Fishing

Ospreys are the only raptors that dive fully into the water to catch their prey. Try to imagine the physical sensation. To skim across the sky, above the ocean, peering down with eyes that can see into the shallows from forty, sixty, even a hundred feet up. To catch a glint or the shadow of a movement and know it to be a fish, the one thing that keeps you alive. To hover, adjust, beating your wings so that you stay in place, like a giant kingfisher or hummingbird. Then to dive, to commit, to tuck with folded wings and plunge downward at over forty miles an hour while still keeping your eyes on the prey, calculating its size and movement. To adjust in midair, redirecting, considering even the refraction of the fish’s image in the water, before pulling in your wings and diving again. And then, at the last second before hitting the water, to throw your wings back and your talons forward, striking feet first. To plunge in, splash, immerse, and make contact at the same time, trapping, piercing, clutching a slippery, scaled, cold-blooded creature.

Now imagine what comes next. Securing the fish, aided by the sharp, horny scales on the pads beneath your toes. For a moment being out of your element and in your prey’s, feeling wet, awkward, ungainly. Then lifting off from the water with a great thrust of exertion, soaked and heavy, hefting an animal that may weigh half of what you do. Beating your wings furiously and rising, shaking the water off like a wet dog, already using your reversible outer talon to adjust the squirming fish, turning the fish so that it faces forward to reduce drag as you lift into the air, triumphant (or at the very least successful) shaking off silver flecks of spray.

To even imagine a dive is to get excited. What a bold way to live! To find one thing you do well and then to stake your life on it. It’s as simple and direct as passion. It is passion. Peter Matthiessen wrote: “Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.” If so, the ospreys have got it figured out. It isn’t hard to picture a band of primitive osprey tribesmen watching the birds and learning from them. One thing they might have learned, and one thing that appeals to me, is how the osprey’s dive weds calculated patience to wild aggression. He who hesitates is smart, at least if when he finally commits he commits fully. For the ospreys, the hesitation is as important as the dive. The birds have a remarkable success rate, some catching well over 50 percent of what they dive for (like humans, athleticism varies; a few particularly adept birds catch close to 90), and this is due in good part to the predive patience, the search for the right target. This careful adjustment will often carry over into the dive itself. After the bird has tucked its wings and dropped down thirty feet, it may pause and readjust, and it may repeat this a time or two again, as if descending imaginary stairs. But while the predive ritual demands control and calculation, the plunge itself is about the opposite of control. It is a moment of full commitment, of abandon, and, finally, of immersion.

But now a confession. So far I have witnessed dives only in my imagination. Despite having spent the past two months roaming the marsh and the last two years walking the beach, I’ve never seen an osprey dive. This is a fairly major failing for a budding ospreyologist. By all accounts the dive—the search, hover, tuck, and foot-first plunge—is the pinnacle of osprey artistry. It’s also how the birds survive. An osprey is built for fishing, and over the last fifteen million years or so has been perfectly honed by evolution to get its food solely by diving from the sky. While most raptors hunt a variety of prey, and in a variety of ways, ospreys eat fish almost exclusively. Despite the nearly constant vocalizations of the Quivett female to her mate, one question she never asks is, “What’s for dinner?”

An osprey nest is ideal for the beginning bird-watcher. It’s big and conspicuous, and the birds, who are also big, go about their behavior in a fairly obvious, even-paced manner, as if winking and making sure you get it. With a pair of binoculars and a little patience you can be a perfectly successful voyeur, watching them mate, nest, feed, preen, sleep. But seeing a dive is another matter. The foraging range of an osprey can extend as far as fifteen miles from the nest, depending on the weather and what’s running, and ospreys fish in the ocean, ponds, lakes, and tidal inlets. I’ve spent a good part of May kayaking up the creeks, along with the herring, hoping to put myself in the right place to watch a dive, and jumping on my bike and desperately chasing the male as he flaps inland toward the Brewster ponds.

Despite my failures, and a creeping sense of inadequacy, something about the activity itself excites me. For the first time in my life I’m taking what I know about nature—about wind, water, weather, and animals—and trying to put this knowledge to use to achieve something. Though what I’m mainly finding out is that I don’t know much, there are times when I feel perfectly content, consumed with the process of hunting for the hunt, fishing for fishing. There’s a primitive satisfaction in reducing life to one goal, and I sometimes remember Alan Poole’s speculations about a Neandertal or Cro-Magnon osprey people. Think of the raw simplicity of a hunter’s life. Get food, as a commandment, is thrillingly reductive. If there is anxiety about the task, at least it’s specific anxiety. To track, to hunt, means to focus on one thing, the prey; but to focus well, the whole world must be taken into account. My own commandment over the last weeks has been only a little more complex than primitive man’s. Mine is: See bird dive.

Alan Poole relates a missionary’s story of how a Bolivian Indian “slipped a warm bone” from an osprey under the skin of his arm, “apparently in hopes of absorbing hawklike skills at hunting.” That seems a little drastic, but it might be worth slipping a bone under my forearm, at least if it instills an enlivened sense of purpose. As it is, I’m not above sniffing the air or playing my hunches. One thing I hope for is that I’ll soon have osprey dreams. I fully expect to, not out of any mystical alliance, but because osprey is what I do all day. It’s been my experience that dreams steal from life, particularly life’s more exciting parts. When I played Ultimate Frisbee in college, I’d sometimes spend the better part of the night skying or diving after discs. In The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen writes about his young son’s artwork: “Ecstasy is identity with all existence, and ecstasy showed in his bright paintings; like the Aurignacion hunter who became the deer he drew on the cave wall, there was no ‘self’ to separate him from the bird or flower.” This sentence may also be less mystical than it sounds, more practical and obvious. To be good hunters we must look at what we’re aiming at, seeing and becoming what we stalk.

