Coming Back

I bundle in my coat, down on the marsh off Quivett Creek behind my father’s grave, still waiting for the birds. The tea I bought at the corner store quickly loses its heat, my hood flaps wildly, and ducks shoot through the low, crazed morning light. After the early surge of spring, winter has reclaimed the marsh, ringing it with ice—a color scheme of deep blue and dead yellow-brown, all fringed with white. Only a week ago grainy snow echoed off the house like thrown pebbles. Now this late March has brought a string of gray days that might as well be December.

Except for the persistent hints. While the buds haven’t opened yet, they are meatier, fatter, quivering with this morning’s gel-like dew. And while ice still edges the marsh, the Canada geese have noisily set up shop, and the chickadees and sparrows, anticipating the warmth, have begun the frenetic scurrying activities of nest building and wooing. A red-winged blackbird sings a garbled love song on the black oak above the reeds, and this morning when I walked down the path a red-tailed hawk lifted off its roost and let out a noise part shriek, part whistle. There are human hints, too, like my neighbor Todd stacking lobster pots on the bed of his pickup.

Staring out at the platform that the ospreys will hopefully return to, I see that last year’s nest has weathered the winter storms pretty well, that there will be a good base for the birds to build from. Looking at the lifeless platform through my binoculars, as if willing the ospreys to appear, I soon feel bored and cold. I gulp down the last sip of icy tea and question whether I have the necessary patience for this sort of daily discipline. The furthest thing from a scientist, I’ve set myself a scientist’s task of observation, hoping to watch the birds at their homes throughout the season. The truth is I’m every inch an amateur. As evidence I need look no further than my footwear—running sneakers soaked through with cold, briny water—or at my enormous binoculars, circa World War II. My field guide is equally outdated, insisting that, among other things, a green heron is in fact a green-backed heron. But it isn’t so much the equipment that’s faulty. While I’ve been living here, on and off, all my life, I’m still ignorant of the names of most of the sedges and grasses and trees around me. Spending time in nature produces, among other results, a general feeling of stupidity, constantly reminding you of the thousands of obvious facts you don’t know. I never hunted as a kid, never tramped around swamps searching for salamanders or toads. Now I worry that there’s a bit of the drawing-room nature lover in me, more familiar with Thoreau than tree frogs. Sometimes I suspect that, at my worst, I like reading about nature more than nature itself.

But this season will be different. It’s time to go out into it and get my hands dirty. In my favor is the simple fact of curiosity. I want to learn, want to know more. My daily walks remind me that I’m perhaps less of a phony than I imagine in more self-accusatory moods. Each afternoon I head up the beach to gather driftwood, while staring out at the harbor seals that cover Tautog rock. Some flop and lounge over the rock like mink coats on the bed at a rich lady’s party, while others balance on the middle of their stomachs, bending upward like bananas at both ends, occasionally moving along in this way, a strange sort of inverse sit-up. In front of the seals, eiders coo; when I get closer, they emit warning cries like muted bomb signals rising up in their throats. While I come to the beach for fuel, more than driftwood has been thrown up on shore this past winter: horsewhips of brown-green kelp, a seal carcass that I’ve watched sink into the sand over the past months (bringing its skull home in February, so that it now rests on the desk in front of me like Yorick as I type), and, most recently, a harbor porpoise, black and four feet long. The porpoise’s eyes had been picked out by gulls and the black flesh ripped back, revealing a shining jawbone and tiny even white teeth. Each day, my arms full of wood, I check in on the progress of decay.

Words and books have little to do with the elation I feel when I climb up from the beach and see a doe and her three young giving back some of its former wildness to the suburbia of Old Town Lane. The summer people who own the houses are nowhere in sight as the deer browse lazily across their lawns. In Colorado we had to shoo deer out of our driveway, but here this rare sighting speaks of nature insisting on wildness despite our worst efforts. Having come back to my home place, I feel that I’m becoming a small part of this resurgence. Over the last two years, since we returned to Cape Cod, my learning about my neighborhood has been fragmented—“incremental,” as my friend Reg Saner points out all nature-learning is—but I’ve stumbled forward, if forward is the direction I’ve indeed been going in. Downward sometimes seems more accurate.

