Respecting Our Elders

Ospreys, as best I can tell, don’t have much use for the idea of “originality.” While my morning rounds reveal that to a certain extent the birds are individuals with distinct personalities, none vary much from the general game plan. Having found a good way to live, a way that works, they stick to it. And why not? They have nested and caught fish as they do now from the Ice Age on and have been peers of mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. Scientists have found an ospreylike fossil from thirteen million years ago, in the mid-Miocene era, and some evidence suggests the birds were common in North America as far back as fifteen million years ago. Just as I stare up at their beautiful white breasts and wings and feel my mind take wing, so likely did Cro-Magnon man look up to the birds. The ospreys were good role models, embodying the patience and aggressive directness of the hunt, but it was more than that. The evidence on cave walls is clear. “Since the earliest of times, predatory birds have figured prominently in the art, ceremonies, and legends of human societies,” write Noel and Helen Synder in Raptors. “Fierce images of raptors abound in cave paintings of primitive peoples around the world.” Gazing at wings beating out a code of the sun’s silver, man felt one of his oldest urges, the instinct to re-create, to make the creation again. The birds did then what they still do: stir the impulse to make art.

Since the harbor chicks have entered their reptilian stage—dark, scaly crouching creatures, hardly birds at all—it isn’t hard to let my mind wander back in time. I pick up a copy of Björn Kurtén’s Dance of the Tiger, a novelistic account of the meeting of Neandertal and Cro-Magnon man. The book, written by the man who was Europe’s most respected evolutionary paleontologist, quickly shatters the stereotypes I hold about early humans. I learn that far from being grunting, simian troglodytes, Neandertal people—as well Cro-Magnon—were large-brained creatures who likely spoke an elaborate language, built tools and weapons, traded, worshiped, lived in crude homes—not caves—and created art. In short, man thirty-five thousand years ago was a lot like man today. Kurtén writes of the primitive artist-hunter:

They strove to catch and render in undying images those transient shapes that burn into the retina and are seen again in exquisite detail and precision when the eyes are closed: animals in repose, in action; the sights before the hunter in that fleeting moment at the point of the kill, when endurance, skill, and cunning are to be rewarded. In that moment, javelin poised, muscles and sinews already exploding into the throw, the strength and beauty of the beast are forever impressed upon the hunter.

Neandertal man’s life intertwined with the life of his place. Food, art, building materials—all came directly from the land. And magic, too, of course. While hunters portrayed and sought absolution from the animals they ate, shamans went further, taking on animal shapes, becoming animals. As Gary Synder writes in The Old Ways: “The shaman speaks for wild animals, the spirits of plants, the spirits of mountains, of watersheds. He or she sings for them. They sing through him… . In the shaman’s world, wilderness and the unconscious become analogous: he who knows and is at ease in one, will be at home in the other.” This isn’t as distant from us as it may sound at first, just the act of empathy taken to its extreme, and I’m not surprised to read that Shamans were considered protopoets. How different is their transformation from the ones described by Keats? “If a sparrow comes before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” Or “the man who with a bird, / Wren or Eagle, finds his way to / All his instincts.”

For me the most exciting moment of Kurtén’s book comes when he briefly mentions “the Land of the Osprey.” In the hill country of the West, from which the Great River flows, lives a small band of men who hold the osprey sacred. A story is told of a man named Cornel, whose life is saved when his brother comes back as an osprey. Cornel was out hunting caribou in a gorge when “the hunter became the hunted,” and he found himself being stalked by a black tiger. Chased by the tiger, he has no hope; then “suddenly the clouds part, and a single shaft of sunlight falls on the wall of the Gorge. At the same time Cornel sees a great Osprey swoop up the Gorge.” The bird leads him to a rowan, the ospreys’ sacred tree, and Cornel climbs to safety.