While I hunt the world opens. It’s impossible to jam all of May into my journal, the month refusing to be organized. Too much is happening too fast. A yellow-shafted flicker rattles its jungle call off the top of a telephone pole, a red-winged blackbird slides down a cattail, and two red-tailed hawks breach the clouds, spiraling and whistling upward in a graceful love dance. Hundreds of feet above the Quivett marsh, they circle and circle, letting off their unearthly cries as they disappear upward beyond the limits of human vision. The other day a pudgy bobwhite flew behind the house, and both types of orioles, northern and orchard, are back, splashing the air with bold colors: tangerine and black, black and blood-red. A chickadee is building its nest under our bedroom windowsill, emitting a loud clicking, as if someone were perpetually knocking on our door. In the mornings the world explodes with birdsong and you wake to a noise so clamorous you wonder how you ever slept.

One day in early May, on the way to the beach, I startle a whole woodwind section of mourning doves, and they break from the phone line with a hushed sound like the rapid opening and closing of an umbrella. In the woods I see more grackles posture, puffing up their chests in a mating ritual, iridescent colors in their black feathers like flying oil slicks. The spring seesaw notes of chickadees, the upward twittering of cardinals, the peals of thrushes. The songs sound pretty, but, armed with my new knowledge, I know them to be laced with testosterone, with claims of property and braggadocio about gonad size. This is the less-than-proper truth behind the dainty doily melodies. Songs of power and sex. With all this boasting about sexuality and territory, it’s almost too loud to think, which may be the whole point.

And not just songs but dances, often elaborate. Among raptors these spring displays include chasing, plummeting, hovering, butterflying, volplaning, and soaring. The osprey’s fish dance is impressive, but perhaps the most spectacular of rituals, bordering on pure ostentation, is that of the bald eagle. Pairs of eagles can be seen flying together, one upside down, linking talons in midair, looking like mirror images of each other, one above and one below. And this is just the beginning of their hotdogging. Next they begin to roll over and over, like a sideways Ferris wheel, whipping each other around in a technique called whirling. Ornithologists Leslie Brown and Dean Amadon elaborate: “With wings at full stretch, tautly connected by the outstretched legs, the great birds come tumbling down in a series of cartwheels, over and over one another, often for several hundred feet, finally separating close to the ground and water and flying upwards again.”

Meanwhile, at the marsh, green shoots sprout next to last year’s brown phragmites, like seven-foot-tall tulip petals (for the moment I forgive the plant its invasive nature). It’s a different marsh than the one I walked around just two weeks ago, almost lime green in places, nearing the peak of fruition, of what John Hay calls “prodigality.” Even the tardy oaks now join the budding, and in the mornings I listen to a massive soughing through new leaves. But while the wind blows, and blows hard at times, it doesn’t phase the birds or me. Warm and pleasant, it has lost its bite. At dawn on May 6 at Quivett, as this new wind laves the land, I look through the haze toward the north, toward the ocean, and see two deer, almost chestnut red in the morning light, grazing their way across the spartina, slowly picking through a line of dew.

This is the time of year when life fills every void; if I put my tea mug on the ground for half a minute it crawls with insects. Sometimes it seems that watching the ospreys is just an excuse to be out in this rushing world, an excuse to watch the different shapes that buds take—some delicate, some hooflike, some bloody purple things like animals just being born. At home the honeysuckle sweetens and tenderizes the air, and while our post oak is the one tree that stubbornly refuses to fully bloom, its tentative buds finally dribble down. Nina and I spend more and more time outside, watching the green procession. At night we take our drinks and dinner out on the deck and listen to the waves lap, the puttering of lobster boats.

While I haven’t seen an osprey dive yet, it seems I’ve watched every other avian fisherman go about its work over the past month. From Bridge Street I witnessed the black silhouette of a heron spearing its own reflection at sunset, ripples wavering in the molten red water as it emerged with something silvery and small. And I’ve seen a kingfisher holding perfectly still in the air, though still only in the sense a hummingbird is, hovering, wings beating faster than sight, before plunging. At the beach near our house, terns dive like thrown darts, living check marks jabbing into the water.

But the birds I most want to watch dive keep teasing me. I’ve seen many close calls but no successful dives, and there are moments when my search seems a bit frantic. I spend a lot of time wandering Wing Island and Paine’s Creek, where the herring have begun to return, wriggling back to the source. I know that to the ospreys the herring present an irresistible feast. And ospreys do come, though at first I have trouble telling them apart from gulls, at least from any height or distance.