Now, at home on these still-wintery nights, I ready myself for the ospreys, sitting close to the woodstove in the rocking chair, reading ornithology texts and rereading Alan Poole’s book, filling my journal with facts about the birds. The books stacked around me, I alternate between taking notes and getting down on my knees to feed gathered wood into the stove’s maw. My reading tells me that by early March the ospreys have left their wintering grounds in South America and are well on their way up here, traveling between one and two hundred miles per day. They have already flown over the Caribbean in one great effort, and, after that daring crossing, they’ll move a bit more slowly, stopping and fishing and resting as they go. Their annual journey is not as streamlined as that of some other birds—sandpipers and orioles, for instance—but they are still compelled by urgency. “Pressures to breed early are obviously great,” Poole writes; “early nesting Ospreys produce the most surviving young.” I imagine our local birds to be in the mid-Atlantic by now, along the coast of Delaware, maybe, moving closer to the Cape with each passing day. In Audubon’s account of ospreys I read that fishermen in the mid-Atlantic states, upon seeing the first osprey return, “would hail its appearance with joy,” as a harbinger of the fish, and the spring, to come.

Ospreys are specialists, eating only fish that they dive for and snare in their talons. Like swallows keying on the return of insects, ospreys follow fish. Soon our local flounder and bass and, most spectacularly, our mobs of herring will begin to swim back into the shallow warming coastal waters. As spring surges northward, life following life, the birds will return to feed. It won’t be long before the season gets down to it, and just as the herring will surely return, the ospreys will be there to feast: peering down at the dark fish with their yellow eyes, hovering above, wings beating, treading air, then plunging with the fierce sureness of a shot arrow.

One of the things I do during these cold nights, as the woodstove ticks and the wind bullies the walls, is educate myself about the time when the ospreys did not return. That was from the late ’50s through the ’70s, and DDT—dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane— was the culprit. Invented in 1874, DDT had already been around for over sixty years or so before the Swiss scientist Paul Müller figured out that one of the things it did well was kill bugs. For this he won a Nobel Prize. In the years following World War II, drunk on the notion of a wonderful antiseptic, insectless world, American chemists, farmers, and administrators sprayed the insecticide liberally over thousands of acres of fields and woods and marshes. This, as Rachel Carson would soon point out, had a few unfortunate side effects. Here is how she put it in Silent Spring in 1962: “Chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in the soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells.”

Looking back, it’s easy to wonder how we could have so profoundly underestimated the interconnectedness of the world. As Carson had predicted, DDT, and its organochloride compound cousins, seeped into everything. Blown by wind, sliding off soil, carried by water, they quickly found their way into many so-called nontarget life forms. One of the problems was that DDT was a stable—that is, long-lasting—compound. Worse, it was fat-soluble and therefore became trapped in the fatty lymph tissues of animals. This last fact led to a process called biomagnification, whereby the concentration of the chemicals becomes greater and greater as they climb the food chain. The concept took me a while to grasp, but it really isn’t that complicated. Consider the case of the ospreys. First humans spray DDT over a marsh in hopes of killing off the mosquitoes. Naturally enough, the DDT finds its way into the water and into plankton, where it concentrates in fairly minuscule amounts. The problem is that small fish eat large amounts of plankton and have no way to rid themselves of the chemicals, which lodge in their fatty tissues. Then, as any first grader knows, big fish eat little fish—the big fish again unable to expel the DDT. Finally, ospreys eat the big fish and, with each fish devoured, the concentration of DDT builds up in their lymphatic system. After a few hundred fish or so, the concentration in their bodies is a million times more than it had been in the plankton. While this is still only a minuscule amount of the chemical—a few parts per million—it has tragic results for the ospreys.

