Openings

March is the waiting time. Everything poised, ready to become something else, a world in need of a nudge. The buds on the old post oak bulge hard as knuckles, the first blades of grass cut through the dark purple rim of the cranberry bog, and the willow branches yearn toward yellow. Almost every morning I watch the sun edge its way up over the harbor, and the world it lights grows steadily greener and warmer. While the season itself may waver uncertainly, the birds insist on spring. As I head out for my morning walk, all of Sesuit Neck seems caught in the upward twirl of birdsong. Cardinals whistle their upward whistle, mourning doves coo, and the brambles fill with the chittering of finches and chickadees.

Down at the beach two hundred sanderlings cover the end of the jetty, and when I walk toward them they take off as one, veering east, showing their white bellies, skimming over the water before banking and heading right back toward me. Just when it looks like I’ll die a silly death—pierced by the beaks of a hundred small birds—they split like a curtain around my body. Then the split groups split, heading off in seemingly random directions before joining up, reshuffling, and then—one again—banking, their white bellies flicking to blackish backs like a magic trick. They put on their show for some time before tiring of it, and I watch, half stunned, thinking how this sight has come like a sign of early spring or the definition of grace, an undeserved gift.

Is it my imagination or do all of us—animal, plant, and human—take a raw, near-doltish pleasure in the coming season? This, more than January, seems the time of year for resolutions, and I have already made mine. I have vowed to spend more time outside. It’s true I’ve lived a fairly pastoral life over the past two years, walking the beach daily, but this year I want to live more out than in, to break away from desk and computer, and see if I can fully immerse myself in the life of Sesuit Neck, the life outside of me. “Explore the mystery” was the advice the Cape Cod writer Robert Finch gave me long ago. That is what I’ll do. Specifically, I have vowed to spend more time with my neighbors; more specifically, with those neighbors who nest nearby: the ospreys. Also known as fish hawks, these birds, with their magnificent, nearly six-foot wingspans, will soon return to Cape Cod from their wintering grounds in South America. One man-made osprey platform, which will hopefully be the site for a nest, stands directly across the harbor from me, the pole on which it rests bisecting the March sunrise. In anticipation of the ospreys’ arrival, I, like a Peeping Tom, aim my binoculars directly from my living room into theirs. Other nearby pairs have nested out at Quivett Creek, on the end of the western jetty, on Simpkins Neck, and on the marsh by Chapin Beach, and so I set out every day on my rounds, wanting to be there to greet them, hoping to catch the return of these great birds on the wing. So far there’s been no sign, and I fear I’m being stood up. But that just adds to the building anticipation of this indecisive month, and soon enough they’ll fill the air with their high-pitched calls, strong eagle flapping, and fierce dives.

These were sights I never saw growing up in the 1960s and ’70s. Not a single osprey pair nested on Sesuit Neck when I spent summers here as a child. For me these sights were as mythic and distant as those described by early pioneers heading west: migrations of thousands—millions—of birds, when the sun would be blotted out and the whole sky darkened for an hour.

Of course, the ospreys weren’t that chronologically distant. Only thirty years earlier, in the 1930s, they had dotted the New England shore, nesting on every high perch they could find. In the late 1940s Roger Tory Peterson wrote of how the abundant osprey “symbolized the New England Coast more than any other bird,” and when Peterson moved to Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1954, he found, within a ten-mile radius of his home, “approximately 150 occupied Osprey nests.” But soon after this the decline of the ospreys began, a decline caused directly by residual DDT in the fish that made up their entire diet. The birds were nearly killed off in New England, pesticides contaminating their eggs and preventing them from hatching, wiping out 90 percent of the osprey population between 1950 and 1975.

The situation on Cape Cod was even more complicated. Here the birds had been dealt a double blow. This land is a recovering one, coming back from earlier environmental devastation. By the mid-1800s there was hardly a tree left on the Cape, all viable lumber having been cut down for the building of ships. Without their primary nesting requirement—trees—few ospreys nested here. A century later, DDT did in those few. The writer John Hay, our most penetrating local observer, has little memory of ospreys on Cape Cod in the years after World War II. Twice within two hundred years, in ways characteristic of each century, we found ways to expel birds that had likely bred here since the Ice Age.