On Alan Poole’s urging I pick up Hawks in Flight, by Pete Dunne, David Sibley, and Clay Sutton. This book, as I understand it, is the state-of-the-art guide to raptor identification. “An Osprey seems unlikely ever to be confused with another bird, but it is,” the authors write, adding that ospreys “can plausibly be confused only with a Bald Eagle or a large gull.” I will testify as to the plausibility of this confusion. While we don’t have many bald eagles, gulls crowd our neighborhood. If you think of the ends of the wings as hands, and the end feathers as fingers, an osprey’s wing’s distinctive identifying trait is that, unlike other raptors, it bends at the carpus, or wrist, giving the hawk-watcher—even the beginning hawk-watcher—something to look for, an easy “search image.” This crook, along with the distinctive black and white markings, small head, and somewhat labored “arthritic” wing beat, do paint a fairly unmistakable picture, and as the month of May goes on, I get better and better at spotting ospreys, even from a good distance. But during those first weeks I make the mistakes of the beginner, running across marshes and scribbling down field notes while staring up at a herring gull. The problem, at first, is that gulls also have a crook in their wings, though, it seems to me, their crook forms more of a V, closer to the “elbow” than the wrist. Gulls, particularly great black-backed gulls, are also a lot bigger than I remember, and often are marked in near-osprey patterns of black and white. There are clear differences, however. As the hawk boys put it: “The wing beat of the larger species of gulls is methodical, languid, and shallow, with overtones of effortlessness or unmindfulness. The wing beat of an Osprey is stiff and labored and seems the product of concentrated effort. On the average, gulls flap a good deal more than do Ospreys.”

At night I continue to bone up on osprey facts. I learn that ospreys have been clocked flying between twenty and eighty miles per hour, at times breaking forty when they dive. Though they can’t match the speed of the fastest raptors—peregrine falcons, for instance, are believed to exceed two hundred miles per hour in a stoop—their angled wing design, along with their long and numerous wing feathers, have been particularly adapted for the jolt of diving into the water and the exertion of lifting out. While accipiters (a group that includes goshawks, sharp-shinned hawks, and Cooper’s hawks) prey on and carry birds significantly smaller than they are, ospreys have been known to lift fish matching their own weight. “The wings of an osprey are remarkable,” writes Floyd Scholz in Birds of Prey. “The long, high-arching design allows the osprey to carry much heavier weight loads in relation to body size than any other bird of prey.” The feathers are also especially adapted for fishing, the plumage dense and oily, keeping them dry during their multiple daily immersions.

The capture of a living fish would be impossible without powerful, specialized wings, but the bird’s toes and talons do the real dirty work. This is fairly standard procedure in the raptor world. In Eagles, Hawks and Falcons of the World, a beautiful compilation of all things raptor (which I’ve taken to simply calling “the hawk book”) Brown and Amadon write of raptors, “The actual killing of prey is achieved by the feet.” An osprey’s feet, like a peregrine’s, look grossly oversized, but they are perfectly task-efficient. The toes are scaly, the bottoms of the toes studded with projections called spicules. The spicules barb down into the fish, and the grip is sure and spiky. Moreover, an osprey’s legs are exceedingly long, so that they can stretch down into the water with what Pete Dunne calls a “boardinghouse reach.” The long legs also act as shock absorbers, muting the impact upon hitting the water.

While I’ve yet to see what I most want to see this spring, these early weeks of May offer other unexpected pleasures. I try to stay alert to the world beyond my goal. Though I focus my energies on one species of bird, I unintentionally learn about many others. For instance, I’d always looked at gulls the way I look at robins, their commonness rendering them invisible. But now I discover that gulls are better fliers, and more generally interesting, than I ever gave them credit for. A few times I’ve watched a pause and a dive, impressed by the aerial acrobatics, before realizing that it was “just a gull.” This “just a” keeps cropping up, like the day I excitedly tried to identify a mysterious seesaw note before discovering that it was “just” the spring song of the chickadee. Squirrels, grackles, sparrows, and Canada geese also suffer from this justness, or injustness, all carrying on with their own lives, oblivious that they have been assigned a lesser position on the human scale of interest. Somehow they manage to continue nesting and mating without letting what we think bother them too much.

Other times my search for the osprey’s dive leads me to sights entirely new. One afternoon during the first week of May, Fred Dunford, the archaeologist at the natural history museum, mentions that while driving on the bridge over the Herring River in Harwich, he saw an osprey fishing. The next morning I’m on my bike, map crumpled between my right hand and the handlebar, scouting around the dirt paths that circle Swan Lake and follow the sinuous river. The air hangs thick, gray and cloud-scumbled, and reflections of branches undulate in the dark water. The swans are out, but last year’s osprey nests remain unoccupied. This is the day I see the kingfisher skim over the water with its rattling call, then plunge under and come up with a fish. The sight just presents itself to me, unbidden. I decide that it will take a similar act of grace for me to see that singular graceful act, the osprey’s dive, and that perhaps I’m trying too hard. But pedaling home along the path, I startle a bunch of grayish birds that I first assume are gulls. They don’t behave like gulls, however, flying off in a loose flock before landing in another tree. I get off my bike and try to creep closer, and when they fly off again they look like slivers of blue against the gray sky. This time I walk more quietly toward them, keeping my distance. I’ve seen a lot this spring, which should have made me calmer, but I still tend to run impatiently toward what I see. I don’t sit still or hang back, lacking a predator’s patience. Now I manage to get close without scaring them, eight birds scattered through a tall red pine, all sitting fairly close to each other. My field guide tells me they are black-crowned night herons, roosting and resting up for a big night of fishing. As I pedal home I remind myself to be patient. I haven’t seen a dive yet, it’s true, but each time I come out I’m more filled with the expectation of it.

