Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition

Where is home? And how do we get there?

These are the questions, and sometimes—with luck—the answers, we encounter in the pages of the best nature writing. It is there, right up front, in the pages of Walden and in the writings of Wendell Berry, the story of trying to find one’s place on earth. “The first flush of rootedness is unrepeatable,” wrote the Cape Cod nature writer Robert Finch. That flush filled me while I wrote Return of the Osprey, a sense of excitement about the fact that I, like the ospreys I was watching, might be able to nest on the Cape.

But it wasn’t that simple. Along with my excitement came a sense of precariousness, the knowledge that nesting can be risky business. And so, while an attempt to root down is at the center of the pages I was writing, Return of the Osprey is an inherently unsettled book. Certainly, its author, no matter how he might have striven to be otherwise, was an unsettled man.

While Cape Cod was my first nature, my first love, I had spent most of my twenties and thirties away from the peninsula. During that time, I worked at various jobs—carpentry, bookstore clerking, a stint at a homeless shelter—while banging my head against two novels that ultimately went unpublished. At twenty-nine I moved back to my hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, where I soon learned I had testicular cancer. During the week of my thirtieth birthday, I underwent an operation that would neatly divide my life into a before and an after.

The one saving grace of that year was my acceptance into a graduate writing program in Boulder, Colorado, where I would find myself the next fall. While out West, I came back to life, and the thrill of being alive in the mountains was reflected in my writing. My first published book, written in Colorado, was about my love of Cape Cod. My second, written once my wife, Nina, and I, newly married, had returned to the Cape, was about my love of Colorado. This pattern, of writing about a place I had recently left, would continue. Around that time, I wrote an essay, “A Polygamist of Place,” the title reflecting my geographic uncertainty. Unlike my heroes Thoreau and Berry, I could not seem to commit to one place.

The osprey year was different. I was in my late thirties by then, and Nina and I had been back on Cape Cod for two years. We had begun to think, and hope, we would stay for good. In the winter of 1999, Antonia Fusco, an editor from Algonquin books, called me up and told me she might be interested in working on a book with me.

“You write beautifully about birds,” she said. “You should do a book about them.”

I balked. My first two books had been about many things, including my cancer and my father’s, which in his case proved lethal, but because those books had trees and squirrels in them, they had been categorized as “nature” books. I, in turn, had become a creature known as a nature writer. I didn’t like the label and rebelled against it in an essay called “Sick of Nature.” (Ironically, it was that essay that Antonia had read before she called to ask me to write a nature book.)

I figured that if I were to write another book about birds my fate would be sealed: I would be a nature writer forevermore. There were lots of other nonnature books I wanted to write, and the last thing I wanted to do was write a quaint, earnest book celebrating the tufted titmouse or semipalmated plover. Then I remembered ospreys.

I had never seen those magnificent raptors on Cape Cod when I was young. But suddenly, after our return to the Cape from Colorado, they were everywhere, including a pair nesting at the end of the jetty near our house. These birds were big and athletic and beautiful. I had not seen them before because New England ospreys had been decimated by the pesticide DDT, and it wasn’t until the banning of that chemical that ospreys rebounded. This excited my symbol-making imagination: hadn’t I, like the birds, survived sickness, endured chemicals and radiation, and come back to health? The more I thought about it the more excited I got.

I called Antonia, told her my idea, and sent her a short proposal describing how I would write the book. Then she did something miraculous. She not only agreed to publish the book but provided me with something I had never had before: an advance. The money wasn’t much, but it allowed me to quit my job and focus all my time and energy on ospreys.

That March I found myself out on the marsh below the cemetery where my father was buried, staring through my newly purchased telescope at an osprey-nesting platform and waiting for the birds to return. I soon realized how lucky I was in my choice of subject. As anyone who has spent any time watching ospreys knows, they are not just gifted athletes but also gregarious and outgoing, perfect for a beginning bird watcher.