Now the birds are back. It has been a gradual comeback, a refilling of old niches. By the late 1970s a few birds had returned, by the ’80s many more, and now a sudden rush. Only recently, in the mid-’90s, have the ospreys begun to reinhabit my town, East Dennis.

The story of the ospreys is a hopeful one in many ways, a rare example of humans reversing our tendency to try to control nature, of recognizing that we have done wrong and then correcting it. It’s also the story of the possibility of cohabitation. Who could imagine a more wild sight than an osprey spotting a mere shadow of a fish from a hundred feet above the sea and diving into the water headlong, emerging with the fish in its talons? And yet this wild creature next turns the fish straight ahead for better aerodynamics, carrying it like a purse, flapping home to a nest that sits directly above a car-littered parking lot. Ospreys aren’t picky about their homesites. In addition to trees, they commonly nest on utility and telephone poles, above highways, and atop buoys near constant boat traffic. Osprey expert and author Alan Poole sees this as a sign of their remarkable adaptability. Thanks in large part to this adaptability, the birds give us the gift of the wild in the midst of the civilized. I understand that it’s a fallacy to see nature as a kind of self-help guide for humans, but there may be a lesson here. Perhaps we, too, can retain some of our wildness while living in this increasingly cluttered, concrete world.

While I’ve vowed to spend more time with the birds this spring, I will try not to draw too many lessons from them. That is, I’ll try to resist the temptations of my own hyperactive imagination. It isn’t easy. A few years back, during a year spent on Cape Cod, I saw my first osprey, and couldn’t help but also see my own life mirrored in the phoenixlike rise of the bird. I was thirty going on eighteen, and my world spun in tight solipsistic circles. Perhaps I made too much of the fact that DDT and its residues had also been found to lead to an increase in the rate of testicular cancer. Having suffered from that disease and survived, I felt even more connected to the fish hawks, and even more joyous about their comeback and return to the Cape. Connections crackled; their fierce revival boded well for my own. The interconnectedness of our worlds excited me.

Two springs ago, in 1997, I returned to live on Cape Cod again, but there were many differences from my earlier year. The first time I’d wintered alone on the Cape, looking to Thoreau as my guide, but this time I brought Nina with me. It was Walden with a wife, and I worried about having dragged my mate away from her beloved western mountains, back to a cold lair of a house where ocean winds buffeted the uninsulated walls. “There’s no such thing as spring on Cape Cod,” said our neighbor Heidi Schadt, and we tended to agree. The meteorologists called it spring, of course, though they also called it the coldest on record; it didn’t get up to seventy through the first week of June. “It’s like living on a ship,” Nina said (happily at first). And it was. The creaking beams were the ship’s belly, the dinging flagpole our mast, the back porch our poop deck, the surrounding vegetation waves, and the gulls a hopeful sign of land. But when landfall didn’t come we got stir-crazy, feared scurvy, and dreamed of the true spring we were missing back in Colorado. I tried to stay upbeat, since moving had been my idea, and pointed out to my wife that the birds and buds were carrying on as if it were spring: the post oak exploding dully and drooping with leaves like dud bottle rockets, the honeysuckle blooming, and the bushes around the house filling in daily like a beard. But Nina didn’t seem entirely convinced.

Why had we come back?

Besides more practical reasons, I’d had a hunch that we might be able to live cheaply and spend an off-season of fires, beach walks, baths, naps, and writing. “The world is sick for lack of elemental things,” wrote Henry Beston in The Outermost House, and it was elemental things we were after. Spring thoughts raced ahead to the next fall: to getting a cord of wood (or three) and living, writing, and chopping wood and walking the beach every day. There were worse ways to watch a year go round.

But, while we had tentatively begun to answer “writers” when people asked us what we did, the truth was that our profession had yet to yield up much cash. While we were essentially squatting in my family home, the house, if a boat, was a leaky one, and the oil and electricity bills rivaled what we had paid for rent back in Colorado. Back in Colorado, of course, was where our thoughts often strayed: to a front range filled with friends and belongings and joint memories that became more paradisical with each passing second.

