Flight

The murder at Chapin occurred at 7:30 on the morning of July 2, and since I watched the whole thing, I feel no need to question anyone for alibis. The next afternoon when I play detective, following up on the case, I find that I’ve been wrong about the fate of the corpse. It hasn’t been tossed overboard, as I assumed in the morning. For the next two days it remains in the nest, a dead clump of occasionally blowing feathers. I wonder if it hasn’t begun to reek, though I suppose that eaters of raw fish aren’t very picky concerning olfactory matters. By the third day the clump is gone and I feel my anger toward No. 3 (whom I’ve begun to call “the murderer” as well as “white trash”) abating. Soon I’m actually beginning to sympathize with him. Following the relentless way of the world, he now becomes the runt he killed. Though there should be plenty of food to go around, it seems that, more and more often, the now smallest bird is muscled out of feedings entirely. The other two, decidedly larger, have begun to occasionally pull chunks of fish away from their mother and eat them on their own. They peck at the food in a more aggressive, even vicious, manner, their orange eyes shining. While they eat, No. 3 crouches low, submissive.

Just as the murder itself did, the new pecking order reinforces the fact that theirs is a world separate from my own way of being, from my ultimate concerns. And this might be the most vital lesson, or nonlesson, of all—that the birds’ usefulness to human beings is, ultimately, irrelevant. That what is relevant are their concerns and their lives. It’s hard not to shoehorn those lives into something that fits into mine, but hard is not the same as impossible. Like anything else, resisting this impulse requires discipline. For longer periods now I find myself observing, noting habits, watching the ospreys without my usual rushing back to self. The more time I spend out here the more I understand—and don’t just believe intellectually—that there are ways to be other than the human way. When I do turn back to me, my journal scribblings are often cryptic and nearly indecipherable. “Wild is not man,” I write. “It’s other… . To be in this is not to think ‘I am in this,’ but to be.”

But if my words aren’t particularly coherent, I’m also less suspicious of words themselves than I was when I started this experiment. My sentences will never get at what it feels like to really be here—the thing itself, the ineffable moments—but at the same time I believe that they connect as much as separate me from the birds. What could be more natural than wanting to express how we feel when we become intimate with someone?

It would be nice to say I’ve changed entirely and that, once and for all, my time at the nest has stilled my need for symbols. But it wouldn’t be true. Something is beginning to happen at the nest that will not allow for a quiet mind. A palpable excitement builds as the young birds edge toward what will be their greatest and most daring adventure.

For the first month and a half of their lives the nestlings lacked the very thing that will most define them, but now they edge toward flight. In the days following the murder they begin to flap with more and more intensity. As early as July 5, three days after the runt’s death, No. 1 has begun to practice hard, but I can’t quite bring myself to believe she will take off. She looks too awkward and goofy, barely able to walk well, let alone fly. Despite this she undergoes a strenuous bout of practice, hopping off her long white pantalooned legs and flapping as if she really wants to get into the air, and suddenly, for a split second, the wind lifts her an inch or so off the nest. When she comes down she looks as surprised as I am, neither of us quite ready.

The harbor birds have begun to practice, too, but being at least a week or two behind, they can’t match the intensity at Chapin, where wings pulse air in earnest flapping. If two weeks ago the Chapin nest was crowded, it now seems more so, despite the recent cruel subtraction. The nest bulges with birds, particularly when two or more decide to practice flying at the same time. Young wings swat young heads; the father stays on his far perch, unamused and aloof; and even the loyal mother hops up onto the crossbar a foot above the nest, freeing up much-needed space. For the nestlings it must feel good to finally be flapping, using their wings for what they were built for. Not just the sheer joyous movement of it, but the ridding of insects and itchiness, the end of enforced stillness.

I haven’t spent nearly as much time on the Simpkins Neck nest, but since my bicycle survey I’ve started hiking in more often, usually after my visit to Chapin. I throw my scope over my shoulder and endure the half hour of swatting aside catbriers, mosquitoes, and poison ivy, while hoping to avoid the dreaded bite of the deer tick. By the time I arrive at the nest I look like I’ve been in the jungle for a week. These nestlings, too, are caught up in a commotion of wild flapping. So much so that it sometimes seems as if the nest itself will take off, levitating over the marsh.