One of the deep pleasures of the year was being drawn out of my own life and into theirs. I tried my best to live out my mentor Alan Poole’s injunction to “live on osprey time.” There were dull moments as I spent hours at the nests, but there were also electric moments when I felt transported. Years later, the writer John Hay, a subject of a subsequent book I wrote, remarked to me, “Strange to have come through the whole century and find that the most interesting thing is the birds. Or maybe it’s just that the human mind is more interesting when focusing on something other than itself.”

Thanks to my time with ospreys, I knew what he meant: the way that by looking outward we expand ourselves, the way that we become more by leaving ourselves behind.

Following a talk I gave after Return of the Osprey came out, an astute reader suggested that the book was as much about my obsession with writing as it was about my obsession with ospreys. She had a point. During the six months I watched the nests, I was able to give myself up fully not just to the birds but to my work. I discovered that, when it comes to making a book, obsession comes in handy. If the sheer excitement of the year was partly about watching the birds, it was also about making something from what I was watching.

Of course, I couldn’t really begin writing my osprey story until the birds left in early fall to fly south and the cycle of the nesting season was complete. This meant there was always a sense of holding back during the spring and summer, of wanting to dive in and start writing, while at the same time knowing that to tell the story well, I had to wait. During those months I filled multiple journals with notes and drawings about the birds, gradually building up a storehouse of detail.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was creating a working method that I would employ in future books, letting the accretion of detail build before fully and finally setting pen to page. Through the early part of the year, I could feel the book pressing but wouldn’t let myself begin. By the time the birds left in September, I was ready to explode.

Which is what I did in October. As the world reddened, the temperature dropped, and the Cape winds picked up, I slammed away at the book. I began getting up earlier and earlier, excited by what the poet Donald Hall called the Christmas morning expectation of what the day would bring, working in my ratty T-shirt and old sweats, spending many hours on the book. I completed a draft in less than a month and, partly sure it must be a work of genius and partly certain it was awful, sent it off to my editor. Then I found myself once again waiting, though this time without ospreys for company.

My editor was likely overwhelmed. She had asked for a book about birds, and she had gotten one that, while it had plenty of birds in it, was also about cancer and rejuvenation and writing and schizophrenia and death. To her great credit she sifted through this thing, pruned it, and suggested I let in more air. She was right of course. The manuscript I sent her was too personal, too raw, too crazy. But while I am deeply grateful for the edits I received, I think I was also a little right. I believed that if I were to write a book only about osprey facts and osprey observations, it would be only read by a few ornithological or scientific-minded folks and put the rest of humanity to sleep.

That correspondence was the beginning of a kind of tension in my published work that has continued to this day. While I believe in looking outward, in the spirit of John Hay, I also believe in inward tunnelling, the work of trying to figure out the particular self we were dealt and how best that self can be in this world. I also believe in sloppiness, in different types of writing spilling over genre walls. This prejudice has grown out of what gives me pleasure as a reader. The kind of writing I like is never clearly one thing, and most of the time I love when memoir and more personal writing muscle into nature writing.

As it turned out, Nina and I would not settle on Cape Cod, and, in another irony, Return of the Osprey would play a role in our being dislodged from the place we imagined might be home. A writer who taught at a college in Wilmington, North Carolina, read the book and liked it. Her creative writing department was looking to hire a nonfiction writer, and she reached out to me. When I was offered the job, we were saddened about the prospect of leaving the Cape, but by then Nina was pregnant, and health insurance and a regular salary seemed like a good idea. So, for the last two decades I have taught in North Carolina, and Wilmington is the place my daughter calls home. Which means that my writing about how much I loved the Cape also led to our leaving it.

I still get back to Cape Cod whenever I can, and when I do I spend time down on the marsh watching a new generation of ospreys. Looking back, I believe my osprey year was pivotal. It changed me, as a man and a writer. It really felt that by discovering ospreys I had picked out an invisible thread that connected many disparate parts of my life and that ospreys were, in John Muir’s words, “hitched to everything.” I am typing this today, for the anniversary edition, over a quarter century after my first season of watching the birds. Fall is coming, which means the ospreys will be heading south soon. I still remember the sheer excitement of witnessing my first osprey dive and watching the young birds make their initial awkward attempts at flight. I hope that excitement is contagious and that you too can experience the thrill of following ospreys.