But if I had doubts, they were eased with my first walk out the jetty. It was a walk I’d walked a thousand times before, as comfortable as the old sweats I’d taken to wearing day and night, and, despite the novelty of being back, I didn’t expect to see anything new. And not expecting to see the new, I didn’t, not even the huge, tattered nest that drooped over the small warning light at jetty’s end. It was my beach, after all—tame and known despite the wildness I purported to celebrate.

Surprise came in size and movement. The flash of wings and a high-pitched warning cry, as loud and unmistakable as a car alarm. It was too big to be a bird, but a bird it was, dropping off the nest and lifting skyward with strong eagle flaps. The shine of white and chocolate brown—a white, proud chest and black-brown wings and bandit eye-band—against a green sea that heaved up as if trying to knock me into it. For almost as long as I could walk I’d come out to the end of these rocks and never seen a sight like that. For the first time since I was born, a pair of ospreys were nesting at the end of the western jetty of Sesuit Harbor.

Soon the drama of the ospreys became the drama of our year, easing the gloom of that first rainy spring. Each day I would stake out a spot at a respectful distance behind the last jutting rock, a distance that wouldn’t provoke the car alarm or the protective circling of whichever bird wasn’t tending the nest. I found I could tell them apart: the larger female wore a dark speckled necklace on her white throat, the smaller male more purely white. I spent hours on the jetty, and while it’s true I was a voyeur, I tried to be a quiet one. For a few weeks I watched. Watched as they flew over to collect sticks—and sometimes full branches—from the bluff to repair the nest each morning after another stormy night; watched as they carried fish home, turned straight in their torpedo-like fashion; watched as the male perched on the small reflector next to the nest and tore off chunks of fish until, apparently sated, he switched positions with his mate, handing off what was left of the meal.

For all the movement and effort that spring, the birds’ main activity was a sedentary one: the dull and vital job of nesting, of staking out a place for oneself and one’s family. Most of the nesting was done by the female, the male occasionally relieving her. “We are all precarious nesters,” I scribbled in my journal. As fascinated as I was by the birds’ behavior, I was equally fascinated by the nest itself. “An osprey’s work is never done,” said Nina, and that seemed so. As important as eating obviously was, during early spring nest repair was the top priority, at least in terms of time allotment. This required constant circling trips from the jetty’s end over to the bluff, picking up, say, a clump of seaweed, flapping back into the gusts, hovering above the nest, balancing in the wind, and finally dropping off that trip’s deposit before landing to pack it down. Then another trip for a branch or a sheet of plastic or some boat line from over by Northside Marina. That was the thing about the nest: unlike environmentalists, the birds didn’t bother with the niceties of organic materials—anything would do. And, for all the work they put into it, there was something essentially unkempt, even sloppy, about the nest’s appearance. Sticks jutted out like bowsprits, plastic sheets flapped in the wind, strands of line hung down like floss.

Of course, while neatness may count, a certain battered look could be forgiven when you factored in the nightly beating the nest was taking. As windy as it was in the day—and I often had trouble walking out to the end of the jetty if it was blowing from the north—at night it began to sound as if someone were slamming a sledge against the seaside wall of our house. Nina and I built fires and huddled close, and we took to going to bed early with the cats and pulling up the covers to block out the howling and shrill whistling as the wind streamed through the harbor masts. If there was something romantic about this, there was also something cold. What would it be like to spend a night out at the end of the jetty, exposed to a wind that built up speed across the bay, as well as to the nearly nightly rains? Perhaps the birds could be forgiven if they looked a little harried in the morning, and if their home was less than meticulous.

It was during that cold spring of 1997 that I finally started to become more curious about my neighbors’ affairs. I drove over to the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History and took out Alan Poole’s comprehensive book on ospreys. I read about how the birds are “mostly” monogamous, though there are exceptions, and about how the nests have to be open from above because, while great fliers, ospreys don’t maneuver well in closed spaces. I also read about their majestic “fish dance” or “sky dance” and copied down a traditional song of the West African Senegalese fisherman:

