be a tactile reflex not a voluntary one,” according to Poole.

For sheer speed, of course, ospreys can’t match their falcon cousins. But they make up for it in strength and, it seems to me, independence. Unlike falcons, ospreys have rarely had their athleticism tapped by humans. While peregrines have been trained to hunt by man, ospreys will not be used. If they are willing to live near us they’ll only take the human thing so far.

Ospreys, like humans, vary, some being more athletic than others. For instance, I’ve read of an osprey actually coming up with a fish in each talon. I already have the sense that the male at the lopsided Chapin nest is the best local fisherman, based on how frequently and quickly he brings back food, sometimes a mere twenty minutes after he leaves. While we need to factor in the weather and the supply of fish, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to imagine that there are individual birds who are simply great athletes, who catch fish easily where others might have problems. Of course, the less coordinated are weeded out more viciously in the avian world than in the human, birds suffering a worse fate than being picked last in gym class. But again, like human athletes, those that survive naturally get better. Experience counts, and experienced hunters are better hunters.

It makes sense to me that the males are the leaner of the birds. The female lives on the nest from spring through midsummer, while the male becomes the primary hunter. In some raptors the difference in size allows the male and female birds to hunt different prey, as well as protecting the female from the male’s aggression, though this isn’t the case with ospreys. Some have argued that a female osprey’s larger size helps her defend the nest from intruders, since she is the primary nest guard during the breeding season. Whatever the case, there is a cleanness to the male’s body, a Spartan simplicity. Sports teaches sparseness, and the best athletes make themselves into arrows, serving one purpose, carving off excess from their lives as they carve fat from their bodies. This is a lesson the ospreys live.

The great wonder is that this supremely athletic feat is at the very center of daily osprey existence. There can be no days off or off days. This spectacle I saw once happens over and over again. To eat is not to walk to the fridge but to become involved in the most savage and direct of hunts. Modern humans miss the link between our actions and our food. We miss directness. For the ospreys, eating doesn’t mean ordering out. It means performing an act of great improbability and brilliance several times a day.

Alan Poole writes, “Wolof tribesmen living along the beaches of Senegel chant of the Osprey’s hunting skills as they paddle canoes through Atlantic surf to tend their nets. Skilled fishermen themselves, they share fishing grounds with Ospreys born thousands of kilometers away along Swedish lakes and Scottish lochs. These people clearly admire the prowess of a plunging fish hawk. It is an everyday sight for them, woven into the fabric of their culture.”

If ospreys aren’t exactly woven into my culture, then at least they have become, more and more, woven into the fabric of my life. When I wake I make a point of lying in bed until I hear the begging of the harbor female. Each morning I check in on my four nests, and each afternoon I kayak up the creeks. I’m not naturally patient—I doubt anyone is who grows up in our culture—but I suspect the birds themselves are helping me learn to wait and watch, to not rush things.

This morning, Memorial Day, Hones and I decide to kayak up the Herring River to the spot where I saw the first dive from the bridge. Hones wants to look for turtles, while I hope to see more dives. The river shines even more coppery today, like a stream of melted pennies, the surface thick with yellow pollen that our paddles break through. We watch swans rip out stalks of marsh grass, showing their young, called cygnets, where to eat, probing deep into the water with their muscular necks.

Ferns grow thick below the oak where I watched the osprey eat after its dive. Marsh wrens sing as we paddle past, bobbing their tails, and a kingbird skims for insects. We come up along one loud man in a canoe whose voice carries across the water, going on about CNN and stocks. We’re amazed when we get closer and see that he is talking not to his canoeing partner, who sits quietly in the other end of the boat, but into a cell phone. It takes restraint not to ram him and sink his vessel. I suppose, in evolutionary terms, it’s likely that this man is a good hunter, a successful provider. I had a roommate in college who’s now a millionaire, his millions made by playing around on a computer with other people’s money. On the simplest animal level you can say this about him: he catches a lot of fish. He would be a good osprey perhaps, but a distinction must be made in the case of human animals: we can, to a degree, decide what it is we fish for. Instinct doesn’t compel us to get our food only one way; we have a choice. Ultimately we must decide, whether by hunch or by long consideration, thoughtfully or thoughtlessly, as to the value of a thing.

I am learning what I value. I value the osprey’s dive. And, after we portage up by the herring ladder to the lake, I’m treated once again. It happens almost the instant we put the kayaks back in, as if conjured by thought. A hundred feet above us an osprey fakes a dive and I prepare for the usual tentative ritual of search. But after the first fake, there’s no wait, no hesitation. He tucks and dives, adjusts for a split second twenty feet from the water, then darts down and lands with a splash. For a minute he’s a waterbird, until, with a great flap, he rises up with a fish, shaking off dramatically, water cascading back down to the lake.

The day is made, and Hones and I point and laugh, both making sure the other saw it. Then Hones heads off on his own, looking for snappers among the tree stumps by the shore. While he hunts for turtles I watch the sky. It isn’t long before I see another osprey dive and pull up, dive and pull up again, before flying off. A third bird rests on a stump near the middle of the lake, ignoring me even when I paddle close. He, or she, is beautiful, with a vivid white chest and head and the thinnest mask I’ve seen yet, looking even more like a bald eagle than most. A fourth bird, plumper and darker, perches on the lake’s edge in a dead tree. After a while both birds rise up and hunt together. I watch from below as they ride the wind, swooping down on the currents, their shadows banking off the pines of the lake shore.

Though my second dive may lack the novelty of the first time, it still moves me. The bird remains indifferent, unconcerned with my gratification, but that doesn’t matter. What matters, to me, is having made contact, having briefly, through the very human act of empathy, entered the bird’s world. No longer desperate, I lie back in the kayak and stare up at the blue sky. When Hones returns he tells me he saw a snapper in the shallows the size of manhole cover. I congratulate him. We have both found what we came to see, and we paddle home.