Though this is the only mention of the Osprey People in Kurtén’s book, it’s enough to fire my imagination. In my mind’s eye I see a water people, a fishing people, living close to the edge of sea and land, bedecked in feathers during their ceremonies, shamans becoming ospreys and learning the birds’ high-pitched language, artists carving and painting images of the great hawk with wings spread, then tucked; I see a people who discover everything they need to learn about life—from patience to directness, from persistence to commitment—in the spirit of this one bird; and I see a people who find mystery and then faith in the bird’s annual disappearance in the fall and reappearance each spring, who in this way look to the bird not just as mystical totem but as practical calendar. Finally, I see a tribe that must respond to the first begging cries of spring with a deep welling of hope and joy, who must look at the birds’ return each year as a kind of pagan resurrection, the bird itself as an avian Christ figure long before Christ, a bringer of the news that the world will soon warm.

If I’m getting carried away it’s only because I wish I could be. Reading Kurtén’s book makes me dream of being lifted up, not just in flight but into a culture so thoroughly permeated by the sacred and the animal. Maybe it’s time to slip that osprey bone under my skin. Having created my own little subculture of the osprey, I feel the urge to proselytize. I’m happy these days when Nina ushers our evening guests toward the telescope, and happier still when they respond, as they invariably do, with the proper enthusiasm. Look how big they are! They’re like eagles! The mother is so beautiful. God … look at the way she feeds the babies! Unless our guests are simply placating me, which is possible—“There, there, of course we understand why you carry on about your birds”—I suspect that it would be easier to convert people to ospreyism than to Christianity.

Why not? There’s just as much ritual in the former, and far more concrete evidence of the miraculous. One day a local minister who does “minisermons” on the radio calls me up to ask about the birds. The people at the natural history museum have directed him to me, telling him I can help prepare the sermon he wants to give about ospreys. I keep it conventional: much talk about the birds’ annual resurrection, their rebirth from DDT, their “family values” in committing to spouse and nest and brood. I decide against confessing my more sacrilegious notions. I don’t tell him that I prefer the vividness of the osprey Eucharist: a tilt-headed sacrament fed from a black-masked priest to a yearning reptilian flock. I say nothing about true communion achieved over the consecrated, all-giving flesh of fish.

Another day in late June I set up my chair and scope at Chapin before sunset. It’s a cool, almost fall-like evening, and long shadows stretch from where I sit toward the nest. Though the tide is low, the shadows fill the creek bed dark blue like water. Even Barbie grows radiant; she has somehow turned a half cartwheel in the nest, so that for the first time I notice she wears sunglasses. While I watch the nestlings they watch the sky; flying isn’t too far off and they are ready, primed and poised. In this light the new golden markings on the backs of their necks shine full orange—a pumpkin orange. Despite a deep sense of satisfaction, something makes me glance up from my journal, a half thought: he should be back with a fish soon. On impulse I look to my right, and for the first time all year, maybe because of the dying light, I notice the speck that is the male before the nestlings do. This is a triumph. Sure enough, he flies past me to his post, with a fish whose flatness says “flounder” until I see the spiked demon tail and recognize it as a skate, its white belly lit up red. I again feel a connection with this, my favorite bird, though I remind myself again that the connection is only one-way. As the male starts tearing at his chewy meal, I sit back and, for a brief moment, feel entirely at home. For once the prospect of what I have to do tomorrow, the almost constant nagging and niggling of the future—of the imagined time when things will be better—subsides. I listen to the pulse of the ocean, slight but steady, and that same sound pulses through the golden sand, the olive spartina, the blazing nest.

I walk back to the parking lot just in time to see the sun drop, the last fast-motion descent, down to an orange-blue silver, and then gone, fizzing in the ocean. I’m in a place that is very much my own when another human being intrudes. A big guy in a cutoff sweatshirt pauses from loading up his jeep to point at my telescope and ask what I’m up to. When I explain, he smiles.

“We got them over in Centerville, too,” he says, “We call them sea eagles.”

I smile back and for a second imagine I see a glint in the big man’s eye. Are you a fellow true believer? I want to ask him. Have you found Osprey, too?