July 6 proves the strangest weather day of the summer. My mother, Nina, and I are stunned by the heat. Oven-hot air renders us listless, and, despite the excitement of flight practice, I watch the Chapin nest for only an hour, rush in and out from Simpkins, and quickly check in with the harbor birds. The nestlings, too, seem more subdued, and I can’t imagine them taking off into this oppressive windless air. Nina and I retreat to the beach, preparing lesson plans in beach chairs and spending the afternoon dipping in and out of the bay. While wading I see a silver-and-sand-colored striped bass squiggling a foot or two above its own shadow on the ocean floor. The heat makes work and thought impossible, and in the afternoon we head back home to lie in front of fans and take siestas.

The weather breaks suddenly at seven that night. Black clouds scud toward us and darken the sky, the air cooling thirty degrees in twenty minutes. The sky rumbles as we race around closing windows, energy returned to us by the dropping temperature and the urgency of the storm. We ready for sheets of rain, but they never come, and the thunder and lightning, which seemed ready to burst upon us, remain a distant rumbling and sparking. This faux storm is disappointing, frustrating, after so many days of heat and drought, but the winds rise wildly, coming at us in great blasting waves, pushing out summer, swirling around the house and thrashing the trees and briers.

The next day I learn that, at almost exactly the same moment I began shutting windows, a thirteen-year-old boy on the other side of Cape Cod was experiencing something that the young ospreys have so far only dreamed of. Jeffrey Plumer was sailing his thirteen-foot boat, Flying Tern, when he saw the same thing I’d seen—darkening skies and rising winds. Sensibly, he headed for the shore of Oyster Pond. Making it to his mooring, he began to lower his sails. That was when the miracle happened. A funnel cloud approached and a huge gust caught the part of his mainsail that remained up, the gust lifting the whole boat into the sky with Jeffrey still inside the cockpit. Riding the wind, the boat and boy flew from the shore to the center of Oyster Pond, two hundred yards away! In the course of its short journey, the Flying Tern rose into the air and flew over several other moored boats before landing and capsizing in the pond’s middle. The boy’s mother, Kristine, who had looked out her window seconds before to see Jeffrey safe by the beach, looked out again to see her son in the water two football fields away. But the boy quickly righted the boat and began to bail, and was soon towed to shore by a neighbor in a Boston Whaler.

The whole experience, from shore and back, lasted less than fifteen minutes. Meteorologists believe that a “gustnado,” a small-scale tornado, was responsible for the freak flight. James Lee of the National Weather Service compared that flight to that of a parasailer: “If the wind got under the sail, he became like a human kite.”

Jeffrey’s flight has been all over the papers and TV, and I can’t help but feel a little jealous. What does it feel like to be part of the wind?

In hopes of getting some answers, I flirt with the idea of trying out hang gliding, even going out to watch a few takeoffs. But the fact of my actually running over the side of a cliff seems far less feasible than a young osprey, equipped with built-in wings, jumping off the nest. On a couple of occasions the hang gliders I watch run toward the cliff edge and then suddenly experience a failure of nerve, backpedaling or crumbling and pulling their sails down desperately toward the safety of earth. No wonder they hesitate. The miracle is that any of them do it. I know deep down that I’ll never be able to make that particular leap, and am glad when Nina insists that I cut the nonsense and stop even considering it.

Grounded, I content myself to merely watch, which, it turns out, is exciting enough. In the week after the gustnado, the wind picks up again and spurs the birds to flap harder. Alan Poole has explained to me that often the very first flight is accidental, just like Jeffrey Plumer’s, brought on by a particularly strong gust. I root for that gust, hoping to witness the first wild, inadvertent flight—that abrupt metamorphosis of creatures whom I have so far known only as sedentary. It will be an event of more historic importance than Kitty Hawk, at least to me and the nestlings, and I stay at the Chapin nest for hours, wanting to catch the exact moment.

After the Chapin No. 1’s early lead, there is a period during the second week of July when No. 3, having benefited from a growth spurt, works hardest at flapping. This seems a classic case of overcompensation. After all, he has the greatest motivation to get the hell out of the nest, away from this place where he is always last. There’s evidence that adult ospreys bolster this motivation by beginning to pull back on feedings as fledging approaches, adding the impetus of hunger to the building instinct to leave the nest. The parents are understandably impatient, and not just because their once quiet nest has begun to resemble a helicopter pad. The simple fact is that the young birds need to make the trip to South America in less than two months, and the sooner they learn to fly the better their chances of survival.