Here is what DDT, or rather DDE, the insecticide’s main metabolic breakdown component, does to the birds. It interferes with their ability to reproduce in the most insidious way, impeding the female’s ability to produce enough calcium for her eggshells. This leads to thin eggshells, which leads to death for the unborn chicks. Maternal instinct compels the mother osprey to incubate her brood, but when she climbs on top she commits unintentional infanticide, cracking her own thin-shelled eggs, destroying her own offspring.

On my third morning at the Quivett marsh I watch from a world barely waking, holding out my hands toward the rising sun as if it were a just-built fire. The seesaw struggle between winter and spring continues, and while the hints of what will come are here, I can’t bring myself to trust them. But I remind myself that despite appearances, spring is coming. The world will warm.

The foundation of sticks from last year’s nest sits atop the nesting platform, a foundation that the returning birds will, hopefully, add to. Though I check in with all the other neighborhood nests, including the one that I can see from the back deck of my house, I find I’m coming here, to the Quivett marsh, most often. I’m already establishing a routine, parking directly across from my father’s gray slate gravestone—david marshall gessner, beloved of family and friends, it reads—and walking down the path in the cemetery’s northeast corner. Throughout these first days (and throughout the spring it will turn out), the red-tail’s shriek-whistle serves as my greeting when I enter the short path. The path weaves down through the catbrier and then through the fifteen-foot-tall phragmites that are my gateway to the marsh itself. I spread the phragmites like beads hanging over a hippie doorway and, once through, walk along the marsh edge. I tote lawn chair, binoculars, bird books, and journal, plopping all down when I get to my spot below the black oak where deer have flattened a circled mat of grass for their beds. A small brown bird’s nest from last year is interwoven into blades of spartina grass, and a row of elder bushes guard the marsh. I set up my chair, take out my binoculars, and watch and wait.

To say there is something a little like prayer in this routine is not going too far, particularly with the cemetery so near. I scribble all the sights in my journal, composing while my elders decompose nearby, turning the marsh into a map, recording the location of the heron’s nest and the Canada geese’s. My prayer is active, but today the weather won’t let me worship long. While the calendar has announced the first day of spring, the wind violently disagrees. Rain flies sideways, and the marsh leans with the wind: spartina grass, trees, even, it appears, the unoccupied osprey nest bend with the gusts. I’ve barely unpacked all my equipment and begun to take notes about an empty nest when it’s time to pack up again. Driven off the marsh, I run for my car. Rain like pencil points drums the roof. Back home I watch the ocean swell, white froth almost covering the jetties. No sign of ospreys across the harbor, but a brave kingfisher rattles low over the water, landing on a rotted old piling. Its Mohawk crown looks ragged, water-sprayed. I imagine it taking shelter in its ten-foot-long tunnel that twists into the muck bank, the tunnel floor littered with the bones of fish.

The ospreys have no such protection. Their homes jut right up into the wind like flagpoles. Alan Poole wrote of watching ospreys return near his home, where they were blasted by an early spring snowstorm and took refuge down low in the marsh until the storm abated. Are the birds already here, huddled down out of all this cold and wind? I worry for them. What if they can’t complete their annual journey? Weather is just one variable; there are so many other threats. How can they hope to survive and breed?

As the rains usher in spring, my nightly reading picks up momentum. Nina makes fun of my reading style, since I need to be involved with at least three or four books at once. She prefers the old-fashioned technique of starting a book at the beginning and reading it straight through before heading on to the next one. By contrast, I read “by inclination,” as Samuel Johnson put it, which is a fancy way of saying I go where I please. At its worst this leads to a lazy dawdling and lots of unfinished books, but at its best a kind of electric cross-pollination occurs. That is what happens now. Every sentence I stumble on seems relevant. Alan Poole’s book, Ospreys: A Natural and Unnatural History, remains my central text, and I return to it again and again, taking Talmudic care to learn the details of the birds’ behavior. But there is also Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which I’ve somehow managed to live thirty-eight years without reading. If in its time the book served as a clarion call and an antidote to a glossy vision of chemically aided Progress, it now, for me, acts also as an antidote to the fear of impotence. Here are words that actually made a difference, that had an effect on the world. This fact is almost as exciting as the fact of the osprey’s return. It also leads me to Linda Lear’s biography of Rachel Carson, where, in the undisciplined style that irritates my wife, I skip right to the parts about the composition of Silent Spring. By that point cancer had spread through Carson—news her doctor at first refused to tell her because she was a woman—and she finished her brave book about unseen poisons while being bombarded with chemotherapy.