By late June the young birds are finding their voices, filling air with echoes of their mother’s stronger cries. Osprey language is fairly simple, direct, and not too hard to understand if you give it some time. (It’s harder to speak, of course.) Vocalizations are used to assert ownership, to warn off, to attract mates, to alert chicks or mates of danger, and to beg for fish. Alan Poole makes out three distinct calls: the standard early-warning calls, the more agitated alarm calls, and the begging calls. All the experts seem to agree on these general categories, though they quibble when it comes to matching letters to the sounds. Clinton G. Abbott writes:

I have often stood, pencil in hand, and tried to put upon paper the remarkable variety of screams to which nervous Ospreys give voice. The commonest tone is a shrill whistle, with rising inflection: “Whew, whew, whew, whew, whew, whew, whew.” This is the sound usually heard during migration; and when the bird is only slightly alarmed. When she becomes thoroughly aroused it will be: “Chick, chick, chick, cheek, cheek, ch-cheek, ch-cheeek, cheereek, chezeek, chezeek,” gradually increasing to a frenzy of excitement at the last.

Abbott also claims that he hears a specific cry at the moment when the osprey seems “to pause in flight, extend her legs downward to the fullest extent, hover on rapidly flapping wings, and call out—very appropriately—‘Feesh, feesh, feesh, feesh.’ ” Though this may be a fairly wishful spelling of the noise ospreys make during their fish display, I don’t think it’s too far-fetched. The fact is that the letters which different writers ascribe to avian vocalizations often seem quite random, as do many of our own human words. The other night when I told a friend I was studying ospreys, she said that osprey had been her childhood word for the phosphorescence that sparkles in the night surf. Os-spray didn’t seem such a bad way to describe the fizz of the luminescence in splashed water, and might well have been our English word for it if we hadn’t randomly pinned those syllables on a bird.

Some other human vocalizations we’ve stuck on the bird are visarend (Dutch), fiskgjuse (Swedish), fischadler (German), balbuzard pêcheur (French), gavião pescador (Portuguese), and kalakotkas (Estonian). The full scientific name—Pandion haliaetus—comes from the bungling marriage of the name of a mythical Greek called Pandion with haliaetus, which, translated from the Greek, means “sea eagle.” According to Stephen Carpenteri, the Latin name roughly translates to “bone-breaking sea eagle.” Whatever the exact meaning, the history of the osprey’s name is spotted with error. For one, haliaetus is a misspelling of the Greek haliaeetus, a mistake that has been allowed to stand after years of repetition (the correct spelling, with two e’s, is used in the bald eagle’s scientific name). And, according to Anders Price, the creator of a wonderful osprey Web site, the whole Greek mythic name is off the mark:

Pandion was the king of Athens in Greek mythology and was poorly chosen as a scientific name for the osprey. Pandion had two daughters, Procne and Philomel. They became caught in an illicit love triangle with Tereus, son of the king of Thrace. This angered the gods and Procne was changed into a swallow, Philomel into a nightingale, and Tereus a hawk. Tereus was sentenced to forever chase Procne and Philomel. The scientist who gave the osprey its scientific name, Marie-Jules-Cesar Lelorgne de Savigny, somehow associated this story with the osprey simply because it had a hawk in it. The osprey should have been named Tereus, since Pandion was only marginally involved in the story and Tereus was the one transformed into a raptor. But even that would be stretching things since ospreys usually eat fish, not swallows or nightingales.

If that isn’t enough, for years there was squabbling among taxonomists about the osprey’s mistaken inclusion in the order Falconiformes, along with other hawks and falcons. By the early twentieth century, taxonomists had begun to reconsider this grouping. Recently ospreys have been considered sufficiently unique to be the only raptor to merit a taxonomic family all their own: Pandionidae.

Since we are unable to get our own languages straight, it’s no real surprise that humans disagree on what they hear when listening to the birds. What Abbott calls a “chick” noise, Poole hears as ick-ick-ick; and I find myself dying to put a k in the whew noise that others hear, turning it into kew, kew, kew. I’ve always had a tin ear, but one thing I do know is that the standard high-pitched cry, often described as “musical,” is anything but, unless the music these scientists like to listen to is made up of piercing whistles. But I do agree with Bent and Prevost that there are times when the slurred end of the standard call sounds a little like the whimpering of a tea kettle right after being taken off a stove.