Despite the delight of the cool fall-like weather that follows the gustnado, I share the elder ospreys’ impatience. Some mornings I come to the nest looking for flight to find only napping or fish begging. When the practice sessions finally begin, I root for the young birds while they dance their step-stomping dances from talon to talon, flapping and hopping up anxiously toward the sky. There are other changes, too—the nestlings more actively follow life outside the nest, whether a plane or bird flying by, and they’re beginning to develop a side-to-side head movement, which I call the “pigeon bob.” But the real show is flight, or the preparation for it.

On July 14 I make a quick dawn trip to Quivett. With all the activity at Chapin, I’ve barely had time for the single “unproductive” nest on my watch. The Quivett birds look truly aimless now, as if they’ve lost their purpose (which, on the most basic level, they have). The pair just sit next to each other at the nest, wind ruffling their feathers, going through the motions, displaying a distinct lack of urgency during this urgent time of year. When I brought Nina here the other night she agreed that the female looked desolate. Sitting back low on the nest, she conveyed a desperation about her enterprise. “The lost nest,” I call Quivett in my journal. Of course, put in perspective, the tragedy of the Quivett nest is no tragedy at all. They are long-lived birds, were successful last year, and likely will be again.

Anyway, I have little time for Quivett. By 9:00 I’m back at Chapin. Over the last few days I’ve noticed another change: brief hops across the length of the nest, nothing you could really call flying, but hops with greater hang time than before. This morning’s high point occurs when No. 1 leaps the full length of the nest and floats in the air for a good two seconds, fluttering her wings, while I feel a corresponding flutter inside. I assure you that when you see this lift, this hover, it’s impossible not to feel the quick internal lift of delight. What’s more, I find myself caught between excitement and fear: flight can happen at any minute, but, like a father who fears his child will never learn to walk or speak, I don’t really believe that my birds will ever learn to fly. Perhaps I’m getting closer to taking that leap of faith, but more often it’s a leap that still, at times, strikes me as preposterous. In fact, it’s one thing to believe in an extended hop like the one I saw just now, but the next step requires more than a mere leap. That step is simple: these birds will do the nearly impossible. They will peer over the nest’s edge, as if it were the end of the world, stare down at the twelve-foot drop to the ground—a drop that would have killed them a few weeks ago—and then they will crouch and leap and suddenly be in the air. They will trust that their wings—these things that so far have been only good for flopping around spasmodically—will lift them into the wind. If this is “natural,” it’s also lunacy, a mad risk, an example of evolution’s sense of the absurd. Can there be a crazier gambit, a more wild bid, than this? But apparently these are the sorts of gambles you must take to lead a life of flight.

At night I steep myself in the literature of flying. Witnessing the murder has made me more hardheaded, and at first I’m temperate, sticking to avian physiology, learning about the remarkable evolutionary adaptations that make flight possible. “The first essential property is lightness,” Jean Dorst writes in The Life of Birds. I discover how every part of a bird, even its skeleton, is remarkably light, helping explain how the ospreys, which sometimes look as big as small dogs, can weigh only four pounds. To this first property are added two others: streamlining and strength. “Every projection,” writes Dorst, “is suppressed. The legs can be retracted into the plumage … or stretched out horizontally. The head, neck, and body are shaped to part air and ensure a smooth airflow.” In addition, an osprey’s heart beats six times faster than ours, and its circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems are all “remarkably efficient.” Anything that doesn’t aid flight shrinks (even reproductive organs during the sexual off-season), creating perfect aerial athletes with no wasted motion.

While man has joined them in the air, birds still have one great advantage over man-made wings: feathers. “The feathered wing’s aerodynamic form, lightness, and remarkable ability to change shape represent perfection in functional design,” writes Stephen Dalton in The Miracle of Flight. No plane will ever maneuver like a bird, in large part thanks to a feather’s perfect design. There are theories but no one really knows how feathers evolved. However they came into being, the nestlings are now getting their first clues about what they are good for. One of the things the young ospreys are doing, when they aren’t practicing, is learning how to care for their feathers, constantly preening. Large birds, like raptors, may have as many as twenty-five thousand feathers.