A couple of days later, on May 10, I kayak all the way up Quivett Creek to the osprey nest. One thing I’ve learned this spring is that kayaking is the right way to enter the marsh. Low and quiet. Not the usual crunching over stalks and crabs that sound like eggshells breaking, warning every animal within two miles, or, the alternative, sloshing through knee-deep muck. Though I’m hesitant to use the word flow, attended as it is by New Age chiming, here I can’t resist. To kayak is to be invited, pulled, tugged into another world, a world where I’m a stranger, though a stranger who feels curiously at home. At Quivett the tide is with me and the current tugs me in deeper, into narrower winding paths that curve and convolute, my paddle barely lapping the water while the spartina rustles. It seems important that I come at this place from below, deferentially, though it’s taken me many years to begin to enter the marsh in this way. As I turn a corner I see a yellowlegs walk along a shallow shelf of mud, pecking down at minnows that come in with the tide.

Despite being outside for much of this spring, I know I’m just beginning to enter the marsh. So much goes on that I don’t see. This food-rich inlet teems with mussels, moon jellyfish, barnacles, scallops, mud snails, skeleton shrimp, turtles, and, of course, fish and fry of all varieties. Above me minuscule spiral shells dot the cordgrass and gulls colic the sea hay with their nests and owl-faced harriers hunt and coyotes roam and howl at night. Even the walls of mud are alive: black seaweed hangs from the ledges like the wet wings of a bat, fluttering in the wind. As I paddle I have the sense that if I’m trying to get away from it all, I’ve come to exactly the wrong place.

I make the journey along with the herring, hundreds of them, though still not at full surge, bluish squiggling masses pushing toward their end. Stripers pulse by, too. Just as the tide pulls all of us in, Quivett pulls me out of self. That’s saying something, for I’m not easily pulled, clinging as I do to the first person. But here it seems almost effortless, almost graceful, and there are moments—and on the best days more than moments—when nature apprehends me. At times I don’t want to give in to this place, I really don’t, but it doesn’t leave me any choice. This spring has been my coming-out party. Sometimes I feel as if I can string together not just moments and hours but whole days, immersing myself and letting this feeling spread throughout my life. When the sea grass hisses and I turn a corner deeper into the marsh, I can’t help but suspect I’m rounding a corner in myself as well.

Fortunately, my nose keeps my brain from reaching too high. The marsh provides this consistent irony: from the town’s most lively, food-filled place, the smell of fresh death emanates. Here there’s always plenty of murder and intrigue: fish killing fish, birds killing fish, birds killing other birds. But there’s life alongside death. I watch a muskrat scramble up into its hole, knowing that ospreys have occasionally taken them as prey during their rare—and possibly accidental—breaks from fish. Horseshoe crabs mate everywhere, and light plays and pulsates off the muck banks. Nature repeats herself shamelessly, and the walls of revealed muck look almost exactly like the desert canyon walls of Utah, even down to miniature cliff dwellings, though here wetness, not aridity, is the theme. While the tide comes in, water still trickles out down tiny waterfalls, playing a clear, hollow-sounding song.

As I near the osprey nest I pick up the bird equivalent of a police escort, territorial Canada geese paddling in front of the kayak and honking. This alerts the ospreys, who swoop off the nest, flying down low, their six-foot wingspans looking even wider from up close. They are such beautiful birds, black and white tinted by the sun’s silver, that for a moment I wonder how I could ever mistake them for gulls. The creek winds right by the nest, giving me the best view yet of the Quivett pair. The nest itself rises mountainous from down here; with no young to incubate, piling up massive amounts of stuff has been the Quivett pair’s principal activity. I paddle beyond the nest, to Sea Street, once a working road that spanned the marsh but now a decaying ruin, phragmites breaking through the concrete. The creek runs right up to the old rusted sign that divides the towns of Dennis and Brewster.

These marshes wind through our towns like a mucky subconscious, and I love the fact that it’s hard for people to build on them. Here there’s no foundation; you can never rest on certainties for long. On the marsh it’s easier to accept the fact that there are no set answers, that everything is variable, each case particular. The month of May also helps make uncertainties easier to accept, making it easier to form a new philosophy almost hourly, as fits each particular case—each day, each moment. I pull the boat up onto the muck below Sea Street, waiting to turn back with the tide. In this way I retain the sense of flow while cheating myself out of a workout. Feeling as lazy as the afternoon, I glide back out. On the way I drift up to the shore, sending black-bellied plovers and ruddy turnstones running off over the grass. I paddle easily back to Crowe’s pasture, where the creek flows into open water. The wind picks up slightly on the bay, but the water remains calm and flat. I am lying back in the kayak, looking up at pale blue-white cloud formations and thinking of nothing except the burritos we’re having for dinner, when an osprey suddenly materializes right above me. It’s no gull, I can tell right away—no “just a.” It’s a single large osprey, and it is hunting. I don’t sit up but watch from my recumbent position, a fish’s-eye view of the hunt. From this angle the bird looks menacing, as it must be for a herring or a flounder, a death-bringing shadow. But this angel of death ignores me, obviously focused on movement right near my boat. He adjusts his primaries, the thirteen long flight feathers looking like ragged fingers. He hovers, dips, appears ready to make the final plunge, while I hold my breath. At one point he draws his wings into a tuck, but then he pulls up at the last second, flies, treads air again, kicking his feet out. I feel tension in him, and in me: will he plunge or not? He starts to dive again and pulls out, the tension breaking in both of us. For ten minutes I hunt with him—treading, hovering, half-diving—then nothing. Each time he stays still and starts to flap I tense. Each time we are both disappointed. Then, with a few strong flaps, he banks on the wind and starts heading back toward Dennis, toward my house, perhaps toward the harbor nest. Less than a minute later he’s out of sight.