Frankly, if I were a better mimic, it wouldn’t be that hard to speak osprey—much easier than, say, mockingbird, with its two hundred or so songs. Most of what the female says to the male is easily enough translated as More fish, you idiot, more fish! In a like manner, a lot of birdsong is decipherable, largely dependent on the needs of the season. Stand outside in early spring and the bird chatter has a male, locker-room feel: Look at me! I’ve got big balls! I’m full of testosterone! This is my turf! On the other hand, there are levels of bird communication far more complex than once imagined. After a territorial dispute has been settled, northern harriers bow gently to each other to acknowledge new borders. (If only my neighbor on the bluff and I could reconcile our differences so gracefully.) Even crows, whose caw the most inattentive of us can imitate, manage to put enough inflection in their voices to get their different points across: their mobbing cry, for instance, can rally the troops, bringing dozens of their brethren out of the woods to attack an owl.

“All over the world learning the language of animals, especially of birds, is equivalent to knowing the secrets of nature,” wrote Mercia Eliade in his classic work on shamanism. “Becoming a bird oneself or being accompanied by a bird indicates the capacity, while still alive, to undertake the ecstatic journey to the sky and beyond.” I’ve tried several times to talk back to the ospreys, and on more occasions imitated their cry for Nina, but I’m no shaman. For now I’ll content myself with having picked up some of their language, a kind of pidgin Osprey. If not able to speak it well, then at least I’m able to recognize, with eyes closed, most of what’s being communicated. One of the more pleasing parts of my day is having the first thing I hear in the morning be ospreys. Several times I’ve wakened to the cries of the punk-rock harbor birds, their calls prying into the edge between my unconscious and conscious mind.

Now that my wife and I are jammed into a single upstairs room, however, I feel occasional spasms of inadequacy. In bad moments I can see my life in a scary light: a bird-obsessed, nearly middle-aged man living in his mommy’s house. But if I shake and tilt the facts just slightly, they rearrange themselves in a more hopeful fashion. I am part of a heritage, a family, a place. It wasn’t long ago historically, I remind myself, that adult children often lived in homes with their parents. Anyway, whichever angle I choose to look at it from, my mother lives with us for only two and a half months. I’m lucky that Nina and my mother get along well.

At night, after we have supper together, I retreat upstairs to my books. Near the end of June my reading shifts from bird language to bird learning. I wonder: how is it possible that the osprey nestlings, barely able to walk across the nest, will be able to dive for fish on their own in less than two months? Biology provides the tools—the powerful, water-resistant wings, the cagelike talons—but who provides the operating manual? Instinct prods and parents act as examples, but so much will come from trial and error. Repeated error will prove fatal. Starvation is always a threat for young birds. They will need to begin to master an incredibly complex task—fishing—in an absurdly short span of time. Only half of the nestlings that I watch will survive their first year; only a third will find their way back here two springs from now. Learning—and learning fast—is vital.

My books remind me of something that most of us already know: birds do much of what they do out of what we choose to call instinct. Instinctive behavior predominates in the avian world, birds occasionally killing each other not out of some smoldering hate but because of the color of another bird’s breast. Flash the color red before a male robin and you’re waving a matador’s cape, filling him with territorial fury and the urge to attack. But put another robin nearby, a competitor, minus its red breast, and the fury dies. Even feeding, including the gaping of nestlings, is guided by the strict hand of instinct. For the most part, birds do what birds do.

But birds learn, too. They learn from each other and from their parents, a process we’ve labeled associative learning. In this manner a crow, to take a particularly bright bird, can watch another crow and pick up on something. More generally, as Short explains, a chick may be born with the instinct to peck but must be taught what to peck by its mother, so that it just doesn’t end up with an instinctive mouthful of thorns. In general, larger, long-living birds are “smarter,” as are birds that need to adapt to varying environments and diets.