An osprey’s bones, while light, must be rigid and strong enough to absorb the impact of hitting the water at forty miles per hour. In most animals the skeleton is the heaviest part of the body, but in birds the bones are not only hollow but, Dorst says, “full of air which is in communication with the respiratory sacs.” I don’t quite understand what is meant by “in communication” and scribble down a note to ask Alan Poole about it. I learn that the phenomenon of having air cavities in the bones is called pneumatization.

I’m doing well, keeping my reading disciplined, until my eye happens to glance down a few dictionary entries below pneumatization to pneumatology, the study of spiritual beings and phenomena. With that stroke of bad luck I leave my science reading behind for the night, my imagination taking off despite my efforts to ground it. I push the ornithology books aside and wonder about human notions of flight. How many of us will ever know anything close to true flight? We glimpse it a little through drink, drugs, the exhilaration of sport, moments of empathy, art, falling in love, lovemaking. But we miss more than we see.

I’m not unique in my failure to stay literal on this particular subject. The human imagination can’t seem to leave flight alone. We talk of flights of the imagination, for instance. Empathy is flying out of your skin into the skin of another, and ecstasy means flying out of the self all together, though maybe jump is a better word than fly. Maybe what humans call “flight” is really no more than a hop, and a relatively small hop at that, mere approximations of the real thing.

Take Keats, for example, whose empathic nature made him an ideal candidate for spiritual flight school, and who dreamed of lifting off “on the viewless wings of Poesy.” Even he, with his ability to leap into the lives of animals and people (and things) outside of himself, and his constant desire to experience “the greeting of the spirit,” could lift off only for precious seconds, as the odes to the nightingale and on the Grecian urn attest. To truly get beyond ourselves is the dream, to lift up and out, but how many of us can sustain lift against the drag and weight of our self-consciousness, even for a short while?

Maybe human beings were built wingless for a reason. To fly means to stay in the air, not just momentarily gaining the sky before dropping back. Of course even avian flight begins with a jump, usually a crouching down and then a springing up. But jumping only approaches flight, is only a momentary suspension. Though we hope for it and dream about it, how many of us will ever know actual soaring? How many of us will ever experience what Jeffrey Plumer did at the edge of the Oyster Pond?

After letting my mind drift with these airy thoughts for a while, I wrestle myself back to fact, picking up my science books again. Enough with humans and human ideas of flight. It’s literal, not metaphoric, flight I need to learn about. How does a bird fly? Yes, they are streamlined and have light bones and all that, but that doesn’t get at the simpler problem: how can something move through the air? This is one of those basic things, like how a car works, that most of us take for granted and don’t understand. We get on board a plane, watch the movie, drink, read magazines, all the while blissfully unaware of how the 200-ton contraption we are sitting inside will ever get off the ground. Now I read about drag and thrust, lift and weight. “Think of air as a fluid, which it is,” my books counsel me, “then imagine the air, the fluid, moving over a wing.” I try to understand, I really do. I read about the fundamentals of aerodynamics once, twice, then a third time, but somehow it doesn’t sink in. I assure myself that over the next weeks I’ll master the material. But right now that seems about as likely as my jumping off our roof and flying across the harbor.

On July 15 I head out to watch the real thing. The Chapin nestlings seem only a little more confident than I am in the plausibility of flight. While No. 1 puts a mighty effort into flapping and manages to lift above the platform for three seconds, treading air, flying in place, a minute later she attempts to hop-fly up to the crossbar and misses awkwardly. It’s amazing that in three weeks these same clumsy birds will be diving for fish on their own; that by early September they will be flying thousands of miles to South America. For now they can’t do something that their diminutive downstairs neighbors, the house sparrows, could do after only a single week of life.