The moment of first seeing the bird was one of raw joy, but already, as I paddle back to Paine’s landing, I know that I’ll label this day as a failure. I almost saw an osprey dive. Almost. How idiotic to judge the experience only by this. While I didn’t see a dive itself, I came closer than I ever have, feeling as if I were part of the hunt. To judge the day a failure is to judge the hunt itself as failure, to understand only the ends of things, not the process. It is, I think, a universal idiocy, but particularly a modern and American one. Despite seeing so many new things, learning so much more, I’ve been falling into a trap, reducing the complexity of nature to a single goal. But these tidy bits of philosophy notwithstanding, I do feel dissatisfied by not having seen what I’ve come to see, unable to check that item off my list. At the same time, I try to remind myself of the amazing patience the osprey showed as he prepared for the dive, and to know that the same patience is required of me.

There are other moments when the monomania of my quest loosens its grip. A few days later I have another close call, again at Quivett. This May evening I decide to circumnavigate the marsh, this time by land, not water. As the sun lowers itself delicately toward the bay, the spartina and phragmites shine. Last year’s reeds might as well be van Gogh sunflowers, while spring green—a bright, almost silly, suburban green—lights up the marsh edge. I hike down the west side of the marsh, jumping over muck canals and covering myself in mud, at one point stumbling into what I’m pretty sure is a muskrat hole. As I walk I keep one eye on the Quivett nest, not quite able to get my mind around the fact that this nest will likely fail. On top of returning early from the Southern Hemisphere, these birds made the very sensible choice of nesting out here, protected in the middle of a marsh, rather than living over at the harbor. And yet the harbor female is down low, nesting hard, contradicting what I saw as her “lazy” nature, while these two continue their frantic housekeeping.

At the beach shadows of cordgrass wave over beige sand. I walk straight into the water in my silly rubber boots, the tide low enough to wade across Quivett’s mouth. The evening shimmers, tides fidgeting against each other. The water is copper-colored, though spotted with deep mahogany patches. On the other side of the creek, near Wing Island, I see a deer, beautiful, tawny, white-tailed, walking quietly, almost pensively.

I veer east, onto Wing Island itself. The hump of land called Wing is an island only in the sense that water fills the salt marshes surrounding it at high tide. Fred Dunford told me the local Native American tribes would come to Wing Island in summer, after wintering inland in the woods. Though they lived deeply in their place, they had two distinct seasonal homes, following food and weather to their advantage. It’s above the raised woodland of the island and the winding tidal creeks of the marsh that I see today’s ospreys. Three of them, interweaving like skiers cutting tracks in fresh snow, their underwings lit up reddish in the low light. They form a hunting party, though at first I think it’s too late to fish. But then I see one of the birds dive and pull up, right near me, and later one flaps wildly, screeching, while the other two fly over to see what the commotion is about. I watch several dives, but the shoulders of the marsh obscure the final results. The sky fills with chipping warning cries, and I think again how easily the birds cover great distances, as I spastically run this way and that over the marsh, trying to keep them all in sight through my binoculars. I fail, of course, and pay for it. Soon one of the three is flying by, straightening out a herring, while the other two follow, screeching and complaining. Now I’ve seen everything—the preparation, the dive, the caught fish—everything except the plunge itself.

Tonight, however, as the sun reddens the creek and the ospreys fly off, I don’t feel depressed. The sunset helps me focus on the successes of the spring. For instance, I can now tell an osprey from a gull, even from a half mile away, and with more and more frequency I’m seeing them fish. It’s only a matter of time, I tell myself, until I see a dive.

At night after my hunting ends, I jump back into my books, trying to learn more about the birds, particularly something that might aid in the next day’s hunt. All of the air treading, hovering, and half-diving I’ve been watching is, according to Stephen Carpenteri’s Osprey: The Fish Hawk, “part of the seek-find-commit sequence that makes a successful hunt.” It doesn’t escape me that this is the same sequence I’m trying to emulate. “Careful observation and imitation of animal habits enhance the hunter’s chance of success,” I read of Neandertals in Carelton Coon’s The Story of Mun.

The more I read, the more I love the romance of the old bird books, the mythic style and anecdotal spirit of the old-time naturalists. Not as purely scientific as our present observers, they say things that sometimes sound a little silly to the modern ear. But even when they were wrong, they were wrong on their own terms. They saw what they saw with their own eyes. They were freer to speculate, to generalize and air it out, and what they lacked in accuracy they made up for in fun. They were also less stingy with poetry—the way, for instance, Arthur Cleveland Bent calls fish “the finny prey” and describes the “exuberant spirits of mating season.”

Of course, for sheer outlandishness the old stories can’t match the modern science books. For the first time I can understand why creationists are skeptical of evolution. In my ornithology text I read how birds developed from reptiles: “the scales on the forelimb became elongated, and their posterior margins frayed out, in time evolving into feathers.” In time evolving into feathers! As if this were the natural course of events—for feathers to appear! But if this sort of change is hard to imagine, it could also provide Bible-thumpers with conclusive evidence of the miraculous. If they were to actually embrace theories of evolution, they would find miracles that made loaves and fishes pale by comparison.