This nudges me in a less sanguine direction. Though my own cancer is in the past, there are times when worry seeps in. A hypochondriac at heart, I can’t read long about DDT without taking it personally, imagining the chemical disseminating into the clear, yellowish lemonade that is my lymph. Now I put aside the Carson biography and track down the article in Nature magazine that proposed the link between testicular cancer and DDT or, more accurately, the metabolite DDE. DDE has, as it turns out, potent “oestrogenic (‘feminizing’) and anti-androgenic (‘demas-culinzing’)” capabilities. The article is careful to only suggest the link between testicular cancer and DDT, and its main conclusion is that more research is needed. But it does point to the rise in the incidence of testicular cancer that coincided with the use of the pesticides, and to the astounding fact that most of us had our first encounters with DDT in utero, and that we all still store the chemical in our fat. Finally, lest we think this a problem of the past, the author, Richard Sharpe, mentions that DDT use in developing countries “probably exceeds the level of its use historically.” Though not a scientist, I doubt that DDT respects national borders.

Connections again. Over and over, I’m impressed by how intertangled the world is. As I read more I’m particularly impressed by the strange marriage of ospreys and DDT. Not only in the ugly death dance that occurred at the nests, but as emblems, symbols, and indicators of the environmental movement. While there were chemicals a hundred times more harmful, DDT, largely through Rachel Carson’s work, got star billing, becoming the villainous symbol that the nascent environmental movement rallied against. In a similar way, ospreys became emblematic, acting in many cases as an indicator of environmental health. This was due in part to the simple fact that they, like peregrine falcons and bald eagles, were big. You couldn’t miss them, and when you did miss them you knew something was wrong. And soon enough ospreys were missed, which would yield surprising results.

One of the first to miss the ospreys was a gentle man named Dennis Puleston. Near the end of her life one of Rachel Carson’s concerns was about who would continue her life’s work, but soon after she died it was clear that others were rushing in to take up the fight. Puleston was one of those others. Since 1948 he had been carefully observing and sketching the resident ospreys on Gardiners Island, off the eastern end of Long Island, a small hump of land suspended within the island’s forked tail. Puleston, later considered the “gray eminence” of the Environmental Defense Fund, was well on his way to becoming an environmental legend. While growing up in England, Puleston had never seen an osprey in the wild, the birds having been wiped out there. Moving to Long Island after World War II, Puleston looked forward to living close to what he considered a “somewhat mythical bird.” Not long after his move he began his studies at Gardiners Island. When he first observed the ospreys, there were hundreds of active nests, but over the years he noticed great changes. “I began keeping records of each nest and its reproductive history. In 1948, an average of more than two chicks fledged from each nest… . By 1966, active nests on Gardiners Island had dwindled from over 300 in 1948 to under 50, and in these we could find only four chicks. Ornithologists predicted the end of the osprey as a breeding bird in the Northeast.”

Puleston had great respect for Rachel Carson, whom he called “that splendid woman”: “Knowing of her work, we collected overdue osprey eggs and took them to the laboratory for analysis by gas chromatography. As we anticipated, residues of DDT were present.” Puleston wasn’t the first to tie the osprey’s decline to the use of pesticides, but his observations would help convert this conclusion into political action. At the time Puleston was a member of a central Long Island conservation group called the Brookhaven Town Natural Resources Committee, or BTNRC. The BTRNC fought local environmental battles, its members comparing notes on, among other issues, the disastrous effects of DDT. At first they operated within more or less conventional means: letter writing, phone calls, and one-person campaigns. But all that changed one day in April 1966. That was when Charles Wurster, the chemist who had run the tests on Puleston’s osprey eggs, left a BTRNC meeting and went home to write a letter to local newspapers criticizing the Long Island Mosquito Control Commission’s use of DDT.