I feel a tug of guilt about not having visited Simpkins Neck over the last few days, but decide to stay here, egging on the near fledglings. Understanding that my rooting has no more effect than yelling at the TV during a Patriots game doesn’t stop me from raving like a beatnik hepcat. “Go, go, go, go, go go, go!” I chant as No. 3 takes over, almost doing it, lifting off with a clump of sticks from the nest caught in his talons, then landing again and trying to clear the clump. Sometimes I can anticipate when they are about to try to lift by their posture and the way they gather themselves in concentration. They now go through at least two good practice sessions a day, facing into the wind and flapping with gusto, consistently hop-flying from one end of the nest to the other. They’re getting more real height, too, lifting about two feet above the nest. I count out the time as they fly: “One Mississippi, two Missi—” the record so far being five Mississippis for No. 1. When the wind comes up they’re blown backward almost off the nest, and though I’d hate for them to come to harm, I’d like to see how they’d react to suddenly not having the nest below them. Something tells me, though, that this would be tragic; that they wouldn’t be quite ready yet to fly back up and reclaim the safety of the nest.

Despite No. 3’s great efforts, their flying ability mirrors their places in the pecking order: No. 1 levitating, the closest to real flying; No. 2 hop-flying; and No. 3 merely hopping about with clumps in his feet. The Vegas odds have them fledging in just that order, though I secretly hope for an upset. Somehow the little murderer has not only gotten back into my good graces but become my favorite. If hope is the thing with feathers, here is hope in its purest form: yearning for the sky. It’s hard to hold grudges when watching so much earnest effort and excitement.

Meanwhile, the nestlings have begun to resemble their parents more, not just in their size but in their characteristic movements. Sometimes they scratch themselves like cats, holding their talons against their just-developing feather sheaths, called pinfeathers, while moving their heads back and forth vigorously. Before No. 1 takes off she goes into her pigeon bob, moving her head back and forth like a ’70s TV pimp. Or maybe to call it a bob is wrong—it’s more a curious shifting back and forth, from left to right, like a bad teenage dancer. Whatever it is exactly, it’s part of her warm-up, a warm-up that’s sometimes as elaborate, and as seemingly doomed to failure, as those of the men in the old-time flying machines.

But while flight is fun, food is still the real game, and when the male returns with a fish, the practice session ends instantly. It’s a flounder, sand-colored and small, already streaked red from the talon gash when it was caught. As the male delivers it, the nest goes wild with noise. No. 1 and No. 2 fight for scraps to drag off on their own now, stabbing brutally at the chunks they take, while No. 3, knowing his place, hunches down in his submissive corvid cower. I take conscientious notes on the feeding, but in truth I’ve begun to resent the times in between the attempts at flight—times of eating, napping, preening, nest building—anything that isn’t jumping and flapping.

Meanwhile, our own nest grows more crowded. Every year since Nina and I moved to Cape Cod, my sister Heidi and her son, Noah, have paid an annual visit from North Carolina in mid July. This year they arrive with a new addition in tow, the three-month-old Adeline Grace.

Heidi, two years younger than me, is my oldest friend. When she was Addie’s age I rocked her in the wooden cradle in which we now stack wood. Of course, I wasn’t an entirely benevolent brother. Across the room from the cradle hangs a photo of the two of us as children. Though at first glance it looks like we are embracing, on closer examination it appears I’m trying to strangle my sister. Despite this, we have become very close over the years. “You never get angry at her,” Nina says, something she couldn’t say about almost anyone else. It’s true. My relationship with my sister is my least complicated.

As we toast their arrival, three-year-old Noah runs around naked on the back deck, naked being the state he’ll stay in for most of the summer. I point the telescope at the harbor nest, adjusting it for Heidi, Nina, and my mother. When I show them how the harbor nestlings have begun to practice flapping, they react with the same excitement I experienced.

After a big welcome dinner, Heidi and the kids turn in early, exhausted from their trip. I climb the stairs and return to my books. In the big hawk book Brown and Amadon suggest that there is something like play in all this practice flapping: “obviously the young birds don’t know they are ‘practising’ flying, but instead are merely indulging in a form of behavior which, at times, at least, they appear to enjoy.” I read various ornithology books for a while but then push them aside. I dip into more mystical texts, again leaving behind pneumatization for pneumatology. Despite witnessing the murder and despite vowing to become more scientific, I can’t seem to break old habits. I read Meister Eckhart, the German mystic, in hopes of gleaning some secrets of flight, but my energy is mostly concentrated on Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism. In Eliade’s book I learn that stories of flight were common among different peoples, Asian, Siberian, Arctic, and North American, and that they were called myths of ascension. These ascents to the sky were central to the roles of shamans among the Katshina, Winnebago, Beltir, Proto-Turks, Ugrian, Yakuts, Buryats, and a hundred other tribes. According to Eliade, the “shamanic vocation or initiation is directly connected with ascent to the sky”; for instance, the great Basuto prophet “received his vocation after an ecstasy during which he saw the roof of his hut open above his head and felt himself carried off to the sky.” Neophytes undertook these ecstatic journeys to the sky through different techniques of ascent: ritual tree climbing, the sacrifice of horses, ascensional trances. They also played the world drum, cut from the world tree, as a means of communication between sky and earth, an aid to ecstasy.