My reading always leads me back to the ospreys and their dives. Bent describes the osprey’s plunge as “dashing,” and he isn’t alone. Mervin Roberts’s The Tidemarsh Guide reports: “This is a tremendous bird to be hovering and precision diving like a circus stunt man from a height of 100 feet into a rainbarrel, but that is just what an osprey does, and he does it well.” Roberts repeats the oft-repeated story of the large carp caught with an osprey skeleton still attached to it. This is an example of that most embarrassing of osprey deaths, being taken under by a fish too large to lift, reminding Roberts of “one of the closing scenes in Melville’s ‘Moby-Dick’ where the harpooner Tashtego captures a sky hawk and pulls it down with him as the stricken Pequod sinks.” There are those who consider the carp story apocryphal (Alan Poole, for one, remains skeptical). But even if an osprey has never actually drowned this way, it remains a useful myth. It reminds us that diving has its risks, despite the best calculations and commitment. There is always the chance that once you dive under you’ll never come back up again. That immersion will be permanent.

My old friend Hones comes down for a week of fishing in the middle of the month. He’s here for his birthday week, as he has been the past two springs. The first spring was difficult, the weather bad. Despite our old, comfortable friendship, our styles clashed. I was protective of my morning writing time and didn’t like his intrusions, as good-natured as they were. I felt cramped, unable to sprawl through the day as I was accustomed. At night I tried to keep up with his eating and drinking, but constitutionally I was no match. I’m a sprinter, wolfing down meals, but he’s a marathoner, able to gnaw through dozens of ribs at a slow pace, and, at six-four, he has more storage space for booze and food. By the visit’s end I had bags under my eyes from trying to eat and drink with Hones and still write every morning.

Fortunately, the next year we developed a routine. While I wrote in the morning, he fished. Then we would get together in the afternoon to exercise, then eat and drink. This year, for the first time, we decide to cut back further on the latter two activities. I used to describe Hones as part Gargantuan reveler, part meat-grilling Sasquatch, but that’s changed since his health scare in January. He now checks fat content, keeps notes on what he eats and, subsequently, is nearly back to the beanpole days of his youth, weighing about what I do despite the fact he’s four inches taller. “A type A personality trapped in a type B lifestyle” is how Nina describes me, and the same could be said of Hones, though in a different way. He’s always had an obsessiveness that rivals my own and, until recently, that obsessiveness tended to involve putting things in his mouth: booze, food, cigarettes. But now, like the ospreys, Hones has whittled down his obsessions from the plural to the singular. Rather than a variety of interests he now has one ruling passion, and that passion is fishing.

All spring, while I’ve been tramping through marshes to watch the birds, he’s engaged in a similar activity, taking off after work and on weekends to fish at the Wachusett Reservoir near Worcester or along the Cape Cod Canal. He’s called me frequently to report the sizes of the fish he’s caught or his near misses. Again, like the ospreys, Hones is an opportunist and doesn’t focus on a single species of fish and, just like the birds, herring are one of the first things he catches. He wades into the Charles River near his house and nets them for bait fish. One day he called to tell me what it felt like to hold one in his hand below the water, the unbelievable power, squirming vitality, and force. Though he doesn’t have reversible talons, Hones was built to fish: he has the necessary hardiness and patience. When he catches nothing, he’s philosophical. “That’s fishing,” he says. We all have friends who we say were born too late: Hones excels at concrete things—tying knots and packing and building fires—and would have made a fine pioneer.

As a child I never liked fishing much. Fishing meant long boat trips out on Cape Cod Bay with my father and a couple of other men, all of them smoking Lucky Strikes and wearing hats and drinking. Those were less politically correct and health-conscious times, and the men never thought to bring along water or even soda. They drank cans of beers into which they’d dropped the pop tops, making me wonder how they didn’t ever cut their throats. When they were done they filled the cans with seawater and sank them to the ocean floor (which, in its day, was considered the environmental alternative to just tossing them overboard.) When I was thirsty they offered me a sip of warm Schlitz or Miller. My first reaction to beer was revulsion, something I’ve since gotten over. But for fishing I’ve never developed a taste.

This year on his birthday, smack in the middle of May, Hones gets up at dawn to fish for trout at Scargo, while I check in at the Chapin, Simpkins, and Quivett nests. We both quit early though, so we can get over to Paine’s Creek at the right tide. We’ve decided that health-consciousness can take a vacation for a day and, before loading the kayaks in the car, Hones prepares several racks of ribs, setting them inside his wood smoker, a three-foot-high grill that looks like R2-D2. Nina has agreed to occasionally baste, and the ribs will cook all day long while we paddle, giving us incentive to return. Keeping with the festive spirit, I smuggle along four Red Hook beers in my backpack.

Last year we got the tides wrong when we tried to paddle all the way up Paine’s Creek to Stony Brook and its source. This year we hit it right, flowing with the incoming tide. There’s no better way to quickly immerse yourself in a place than to paddle up its creeks. As we enter, a green heron flies off from the spot on the bank where it had been hunting, its blood-purple neck extended and orange feet hanging down, landing farther up the creek, far but not too far ahead. We see a rose-breasted grosbeak and a towhee, and as we paddle past Wing Island, the split-tailed barn swallows shoot low in front of our boats, hunting insects.