Habituation is the most simple form of bird learning. Habituation means, simply, getting used to something, and the harbor ospreys present a good example. They have learned not to be startled by trucks, tractors, and cranes, enormous and enormously loud machines that would terrify the more isolated and shy Simpkins Neck ospreys. Birds can also learn through conditioning and, of course, trial and error. But most exciting, and much more rare, is insight learning, when “a creature, presented with a problem, suddenly spies a solution, and does whatever it takes to resolve the problem.” In The Lives of Birds, Lester Short cites examples of cedar waxwings passing fruit to each other, and woodpecker finches using cactus spines to dig out insects. These behaviors require an “insight,” followed by a dramatic alteration of behavior. In The Wind Masters, Pete Dunne writes speculatively about the insight learning of a common black-hawk. This bird has learned to lift its wing over the water, understanding that fish will seek out the shade, while also “waving the tip of her wing in the water, troubling the surface” knowing that to a fish it will look as if “some small creature were struggling.” Then, after waiting patiently for several fish to move below the wing, the hawk will “thrust out a net of talons, closing a fish in her grasp.”

The capacity for insight makes me reconsider the expression bird brain. I also read in Short about how a green heron steals bread and tears it into crumbs, dropping them in the water to lure fish. And about the male mockingbird, who sings the two hundred or so songs in his repertoire not just to protect his territory but to impress females with the complexity of his song. Short writes, “Springtime in Norway and Sweden finds some Hooded Crows pulling up lines that fisherman have poked through holes in the ice. A crow will grip the line in its beak, walk slowly backward as far as it can, and then walk toward the hole on top of the line. This prevents the line from slipping back into the water, and is thought to be an example of insight learning.”

But before we get too excited about bird intelligence, it’s best to circle back to instinct, and to remember that immutable genetic laws govern most of a bird’s behavior. You can sit around a long time waiting for insights and, generally, you’ll be disappointed. Even flight is ruled by instinct, although, Short explains, the subtleties of flight—landing, banking, and so on—are likely learned.

Watching the Chapin nest, already worried for the nestlings’ futures, I consider all they will have to learn over the next two months. It is considerable and intimidating, a crash course. I vaguely understand that their ability to catch fish, for instance, will spring from a mixed soup of instinct and learning. But I don’t know the half of it. There will be many near misses and miscalculations, much fumbling despite all the tools that nature has provided them with. I’ve read some accounts of parents weaning the young off their feedings and even dropping fish from the air for the young to “catch,” bolstering their confidence, perhaps. But contradictory studies show that fledglings raised alone can learn to fish quickly, sometimes within just a few days. Of course, experience is what sharpens instinct, and experienced fishermen are better fishermen. Instinct drives the ospreys to hunt, but technique must be learned—from trial and error, from their parents, possibly even from watching other birds. The trick is to live long enough to become experienced.

For human beings the equation is more complicated, though possibly more heavily weighted toward instinct than we’d care to admit. In some ways I’m no more an original than the fledglings. If words come to me when I walk to the bluff, don’t they come out of an instinct to make language? How is my response to a beautiful place any different than that of my Cro-Magnon ancestors, a sort of scrawling on cave walls?

Human language owes more to the land, to the old ways, than we sometimes care to admit. Recently I read that the ancient Greeks wrote one sentence from left to right and the next back from right to left, mimicking the way they plowed their fields. We are not so different from the Greeks, or from Cro-Magnon man, for that matter, and language and earth can’t be peeled apart, no matter how hard we try. Since Nina and I moved back here it sometimes seems as if all I’ve been doing is simply harvesting words, plucking things that have grown of themselves. My chief tool for this harvesting has been my journal. While I work on other projects, the journal has been my real book of the year: of spring’s infatuated return, summer’s booze-and-pork-filled complacency, the ecstasy of fall, the melancholy of November, and the final wedging downward of deep winter. From our very first spring back, the drama of the ospreys’ precarious nesting at the jetty nest made my fictional world look dull in comparison. The journal reminds me of my neighbor J.C.’s front yard. In that yard he collects items scavenged from the beach: lobster pots for tables and buoys hanging like Christmas bulbs from the juniper tree; shells pave his driveway. The sentences in my journal are just like that: things I’d found thrown up on the beach.