When I first wintered on Cape Cod I often had flying dreams. I couldn’t get over the bird life, the millions of seabirds and songbirds migrating overhead, couldn’t get over the good luck of being a witness to these mass movements. Now I’m spending more time than ever with birds, but the dreams haven’t returned. I’m not sure why. These days I’m healthier, stronger, reading books on flight both ornithological and mystical, while back then I preferred Meister Bräu to Meister Eckhart. It takes a strong ego to leave the ego behind, a strong self for selflessness, and I think I’m better prepared to leave myself for a while, trusting that when I come back I won’t be any worse for the wear. John Elder wrote, “Humility, finally, means to value something for its own sake, not for the way it reflects oneself or one’s values.” I’m an egotist, true, but the discipline of sitting with the ospreys helps me in this regard. With greater frequency I’m able to project myself into their nest, without projecting the grid of my mind, able to just watch and be there with them. I like to think of this as a kind of minor flight.

For the shaman, flight meant nothing less than ecstasy, the joyful leaving of the self behind. These lifting moments are also what Emerson valued most, and it seems he spent his most potent creative years almost constantly flying up toward or dropping back from this heightened state. “This inner wildness, this habit of enthusiasm, this workaday embracing of the Dionysian is quintessential Emerson,” Robert Richardson writes. “He is wild or he is nothing.”

These are my standards as well, though they are in fact impossible standards as we muddle through our long, ordinary days. Nevertheless, I still find them the best way to judge my life, even if this often sets me up for disappointment. I wait like Jeffrey Plumer on the edge of Oyster Pond, knowing that when the lifting moments do come they will blaze like fireworks. Then my everyday concerns will seem like just what they are—everyday—and I’ll get a brief but exhilarating glimpse of the fact that I’m part of something infinitely larger, a life force, if not religious then at least biological.

The next morning, July 16, sure that this will be the first day of true flight, I’m at the Chapin nest by six. The sun is an orange disc, and purple strands of clouds tear across the sky, while high tide glistens the spike grass and glasswort. The nestlings strut bravely along the very edge of the nest, no longer afraid of falling over. Wings beating furiously, No. 3 hover-hops up onto the crossbar, a vast improvement from only twelve hours ago. Then, as if not to be outdone, No. 1 lifts straight up and floats in the air with her long white leg warmers hanging down as I count out an easy six Mississippis. I laugh while I count, so startling is the change from just yesterday—this is very close to real flight! My birds are overnight sensations, hopping and flying all over the nest.

I hear myself curse when the father returns with a fish, knowing that this will ruin the fun for some time. It isn’t much of a fish either, just the scraggly scrap of a tail. The female immediately rips it from his talons and flies it to the other side of the nest. He doesn’t even bother sticking around, but takes right off. Though the Chapin male is my favorite, he is also the classic aloof father, becoming less and less of a presence at the nest with each passing day. The female stops ripping into the fish for a second to aim a few angry begging cries after his receding form.

Knowing that the Chapin nestlings will be preoccupied fighting for scraps and then, possibly, napping, I decide to head over to Simpkins Neck. I tote my beach chair, using it to knock back the branches and briers, and set up behind the marsh elder bushes at the edge of the marsh. Perhaps it’s their different parenting styles—the shy Simpkins pair more quick to leave the nest unguarded— or the different angle of the nest for viewing, or my prejudice toward the Chapin male as a hunter. Whatever the reason, I long ago decided that the Simpkins nest is less “mature.”