The first part of our trip is lazy, uneventful, until we portage over Route 6A and put in on the other side. There, trying to lower himself into his tipsy boat, Hones manages to act out a classic pratfall, flipping the kayak and spilling himself and all his belongings into the creek. This would be the occasion for curses and teasing, and it is, until we realize that, along with his shoes and baseball cap, his glasses have fallen into the water. I climb down the bank, get hip deep in the dark water, and, somehow, with the first swipe of my hand along the bottom, feel the metal frames. This is a stroke of preposterous good luck, serendipity not skill, finding the frames in a rapidly moving stream. We laugh at our good fortune, sure that the day must be blessed. We also rescue his boat shoes and find his favorite striper hat floating a hundred yards downstream.

Once we’ve pulled ourselves together, we paddle under the bridge near the natural history museum, past a platform where osprey pairs have tried to nest in the past. When we cross under the bridge I can taste fresh water mingling with the salt. The banks close in with briers and overhanging poison ivy, giving the journey a feeling at once more cramped and more secluded. A muskrat streams along, heading right toward us until he notices the kayaks, and dives under.

We take a break from paddling so that Hones and I can indulge our individual obsessions: I lie back in the kayak and stare up at the sky, looking for my birds, while he peers down into the creek, or what is now a lightly salted brook. At first he has more luck. He finds a bullhead catfish in the shadows below the bank, and several perch. Most of all he finds herring, in greater and greater numbers, their bluish forms squiggling and darting upstream. As the creek gets shallower and melts to copper, the fish become more and more obvious, and Hones follows them into the shady hollows below branch and bush, where they rest for the great climb ahead. Alan Poole tried to drill it into my head that reproduction is behind everything, and here that lesson comes through clear. As creek becomes brook the tide gives way to the seaward flow of the water. The fish expend a fierce, almost unimaginable effort against the flow, particularly during the last stretch, where they will climb stone and water walls, all in hopes of getting back to where they were born so that they can spawn. If it’s hard to understand how young ospreys return to their birthplaces, this is all but unfathomable. The herring squiggle en masse to the source. As inelegant as the metaphor is, it’s a bit like watching the animal equivalent of sperm.

Unlike Hones, I can take only so much fish drama. I tell him that I’m going to laze awhile and that he should paddle ahead. But before he goes I pull out the beers and hand him his first birthday present, a warm Red Hook. He looks pleased despite the beer’s temperature, and we slurp them down as if they’d just been pulled from an ice chest. When he leaves I imagine someday bringing my own son or my nephew Noah on a kayak trip like this one.

Walls of vegetation, catbrier and poison ivy, hem in the spot where I’ve chosen to stop. Here the creek narrows to six feet, and I let my boat drift in a side pool, pull off my shirt, and stare at the sky. It’s one of those mid-May days when you know winter’s heavy cloak has been lifted off your shoulders, and when you can feel pretty sure it won’t be back for a good while. As with any time when a great weight is taken off, the reaction is one of lift, energy, spring. I kill the beer, and a feeling burbles up in me similar to that of the shadows I see pulsing off the underside of an overhanging oak. I chalk the sensation up to equal parts alcohol and weather.

Two orioles flash overhead, and for a while I watch some gulls, once or twice thinking I see an osprey, and then—right in the midst of a pack of gulls—suddenly sure, I see one. My search image has been refined over the last couple of weeks, and I manage to pick him or her out of a crowd over a hundred feet up. The gulls scatter, and the first osprey is joined by another, both of them seeming to focus more and more on my particular spot, and coming down to within thirty feet of me, hovering, looking ready. Go ahead, dive, I think, there are fish in here. They look ready but then, perhaps because of my presence, they bank off and head away to less crowded fishing grounds.

By looking for one thing you can miss many others. There have been days this spring when my goal of seeing the birds dive has gotten in the way of seeing itself. I’ve let the worry that I’ll never see a dive nag and obsess. This isn’t very Zen of me, I understand. But if there are days when my own brain limits me, there are other days when spring will not allow self-consciousness, and this is one of them. With Hones out of sight, I decide to indulge my taste for the ridiculous. If the ospreys won’t dive for herring, then I’ll do it myself. I dock my boat in some reeds, strip off my shorts, and wade upstream to where the bottom is sandy and the water hip deep. A skinny-dipping human male rightly fears snapping turtles, knowing exactly what they’d chomp on as dangling bait, but I quell my anxieties and climb up on a small bank above the sandy section of stream. It takes only a minute or so of waiting, crouching, until the first pack of herring arrive, twenty or so strong. So many fish that I figure I might have an actual shot of at least touching—if not actually catching—one. Trying to put myself in an osprey frame of mind, I tense, wait till they’re right below me, then pounce. Part dive, part belly flop, I splash into the water with a pure and sheer inelegance that only Homo sapiens could manage. Of course I land no fish; they likely darted away before I even hit the water. Evolution has not been as kind to me as to the ospreys, at least when it comes to catching the finny prey bare-handed. I have no spicules or scales on my fingers. Theoretically, I’ve been dealt a big brain, but I let that brain stay shut off for a while as I do a dead man’s float in the stream, opening my eyes and watching weeds weave along the brown bottom. I swim for ten minutes before pulling on my pants and paddling hard upstream to catch Hones.

By the time I reach him the water runs so shallow that the kayaks can barely move. We pull the boats up on a bank and then walk straight up the brook, still escorted by herring. Soon we hear the barking of gulls and then the gull-like barking of the tourists who’ve come to the Stony Brook Mill to watch the last stage of the herring’s journey: the miraculous leap up the rock rapids to achieve their final goal of the spawning lake. But before reentering the human world, Hones receives another birthday present. We begin to notice a sparkling in the water, a sparkling that shines stronger and stronger the farther we walk up the brook, like a pile of dimes below the water.