The letter set off a rapid chain of events. It was promptly read by a flamboyant local lawyer named Victor Yannacone. Yannacone was not shy about suing and was already in the midst of a suit against the mosquito commission, claiming that DDT had led to a large fish kill. Victor Yannacone’s concerns were not specifically environmental, but Wurster’s letter sparked his interest. In his recollections of the time, Wurster remembers Yannacone asking him if he “had specific evidence of damaging effects of DDT” and “whether I would help him in his lawsuit.” “I said ‘yes’ to both questions,” Wurster recalled, “adding that others on Long Island might want to help.”

Those others included a hearty local biology teacher and birdwatcher, Art Cooley, the BTRNC’s founder and unofficial chair, and Dennis Puleston, with his mounting evidence of the ospreys’ decline. The atmosphere during those early meetings must have been charged and, though they didn’t know it at the time, the BTRNC was about to undergo a dramatic metamorphosis. Less than a week after that meeting, Yannacone presented an affidavit to the New York Supreme Court, requesting an injunction against the mosquito commission’s use of DDT. To the surprise of the BTRNC members, that injunction, bolstered by their scientific evidence, worked. DDT use was blocked until the case went to trial in November 1966.

If DDT, through Carson’s crusades, could be said to have led to the beginning of the modern environmental movement, then both DDT and the ospreys would be responsible for the birth of what is now known as environmental law. Ospreys, it would turn out, were central to the first DDT trial. Since they were at the top of the food chain, where the chemical concentrated, they provided the most dramatic evidence. By then Dennis Puleston had brought more damaged eggshells of the Gardiners Island ospreys to Charles Wurster at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Wurster’s tests had determined that the DDT levels were dangerously high. Against this the commission had no defense. Despite the fact that the presiding judge had to look up the word ecology, it was soon obvious that he was impressed with the mounting evidence. Though the same judge would finally rule that the court had no jurisdiction over the mosquito commission, by then two summers had passed without spraying. In that time the public had been made aware of the problem, and the Suffolk County legislature had forbidden the commission from ever using DDT.

For the first time science was wed to law to gain environmental results, giving legal muscle to Rachel Carson’s concerns. And the team of BTRNC scientists wasn’t done. Inspired by their success, they launched a national campaign to, as they privately put it, “sue the bastards.” In 1967 they incorporated as the Environmental Defense Fund, with Puleston, Wurster, and Cooley among the founding trustees. Their lawsuits would lead directly to the banning of DDT not only on Long Island but, soon after, in Wisconsin and, then, throughout the country. Of course, it wasn’t easy. Like Carson before them, they were accused of being Communists and, inevitably, perverts, for their attacks on the all-American chemical. But despite the industry’s attempts to smear their names, they kept on pushing the DDT suits right up through June 14, 1972. On that day—a happy one for both the original BTRNC members and the ospreys—EPA administrator William Ruckelhaus permanently banned DDT use in the United States.

By night I read about one comeback, by day witness another. The Quivett birds—my birds I already hear myself ridiculously calling them—return on March 23. Or at least that’s the first day I see them. Theirs is a dramatic homecoming. I’m out on the marsh early on this hazy morning, sitting in my lawn chair, blueberry muffin and tea in hand, when they catch me by surprise. With the weather the way it’s been, I didn’t expect them back this early, but here they are. As the sun comes up and burns the fog off the marsh, a great bird—a male, I suspect—lifts up, his wings underlit with glimmers of silver, flying right toward me. His full outline shines when he gets closer, as if water is still drying on his primaries, the thirteen long feathered fingers that extend on the outer half of his wings. As he banks I see another gleam, like the flash of a knife blade, and notice the fish in his talons—a flounder, it looks like. He flies low, banks again, then flutters high so that I have a fine view of his vivid white belly and breast. Now the female joins him—they’re both buck!—and one behind the other they glide in from below the old nest, rise up, flap, and land.