Sometimes, for all our efforts, nesting doesn’t take. To work hard, obsessively hard—dawn-to-dusk hard—and to get nothing in return is common enough in the animal world. Once the weather finally broke that spring there came a terrible day when the human fisherman began to crowd the end of the jetty near the osprey nest. The first time it happened my face went flush. I felt angry, panicked. A half dozen men and women stood right below the nest, oblivious to the agitated bird flapping and screeching above them. I walked out to my spot by the rock and watched as one man (wearing appropriate plunderer’s garb: an Oakland Raiders sweatshirt and a leather jacket) leaned his back against the structure that supported the nest itself. Only the female was home, and she flapped around nervously for ten minutes before flying off. I weighed the effectiveness of delivering the lecture I could feel building inside me but, deciding it would do no good, swallowed my rage and retreated to the beach. Before heading home, I took one last look back through my binoculars and saw an astounding sight. Dusk had begun to drive most of the people away, but one teenage girl remained and, before leaving, she decided a final indignity was in order. As I watched, she walked up to the warning light, climbed the supporting structure, and peered right into the nest.

Hoping she wouldn’t yell for the police when she saw the man charging out the jetty toward her, I calmed myself so that I could politely explain the situation: these birds had been trying to nest here since March and they deserved some degree of privacy and respect. I lied and told her that I was with the Wellfleet Audubon Society and that we’d soon be erecting a barrier at the second rock. She was friendly enough, nodding and saying “uh-huh” to my explanation, but when I asked her not to disturb the nest again, she replied casually: “Oh, it’s no problem. I didn’t even see any eggs in there.”

After she left I stayed out at my rock for another hour. But the ospreys did not return.

The next morning the world was back in place, at least temporarily. The female was nesting again, and the male was going about the morning chore of nest repairs. She sat hook-nosed, looking satisfied, while he worked around the house. When I got home I called the town environmental office, told them the situation (which they already knew about), and asked if a barrier was going to be erected. They told me that, yes, it would be, and within a week the barrier was up, despite the grumbling of the fishermen. From well behind the barrier I watched as the ospreys again hunkered down low, riding out the end of a cold, windy May.

But they’d begun to spend more and more time away from the nest. By Memorial Day, when the white apple blossoms bloomed, it was still cold, and by early June the nest was sagging down like Rasta dreadlocks. The female remained deeply intent on nesting, or what I thought was nesting, her proud bandit-masked head down low, just above the nest’s rim; only, according to the books I’d taken out of the library, the young should have hatched by then, and there was no sign of them. Despite this the male continued to play along, going about his work of gathering and fishing, the wind ruffling his feathers as he returned to the nest. Then on June 10 the real change finally came to the Cape, velvety summer breezes and summer sun. As Heidi Schadt had predicted, we’d had no spring, just a straight drop-off from winter to summer. Suddenly I could barbecue in shorts at six at night, and the mourning doves sounded slightly different, cooing with a still hollow but happier melancholy. The ocean grew tame, a gentle green pool that lapped at the harbor’s edge. The next morning the nest was deserted. I saw the two ospreys fishing and circling together. And then a third! At the time I didn’t know what to make of this. Was this one of the “mostly” monogamous situations I’d read about, the occasional threesome? Had the nest failed?

On the morning of the summer solstice the nest was again deserted, looking even more tattered and windblown than it had during the worst of the winter weather. I watched awhile, and sure enough the male and female, without the mysterious third, appeared. She swooped in from below and glided up above the nest before landing, while he, with a fish in his talons, had a harder time maneuvering into it. They rested for a while before flying off, the fish still intact. The nest, it seemed, had become no more than a pit stop.

In fact, that was the last time I saw them in the nest. Later, in mid-July, hiking in the marsh behind the graveyard where my father is buried, I saw three ospreys and thought they might have been the jetty birds, but from the distance I couldn’t be sure. My books informed me that ospreys fly south in September, but ours were gone by August.

As I say, sometimes nesting doesn’t take. A depressing story perhaps, and one without a warm and fuzzy moral for Nina and me. But during the next winter another osprey platform was erected across the harbor, and by March 1998 I began taking frequent walks, filled with the excitement of anticipation. It wasn’t until mid-April that I noticed the ospreys taking up residence. Drinking my tea each morning during our second spring back, I would stand on our back deck and watch as they flew off to search for branches, observing their nest from mine. They had gotten a late start, and, like the last pair, were immature, and it would come to pass that they would produce no young. But they often flew right over the house, emitting their by then familiar cries, and with neighbors like that, we decided we’d have to stay for another year. Though no birds were brave enough to try to nest again at the jetty’s end, the platform at Chapin Beach and the one behind my father’s gravesite were both occupied. “Don’t worry about them,” my neighbor Tommy Olsen, a boatbuilder, said to me. “They’re like pigeons down south.” Indeed, if my books were right, we might soon be approaching the number of birds that had nested here in the early nineteenth century.