On the other hand, members of Homo sapiens more clearly (or at least more obviously) are constant practitioners of associative learning. Like our fellow primates we’re great mimics. The instinct to make stories may be encoded in us, but my experience teaches me that human language often comes directly not from one but two places: the world and words about the world. Or put another way: if one source for our own words is the land, the other is the words of those who came before us.

For instance, as I write about ospreys I would be helpless if I merely depended on my “original” insights. Fortunately, I have an entire library to lean on. Most obviously, Alan Poole’s research has helped me make my way through the maze of the bird’s behavior. But, because we are the one animal that has managed to record our vocalizations with some permanence, I can access human writing about ospreys dating back to 410 b.c., in the work of Athenian playwright Aristophanes. Or if I choose I can sample Aristotle’s writing on the birds in his Natural History, or dip into Shakespeare’s words in Coriolanus:

What are books if not the result of our instinct to communicate—and to make things stay? We report what we have seen, but to whom are we reporting? Our future selves? If I were so inclined I could read an account even older than Aristophanes’s, traveling to the very caves on whose walls our Cro-Magnon ancestors scrawled hawklike forms.

Today, June 27, I put my books aside and plan a long bike ride, hoping to take a survey of all the nests. My first stop is an easy one. While eating a roast beef and horseradish sandwich I check in with the harbor nest, which, as best I can make out, supports three nestlings. I’ve been quick to attribute “personality” to the harbor adults—loose, late, disheveled, hardly workaholics—but this may be more fancy than fact. The truth is that most of their originality and individualism, their behavioral differences from the other nests, is attributable to youth. I’m almost certain that this is their first brood and they haven’t yet learned to conserve energy at all costs. They will learn. There are times when the harbor male seems run ragged in his efforts to feed himself and four others, as if not quite sure what he’s gotten himself into. He looks ready to chuck it all and go raise hell with his mates, but he won’t, instinct prodding him toward continued matrimony and fatherhood.

After throwing my binoculars and journal in my backpack, I jump on my bike and head over to the Chapin nest. It is a perfect June day, the world wide awake, full and open. On my way to Chapin I pedal up to Scargo Tower, the Cape’s highest point. I get off my bike and climb the circular stairs to the top of the tower, staring out at the fish-shaped pond and ocean beyond. While most Cape Cod osprey live by the ocean, they do a good deal of their fishing in our many inland lakes and ponds, particularly the ones, like Scargo, that we’ve stocked with fish. A week ago I witnessed several osprey dives and near dives from this stone perch, one from at least ninety feet up. From this height, I could stare eye-level to where the birds began their dive, giving me an even better idea of the penetration of vision required; it was like watching an arrow being shot into the depths of the lake.

I descend the tower and glide down the hill on my bike, cutting across 6A and back into the sandy streets that lead to Chapin. I pedal faster as I get closer, ready for new sights. The Chapin nestlings are ahead of the curve and always seem to be up to something new. About two weeks ago, around June 10, they stopped looking like exaggerated embryos and started becoming more like real birds, miniature versions of their parents, though still awkward and reptilian. Then, when gulls rose and swirled behind the nest, joined by terns flashing like slivers of light, the nestlings would flop over to watch, and poke their heads in the air, mouths open, curious. Their great downy wings flapped up uncontrollably, like the necks of spastic emus.

Soon after that, the first feathers replaced down: orangish, rusty pinfeathers on the head, a black-and-white pattern emerging on the bodies. It was around June 15 that I became certain that the Chapin pair were one of those rare parents who were raising a brood of four nestlings. Today I toss my bike down on the marsh and pull my binoculars out of the pack. The afternoon grows dry and hot, the slather of sweat from my ride soon splotched with bugs. I train my binoculars on the nestlings: beautiful black-and-tan feathers pattern their wings, black and gold along the backs. The birds have transformed into little masked raccoons, and golden tan feathers run like racing stripes down the back of their heads. They jostle about the nest, jockeying for position as the father prepares to relinquish what remains of a flounder.