Today I discover just how wrong I am. As I sit trying to record the complicated interactions of the parents, the male again seemingly taunting the female and then flying off to a tree to eat, a strange thing happens. Suddenly, smoothly, in what is definitely not a beginner’s flight, the Simpkins No. 1 pushes off the nest and flies an easy lap around the marsh. There’s nothing tentative about the flight; it’s a full-fledged lap and relanding. I’m left flabbergasted. I watch for two more hours, and begin to doubt what I saw. But I did see it, and the sight throws things into chaos. I’ve been so set on seeing a first awkward flight that this brings with it a sense of anticlimax, as well as another reminder of just how far I really am from being an “expert.”

The next morning, I make the jungle trek back to Simpkins and discover confirmation of yesterday’s sight. When I arrive at Simpkins the No. 1 fledgling is already roosting in a tree a quarter mile from the nest, while No. 2 stands on the ground closer to home, leaving only one bird on the nest. My guess is that they’ve already been flying for at least a week, and I try to reconstruct why I thought these birds were younger—perhaps the greater bulk of the nest disguised their own bulk. Whatever the reason, I am now faced with an executive decision: to watch this pair or to retreat, both down the path and in time, back to the Chapin nest. It proves to be no decision at all. Having missed both the buildup to flight and the moment of flight itself, I know I need to get back to the lopsided nest, and to put in even more hours there.

Which I do. Forty-five minutes later I’m back watching the more familiar Chapin birds and, through an effort of willful amnesia, able to imagine I am still searching for the summer’s first flight. It doesn’t take long to get wrapped up in the drama; after all, for these birds it will be the first time. They peer over the nest’s edge, considering the leap, their black-and-white underwings flapping while they hop about in sometimes ridiculous fashion, treading air two, three, five seconds. Soon the time will come when one of them, the biggest, bravest, or just the one who happens to get lifted up by an unexpectedly strong breeze, will flap right over the edge of the nest. Over the next hour I count several straight hovers of five or six seconds, then a hitch, a double pump, and back up again with just a brief landing between the two “flights.” I watch for the better part of the morning, but these double-clutch flights remain the day’s highlight.

By the morning of July 18 I am now overly ready to see the moment. But the world takes time. Despite the birds’ (and my) urgency, life won’t be rushed. Nature is like an old-time storyteller, moving the plot along subtly, so that the listener doesn’t see the action as being forced or rushed. The year pulses forward, moving like a good story, gradually, inevitably. With each day the beach plums turn blue toward purple, separating themselves from the green of their leaves, and the fall fire of the glasswort has just begun to ignite, red spreading up from the base. Life has a way of tricking you if you don’t pay close attention. It’s easy enough to miss the changes, though when you look back, a few weeks later, everything is different.

Today a lingering haze covers the marsh, the same thick haze that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. earlier in the week. I’m tempted to weave him into my journal notes, as he died while attempting to fly, but for once I manage to be respectful, resisting my imagination.

Instead I watch the birds. The first hour proves disappointing, as the air is still, windless, and they seem to have regressed, no longer achieving yesterday’s double-clutch hovers. In fact, what the day consists of mostly is a lot of picking, preening, and lazing about in the heat. Their itchy settled life continues. Escape from itchiness adds a supplementary reason for wanting to get up into the air, as if they needed more motivation. If I’m impatient for flight, the nestlings, I suspect, are more so.

In this time of strange coincidences, my nephew, Noah, provides another. It’s during their summer visits that I’ve become friends with Noah, and we’ve developed a special connection. It’s been fun to help him get to know this neighborhood. When Noah was a toddler he liked to grunt up at the moon, and this paganism continues in his love of sand, grass, and surf. He remains our little nature boy, spending the day naked, except when absolutely forced to wear clothes. This year, however, a change has taken place: he now speaks to us in sentences. How extraordinary to have an actual conversation with my old, mute friend. When he addresses Nina or me he carefully places our names at the end of each phrase. “What are you doing now, David?” “Are you trying to work, Nina?” “Are you ready to go to the beach now, David?”

It’s hard to answer no to the last question for long. Eventually, at some point in each day, I give in, spending an hour or two making sand castles, playing with trucks, digging holes, and, when he’s feeling brave, swimming. On the second day of their visit, I bring Noah down to the beach by the bluff. We dig a giant hole out on a sandbar and sit inside it and erect sand walls around us to protect from the incoming tide. He giggles as the water floods through our defenses, and we retreat to the next sandbar, scaring off a large herring gull in the process. Noah sees the gull take off and then starts running in its direction, leading with his head, a joyful goofy smile spreading across his face. He starts flapping his arms as he runs.