By watching the pair across the harbor, I learned that I had perhaps been overprotective of the jetty ospreys the year before. Compared with other raptors, ospreys are not particularly shy or private. For instance, the harbor pair carried on their daily affairs thirty feet above a busy parking lot in the midst of summer. It is, I understand now, more likely that weather and inexperience, and not human interference, were what did in the first pair’s chances of reproducing. And while I still resent that people didn’t respect them enough to leave them alone, I’m glad the birds at least tried to make their desperate stand at rocks’ end. Long after they’d left, in late summer and early fall, their disheveled nest still flew like a flag of wildness over our increasingly suburban neighborhood. And, thinking of it now, I see it not just as a flag of wildness but one of resilience and of hope.

Now our third spring is trying to eke its way out of winter. Pussy willows sprout silky goat hooves, an early herald of the time to come, but ice still flakes on the harbor banks. There is no sign of the birds this morning, but I’m content to wait, readying myself. While I look forward to their return, I also see it as something of a challenge. Having spent two years getting to know the ospreys, I now want more. I want to see things my binoculars can’t help me with; in fact, adding another lens between myself and them is the opposite of what I hope for this season. Instead I’d like to remove a layer that exists between me and the birds. Perhaps what I want is the direct experience of something wild, something other than myself.

I’ve had hints of what I’m after. One day during Nina’s and my first summer back, I stumbled through the phragmites at Quivett Creek at dusk, crashing over the crackling reeds with all the subtlety of an elephant. When I emerged from the grasses into the marsh I found a nearly full orange moon shining with cartoon clarity. I also found myself close, too close, to an enormous nest. The nest was the result of a strange union, equal parts Commonwealth Electric and osprey; the birds had built their home on top of a pole and platform that the electric company provided. But if the nest was only half wild, I felt wholly so standing there, my feet encased in marsh muck, with the daylight fading. From my angle, looking almost straight up, I could see no sign of the young that rested in the nest, but soon enough one of the parents—the mother, I suspected—was floating nearly on top of me, less than twenty feet away, blowing sideways and swooping back and forth in the wind as if swaying on a giant puppet string. Her urgent cries came faster and faster, calling out, “Don’t come closer” and “Don’t hurt my babies” and, finally, urgently, “Back off or I will hurt you!” For a second, I didn’t back off, euphoria rooting me in place, staring up at the nearly eagle-sized bird that was clearly and urgently speaking to me. But even if I wanted desperately to stay there, to draw that moment out as long as I could, I had to acknowledge just what the bird was saying. And so, after a minute or two of rudeness, I finally listened and, minding my manners, retreated through the reeds. It only seemed fair that I give way, after all, since I was there as a mere watcher, a collector of moments, while she was living a life.

Now, in this new season of expectation, winter unlocking into spring, I want to become more than a watcher. I want immersion as well as contact. I want to learn everything I can about these wild birds, and not just by the book. So far my attempts to know my winged neighbors have been halting and half-baked, but it’s a deeper, truer intimacy I’m after, an attempt, perhaps doomed to failure, to see the ospreys not as a reflection of myself, but for themselves.

I no sooner finish resolving this than my mind turns again. While I want to greet the ospreys on their own terms, I’m not entirely opposed to learning a thing or two from the birds. We hope to learn from our neighbors, after all, and I secretly hope they can teach me a little of what it means to reinhabit a place, to make a place home.

But more than lessons I simply want to be close. If these birds were once so common, why does it feel like a miracle that they have come back now? Perhaps it’s because even the plain facts of the coming spring are miraculous. Almost gone from these parts forever, the osprey has rejoined life’s circle. They will be arriving any day now, and I feel poised, ready. Excited by sights I’ll soon see, I let the coming season infect me. I share the world’s anticipation. Eager to begin.