He tears at the fish with his curved beak while she begs with the characteristic cry that the renowned early-twentieth-century ornithologist Edward Forbush called “a complaining whistle.” Her cries fill the marsh the way no other sound has this cold month, and, despite the edge of irritation in her voice, it feels uplifting to be in the presence of ospreys again. Such proud-looking birds, with their white heads and dark masks. The field guides often describe their coloring as black and white, but today a dark chestnut brown seems a truer description. This color, contrasting vividly with the thick white of the chest, covers the tops of the wings before working its way up the back of the head and encircling the yellow eyes in a dark raccoon mask. I notice that, despite the speckling of dark spots on her throat, she seems to have more white in her than he does, but perhaps that’s simply because she is larger and her white chest is more expansive. On the other hand, his mask is definitely fuller, covering a greater part of his face.

I marvel at their size. Ospreys are enormous birds, reaching twenty-four inches tall from head to toe, with wingspans between fifty-eight and seventy-two inches—five to six feet. By contrast, a red-tailed hawk (the hawk casual bird-watchers see most often) has a wingspan of about fifty inches, while a peregrine falcon’s wings stretch between thirty-six and forty-four inches. On the other hand, a bald eagle’s wingspan can reach between seventy and ninety inches, and it can weigh up to ten pounds more than an osprey. That said, beginning osprey watchers often can’t get the word eagle out of their heads. The combination of coloring and majesty won’t let them.

I watch through the morning. The pair lie low, likely exhausted from the journey, and later take short foraging trips for sticks to bolster the nest. As well as they fly, as brilliantly athletic as they are, they sometimes seem to have a difficult time landing on the nest, particularly when carrying large sticks. Before landing they drop down ten feet below the platform, almost to the ground, then fly straight up into the wind, hovering, and finally land with a great flapping of wings—beautiful, but the antithesis of smooth.

At first, as the morning passes, they both work, but before long I notice a division of labor along gender lines: he flies out and gathers, then hands—or beaks—the sticks over to her. She places the sticks with her bill, sometimes delicately, sometimes not, then hectors him if he hasn’t already flown off for more material. Later he preens on a nearby post while she tamps down the inside of the nest. In no time their home is being built back up, and this early active domesticity gives me hope for the pair’s success. Certainly these two at least look like they know what they’re doing.

But the next day the rain pours; the next night lashes. I worry and fret, knowing a rainy spring means a greater chance of a failed nest. Then, on March 25, the third morning of the birds’ return, the sun breaks through, and for the first time the bushes and briers surrounding the marsh appear more green than not. While most of the trees’ buds still aren’t open, they are poised, ready to burst. The resident great blue heron flies by in pelican profile, and the nesting Canada geese honk down for a hard landing. Having survived the last two days, the ospreys look proud, if rumpled, their heads up; she on the nest, he on the crossbar below. It’s the warmest, least windy day yet, the real first day of spring, and the birds seem to be enjoying themselves. The morning is spent patiently resting, scratching feathers with bill and talon, soaking in the sun. They don’t work as much as you might expect, though occasionally she pleads with him and he flies off to scavenge a stick or two. I’ve been told that words like hector and plead are examples of anthropomorphizing, but watch the nest for a morning and it’s clear what is happening: she communicates a need to him, insistently—I want this—while he rests, ignoring her as long as he can. There is something of Dagwood Bumstead in the male, and he only reluctantly gives in to her commands, preferring to indulge in the osprey equivalent of hanging out on the couch. After a while he does lift up, taking a swing around the marsh, coming back with what looks like the shining tape of an unspooled cassette. She takes it for more tamping, but it is clearly not what she had in mind, and she lets him know. So he is off again, wings backlit, banking, gliding, as if still enjoying the sun. It isn’t hard work. Sticks are easy prey, after all, much easier than fish, and this pair has the luxury of foraging close to home. He drops off another branch and returns to his crossbar.