“Look, David,” he yells. “I’m flying! I’m flying!”

From the expression on his face it’s hard to doubt him. He keeps flapping and running in circles for a minute, almost tripping over his own feet, and then doubles back toward me. He slows down and comes close to explain, as if I am too dense to understand.

“I was flying, David,” he says.

Despite his intense efforts, Noah couldn’t take off. Most humans aren’t as lucky as Jeffrey Plumer. During my nephew’s first week with us I study hard and begin to get a handle on how flight works. Not Noah’s flight, not theoretical flight, not literary flight, not shamanistic flight, but flight itself.

Think of air as a fluid. Yes, do. Then imagine this fluid streaming over aerodynamic wings, exerting pressure both upward and down. When the pressure above the wings is less than that below, the wings are “sucked” upward; when the pressure below is increased, the wings are lifted. Wings work by funneling the air downward. A bird’s wings are an almost perfect airfoil, directing the air for maximum “downwash” while creating little drag. As the air is pushed downward the bird lifts up. In The Miracle of Flight Stephen Dalton writes, “It is rather like walking up a sandy slope—every step upward pushes the sand downward.”

As I read more in Dalton’s book I feel a bit like I’m the one on a sandy slope. There is something called Bernoulli’s principle, which says, as best I can tell, “the faster the fluid moves the less pressure it exerts.” Try placing a spoon face downward below a faucet to get the idea: it will be pulled up toward the flow, much the way wings divert air and create an easy forward pull into the airstream. Then turn the spoon face up and feel the downward pull. Because of the shape of a bird’s wing, air takes longer to flow over the top, traveling faster, reducing the pressure from above. The greater pressure from below causes the phenomenon known as lift.

None of this does much good without moving air. Air has to stream over the wings for flight to happen, though it doesn’t matter if it’s the air or the wings that are doing the moving. That’s why birds can be seen lifting straight up when the wind is blowing strong, just as you can let go of a kite in a strong wind without running. When the air flow is absent it must be created by forward movement, like a plane on a runway or flapping bird. This is why, while the osprey nestlings don’t yet have the strength or coordination to provide the necessary thrust forward, a strong enough gust could catch them and blow them out of the nest, just as it did Jeffrey Plumer’s boat.

It happens at Chapin on July 21. It is No. 1, of course, first in flight, as in everything. She does her pimp head bob facing south, showing me the cinnamon swath on the back of her neck. Other than that, and the black-and-white checkering on her wings, she doesn’t look much different than her mother now, and it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that she can fly. Still, I don’t believe it until I see it.

It begins with another new development. No. 1 is watching a mob of crows stream by, turning her head as they pass, when the mother suddenly flies off the nest—just like that—out toward the water. After months of watching her sitting on the nest, involved in her sedentary marathon, this behavior startles me. It’s as if she’s saying, Okay, kids, enough’s enough, it’s time to stop begging and fly on your own. And, as if instantly heeding her, No. 1 moves closer to the edge and then peers over—leaning forward—looking down at the house sparrow perched on the commemorative plaque screwed into the pole. I anticipate an elaborate warm-up but she gets right to it. She shakes out and ruffles her feathers, stamps her feet a couple of times, and then, without further ado, pushes off.

A leap of faith is easier when you have wings. Even though I’ve been expecting it for so long, and even though I’m seeing it with my own eyes, I can barely get my mind around the sight. Suddenly, while the other nestlings look on in seeming admiration, No. 1 flaps straight toward me. The gap between six Mississippis and this, from jumping across the nest to full circling flight, is enormous. She flies a big lap of the marsh, looking not like a klutzy nestling but like a real bird—that is, until she attempts to reland on the nest. She misses the crossbar and then circles back and misses again. The second time she buzzes the nest, and the other two nestlings start cheeping wildly. Exhausted, she circles the marsh for another two minutes and then tries to land once more. She comes in too high and awkwardly. Not a pretty landing by any means. But a triumphant one. Her siblings serenade her with high-pitched cries as she slumps in exhaustion. She is down safe.