I watch the Chapin birds for an hour before riding over to Simpkins Neck. There I ditch my bike behind a patch of catbrier and make my way in through the woods. Though located just a mile farther inland along the same tidal creek that the Chapin ospreys live on, this family remains the most unknown to me, protected as it is by bugs, thorns, briers, and a longer walk. I check in here only once, maybe twice, a week, and I can’t quite get a grip on what’s going on. For one thing, they are the most private of the birds I watch, unaccustomed to the presence of humans, and I’m careful to observe them from much farther back. They remain shy, quick to leave the nest, and seem to have a running feud with a northern harrier who lives nearby. The harrier, apparently unaware that he is half their size, has never gotten used to having such ungainly, such obvious birds on his little section of marsh.

I emerge from the briers onto the salt marsh, only a few houses visible through the thick summer leaves. I point the binoculars and confirm what I thought to be the case: three nestlings huddle at the nest. I ease closer, missing my boots, my sneakers soaking as the tide rises through caked mud, hoping not to agitate this overprotective mother. To my eye, there’s not much individuality or personality among the nestlings; like their down-creek neighbors they are gaping, begging, eating machines. They wear the same black-and-tan feathers, and their young eyes shine the same strange, bloody orange. Awkward-looking tongues stab out from open bills. Though there’s much learning ahead, for now raw instinct and hunger guide them.

This family of birds is the least consistent of the variables in my osprey experiment. Though both clutches are between three and four weeks old, the truth is that I don’t know which of the broods along the tidal creek was born first. I’ve just assumed that the Chapin birds are older because they have monopolized my interest, but these youngsters could easily have been born during one of the periods I didn’t visit.

I watch through the late afternoon, then make my way out of Simpkins Neck, slapping away mosquitoes and flies and wishing I had a machete. God knows how many deer ticks I’ve collected over the course of the summer, only luck keeping Lyme disease at bay. But I’m not worried, at least at the moment. Adding up the totals of my survey—four nestlings at Chapin, three at the harbor, three at Simpkins Neck—I come up with ten new birds, the most this area has seen in half a century at least (and, likely, because of deforestation, a full century or more). Even if less than half of the nestlings never make it back to Cape Cod as adults, that number still bodes well for the future.

Once I reach the end of the path I pull my bike out of the briers, brush off the seat, and climb back on. The sun is sinking toward the bay, but, feeling upbeat, I decide to push it, pedaling up to the bike path. Out of a sense of duty I’ll include the Quivett nest in my survey, though I know that I won’t find any young there. I rarely visit Quivett these days. But the least I can do is be conscientious toward this most conscientious pair.

To avoid riding along 6A, I climb up Old Bass River Road to the Rail Trail, cutting through Harwich and Brewster, ending up at the Stony Brook Herring Run, the spot that Hones and I paddled and then trekked up to in May. I feel tired but happy, and stop at the run to look around. I know this place both through experience and words. Those words belonged to the great Cape writer John Hay, and, a mile after I bike by the run, I ride down a dirt road to a sign at the bottom of a long wooded driveway that reads j. hay. That sign, simple and hand-painted, surrounded by trees, seems the perfect fit for Mr. Hay.

I stare at the sign. Cape Cod is crisscrossed with sentences, crowded with the words of others. Growing up, it seemed the worst sort of luck to have fallen in love with a place that had already been so thoroughly settled and developed, literarily as well as architecturally. But today, maybe relaxed by the endorphins pumping through my system, I feel blessed rather than cursed to have predecessors nearby. Montaigne wrote, “Still I am pleased at this, that my opinions have the honor of coinciding with theirs, and at least I go the same way, though far behind them, saying ‘How true!’” Maybe I’ve finally begun to understand that I’d better try to respect my elders. Last March I finally met John Hay. I rode my bike up the long hill to his house and talked with him for half an hour. It was Mr. Hay who first gave me Alan Poole’s number and suggested I call him. I’m pleased to be relying on Alan, just as Hay did for his beautiful book on terns.