This seems to me a morning well spent, a morning of Beston’s “essentials,” just what I came back to the Cape to find. “Feel that sun,” the gas station attendant said to me on the way here, and for a while I do just that. As it soaks into my skin, I close my eyes. When I open them again I notice broken glass glimmering along the marsh’s edge. At first I wonder if I’m seeing beer bottles from a teenagers’ party, but, as I get up and walk over, I find that what I thought was glass turns out to be the purple-blue shine of broken mussel shells. It was a party all right, but the partiers were gulls; twenty-five shells or so spread over the rocks and spartina. On my way back to my seat, the sun paints the pines behind me olive and gives a landing crow its distinctly oily black shine.

The ospreys let off their cardinal-like warning cry at my stirring, but they aren’t really alarmed. They rest next to each other, companionable. It has been my—and I suspect their—best morning yet. The three of us are all large animals, not frenetic like hummingbirds or mice, and, resting on top of the food chain, we can afford to lie back occasionally and let the sun stun us. But if I feel lazy, it’s laziness tinged with excitement. My uneasiness and boredom of a week ago have vanished. Though I sometimes self-mockingly succumb to the stereotype of the nature lover as dull dodderer, and of bird-watching as boring, I know this is preposterously wrongheaded. What could be more exciting than the essential drama of these birds? What better than their return with the sun after all the cold winter months?

In 1960, 10 to 20 pairs of ospreys nested in Massachusetts. In 1996 there were over 300 pairs. At last count we were up to 350, and observation tells me the numbers are still increasing, at least locally. It makes sense. After fledging in New England in late summer, the young birds migrate to South or Central America, where they will spend the next two years. Then the two-year-old ospreys will return to their natal nesting grounds to attempt to breed. With between one and two birds fledging each year from our local nests, and around 40 percent of those surviving migration, we can expect more and more ospreys back in our neighborhood over the coming years, the numbers held in check only by the availability of nest sites and food supply. At the same time established pairs will keep breeding, and since ospreys live long lives, sometimes up to twenty to twenty-five years (though more often into their teens), most pairs will produce many young. This all adds up to a healthy return.

Meanwhile, with DDT long since banned on the Suffolk County marshes, the place where the first legal war was waged, the ospreys are back. Dennis Puleston writes, “In 1992, a post-1948 record total of 226 nests on Long Island, including over 60 on Gardiners Island, fledged another record of 260 chicks.” Though DDE remained in their systems, it turned out that a minuscule difference in the amount of the chemical made a world of difference for the birds. As the organochlorides disappeared, the percentage of the chemicals in the ospreys’ systems lessened and the birds gradually returned, again breeding at the rate they had before the pesticides were introduced.

Nothing excites like a comeback. In sports, you may hope the home team wins in a blowout, but it isn’t nearly as exciting or satisfying as an improbable escape from disaster. In love, what’s better than the sparking of near-dead flames? In religion, we need look no further than Jesus emerging from the cave. Mythologically, the hero goes into the underworld and comes back alive, reborn. This has been the role the osprey has been fated to play: a modern-day, fish-eating phoenix staging a feathery revival. Drive down eastern Long Island, where DDT was once repeatedly sprayed, and you’ll find a road dotted with nests, ospreys flying overhead with stripers in their talons. On Cape Cod even the most somnolent tourist occasionally wakes from his summerlong trance to notice the birds with the six-foot wingspans and ask: “What are those, some kind of eagle?” Ospreys have once again become the symbol of the New England coast, and many of us feel protective of our neighborhood pairs. They are, as they have long been, an emblem bird. And a status bird, too. Celebrities on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard have platforms erected on their properties (so that we now have James Taylor’s osprey or Carly’s), and newspapers continually feature the good news of their return.

If there is a feel-good element to this story, it’s at least partly deserved. For once we did something right, we can say to ourselves: for once we didn’t screw up. But as miraculous as it is to have the birds back, it isn’t hard to imagine the opposite, the route we’ve most often taken when interacting with other species or peoples. For all the joy of the ospreys’ return, we need to understand just how tragic the alternative would have been.

Or maybe, in this case, we don’t. Maybe, just this once, it isn’t the dark side we need to keep reminding ourselves of. Maybe most of us remind ourselves of that enough. While the litany for pessimism is familiar—thinning ozone, depleted resources, acid rain, extinction, the intractable crush of population—here, in this case, we’ve given ourselves a reason to feel hopeful. Here is an example of a group of human beings who fought the will of an industry that stood to make millions and millions of dollars, and of human courts and government who handed down verdicts on the side of a bird. While I’m a cynic by nature, maybe once in a while we need to focus on our victories, not our losses. By looking toward the ospreys we can see a little light. We can see what can occur if we are able to exercise restraint. Can see something truly hopeful in the miracle of what we managed not to do.

Maybe we should all allow ourselves hope for at least one season each year; it seems to do some good, like the occasional shot of tequila. I try to hold myself in check, feigning sobriety, but it’s no use. I’m drunk with the season. Now, as March becomes April, the world stages its full green resurrection. The rush is no longer slow, nature no longer opening in orderly fashion, single file, one thing at a time, but bursting in intoxicated glory: tadpoles, riotous birdsong, herring shooting up the silver of the tidal creeks. Our third spring here puts the lie to Heidi Schadt’s rule: buds unclench and explode with meaty green and streaked red. One morning I head down to the beach as the sun rises over Brewster and stains the sky salmon, bathing the world below in a yellow light as I jump from one barnacled rock to the next. A gull flies by with a starfish in its mouth; then a crow comes close, its wings beating out a husky whisper. The harbor porpoise, chewed down to its black and red ribs, eyes and blowhole poked out, still smiles its perfect, small-toothed smile. Then, at the kettle pond up past the bluff, I hear a joyous though eerie symphony. For a brief second I think I’m listening to an insect’s song, a cricket’s maybe, but I quickly recognize the singers for who they are—the spring peepers. They are late, almost two weeks behind last year, but they make up for their tardiness with gusto. The tiny frogs sing to one another, to the world, as if trying to communicate what spring means at the top of their lungs. When I walk the path inland the song rings through the depression between the sloping sand hills.

Over the next week Sesuit Neck fills with ospreys. The birds claim the lopsided nest at Chapin, the midmarsh platform at Simpkins Neck, even the parking lot pole directly across the harbor. The neighborhood echoes with the upward whittling of their high-pitched cries—kew, kew, kew—cries I can now hear from my bedroom when I wake in the morning. The harbor pair seem dawdlers, not nearly as efficient or industrious as the Quivett birds, but it’s still nice to have them back, flying near and sometimes directly over our house. Every morning I head to Quivett, nodding when I pass my father’s gravestone, watching as the birds carry on with the essentials: nesting, feeding, and mating.

There’s a thaw in the air, a certain smell of the land unlocking and the first cut grass, a smell that sends me back to childhood, that almost gets me reaching for my baseball glove under the mattress, where it’s been breaking in. Out back, grackles posture with the puffed-up chests of bullies, and a tufted titmouse pecks at the food below the feeder. A kind of healthy mania is taking hold of the natural world, and I’m part of it, up at dawn and walking down to the bluff, hoping to see if the swallows have joined in the season’s revival. They haven’t, but no matter. As spring’s excess overwhelms the simplicity of winter, life’s usual doubts are overturned. I know those doubts will return soon, but for the moment I enjoy the mindless surge of confidence, the sense of renewal. Right now, watching the ospreys, at this moment, both the world and I are back in place.