We need to imitate the spirit, not the letter, of the writers we admire. I don’t want to steal words, but I’m happy to plagiarize actions or, rather, a manner of being. If our human learning is associative, then I would like to learn from how earlier writers have lived. Japanese landscape artists could serve as corrective examples to our current craze for originality: their goal was not to do something radically different than what had been done, something that no one had ever seen before. The goal instead was to approach the work of the masters.

What better way to learn to do something well than to steep yourself in the work of those you admire? What could be more direct and simple? This doesn’t mean we mimic them; it means we learn a way of being, of looking. We grow so that the older voices no longer intimidate us, or come at us in a furious babble. Eventually, if we’re lucky, we feel on equal ground with the voices. We feel that we can, with gradually building confidence, talk back.

“How’s it going, Dad?”

It always amazes me that I, a firm discounter of an afterlife, often talk directly to this gray slate stone. The last leg of my bike ride brings me from John Hay’s sign to the Quivett marsh, but before checking in with the ospreys, I pay my respects at my father’s grave. How this piece of rock embodies my dead father I have no idea, but it somehow does, at least to a part of my brain. Maybe it’s the manifestation of words in the landscape again, like Hay’s sign. In this case: david marshall gessner. In early spring I passed this gravestone every morning, on my way down to watch the Quivett birds. Many times, more than I’d like to admit, I stopped to chat with my father.

Some days I’d just tell him how the Red Sox were doing, or news about my mother. It’s a silly ritual, primitive, I know, to give this lump of stone such import, but it’s also reassuring to have something to talk to. If a little odd, it’s at least harmless. Today I relate the news of my osprey survey, my thoughts on John Hay. Literary forefathers have nothing on the man buried here, at least in terms of intimidation. His voice may be silenced now, but it still resonates in my head and will continue to until I join him in the ground. More and more I like what I hear when my father’s voice speaks to me. As sad as it is that it took death to get the proper distance, I now appreciate my father in ways I didn’t when he was alive. And as I speak out loud to the rock that represents him I think I recognize in my own voice some of his directness, bluntness, strength. A part of him that—in a concrete, not spiritual way—has carried on.

I walk away from the gravestone, down the path through the greenbriers and phragmites to the marsh. I’ve been riding most of the afternoon, and now, as the sun drops, I stare quietly at pink clouds bulking up behind the osprey platform. The male is nowhere in sight, the female on the nest. After a while she slowly flaps toward the water, perhaps to clean herself, perhaps to fish. Whatever the reason for her departure, when she lifts off she leaves behind any illusion that she will produce young this year. Certainly she deserves the marathon award for nesting: she has been a paragon of patience—a restless patience, but patience nonetheless. The fact that instinct compelled her makes her endurance no less impressive. But while she was a marathon sitter, a brilliant sitter, her persistence couldn’t change the way of things. She will add no numbers to my survey’s total. But next year she and her mate will return, the tragedy forgotten, driven to reenact the drama once again.

As twilight settles, the songs of day birds give way to an owl’s hooting. I would hazard to guess that neither owl nor osprey spends a whole lot of time wondering about where their voices come from. Thoughts of that sort are left to the perpetually self-conscious species of which I’m a member. My brain, trained by writing, likes to wrap things up, draw conclusions, make sense of things, but that, as I’m learning again and again, won’t do on the marsh.

My time with the birds does reinforce one human conclusion, however. We are all a lot less original than we like to believe. While not as strictly hemmed in by instinct as an osprey’s vocalizations, my own voice is more a product of others than I might want to admit. “It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are,” wrote Wendell Berry. If the bluff sometimes speaks through me, then on a simpler, genetic level so does my father. At the same time I rely on the work of those who have given words to the Cape. In all these ways I am very much the result of my place and those who came before. To thrash rebelliously against this fact may give the momentary illusion of independence, but it is not honest. To admit debt, to honor it and respect it, is the beginning of a larger, greater freedom.