“What the hell are they?” I ask.

Hones drops to a knee and reaches under the water, scooping up a handful of sand and silver. He studies them.

“Scales,” he says finally.

And that’s what they are. Thousands and thousands of fish scales, peeled off by the current and bottom. Left behind by the herring during their struggle, thousands of them forming a shining underwater mosaic.

Reluctantly we leave the scales behind and trudge up the last section of water. What was a wild place becomes a tourist attraction as we emerge at the bottom of the human-aided section of the run. Here parents point at the fish and their children stare and scream. This is evolution as entertainment, and I’m hoping we add to the spectacle. We must present a fairly startling picture as we emerge from downriver: two bearded, muck-covered, near-naked men walking out of the wilds. But though we don’t mind being part of the show, we don’t linger long at the mill. We quickly retreat and cross back down through the water to regain our boats.

I let Hones paddle ahead while I scoop up a handful of the herring scales, the water sifting through my fingers until only some sand and the thin, glimmering jewels remain. These scales are the day’s prize, its treasure, its reward. They say that money can’t buy happiness; maybe fish scales can. Whatever the case, happiness is briefly mine.

And I am happy, even after tossing the silver back in the water. As dense as I can sometimes be, I’m not quite stupid enough to think that not seeing a bird dive has ruined this refulgent spring. I also know that I’ve been hunting not just for the hunt but for moments, moments exactly like this one. If I haven’t witnessed an osprey catch a fish, then these times, when I feel empty but full, are coming with more and more frequency, and that, as my father would say, can’t be a bad thing.

But it isn’t just moments I’m after, and not just moments I’ve found. It’s gradually begun to dawn on me that what I’m really hunting for is knowledge about my place, and that is coming, too. For instance, a year ago when we kayaked up this same creek, the site of a green heron startled me, and I had no words for what it was. But now green herons sproaking across the marsh are an everyday sight; I recognize the bird by ear before even seeing it. So while I haven’t watched an osprey dive, at least I feel like I’ve gone deeper into this place, and that—slowly but clumsily—I’m learning more about it. By spending more and more time outside I have, despite myself, begun to change in ways I can’t yet put into words.

If this process—being outside, walking around, biking, watching the world, kayaking—is an end in itself, it’s also a sort of fishing. At the very least I’m fishing around the edges of my consciousness for my own best thoughts. On most days these thoughts don’t come at all, and when they do they never seem to come in an orderly way, even-paced, predictable, but rather indirectly, in bunches, and in a rush, like this hurried, overfull month. I don’t know how to logically produce these thoughts, but I do know the habits that tend to conjure them up. They’re the habits of a fisherman: getting up early and going out alone, throwing my line in, waiting patiently by the water’s edge.

As it has for Hones, this spring for me has been a quest, a search. With all due respect to those privileged few who have found “it,” we all know that humans are happiest when in the act of searching. What does a searcher search for? Something larger, more vital, more meaningful; something outside of self. Some find God. This spring I’ve begun, however tentatively, to find ospreys, though I could just as easily, like Hones, have been on a pilgrimage for stripers. It’s been said a hundred times before but bears repeating: the object doesn’t matter as much as the process—being part of a process. Putting myself out here is the important thing.

Now, however, comes the time to turn around. If the way back out is always anticlimax, it is anticlimax spiced by sights of its own. By the bridge we witness something I’ve never seen before. An osprey is flying by with a fish when, suddenly, a red-tailed hawk drops from above, diving viciously toward fish and fish hawk. For a minute we watch a true aerial battle; when the hawk dives again, the osprey veers off beautifully. But as the osprey banks, something shining drops from its talons, and the red-tail loses its motive for battle. The fish gone, the hawk relents, and the osprey flies off, making no effort to retrieve its hard-earned dinner.

This reminds Hones of an osprey he saw dive on a lake by his parents’ house near Mount Lassen State Park in California. As graceful as an osprey’s dive can be, a fish hawk in the water often looks awkward and ungainly. Water weighs down their wings and they seem to need to heft themselves back into the air. The bird Hones saw had speared a fish but found it too heavy to lift back out of the lake, and so used its wings to row through the water, dragging its prey to shore. There it lay exhausted next to the dying fish, while a half dozen human fishermen, including Hones, looked on. One of the fishermen, a particularly indolent and repulsive member of his breed, took the opportunity to walk over and try to plunder the osprey’s dinner. “We all yelled and swore at him,” Hones says, “Told him to get the fuck away.” When the interloper relented, the osprey, strength regained, picked up the fish in its talons and flew off.

Hones finishes his story just before we portage back across route 6A. No mishaps this time. Again, we’ve gotten lucky with the tide; it’s just turned, and we flow out with deep water that rises up over the banks of muck into the spartina. Now the creek spills over with herring. We pass thousands of fish, all working against the tide, heading to the place we’ve just come from. The water bulges blue with herring, and though it would be impossible for me not to see them, Hones, terrifically excited, keeps pointing them out to me as if I were blind.

When we get home we re-create the day for Nina, worried that our adventures don’t seem quite so adventurous in the retelling. But beer and rum drinks quash the worries and on we blab, for one night allowing ourselves to regress to our older, less healthy habits. Hones takes the beautiful red ribs off the grill and we sit down to a ritual feast. We gather around the dinner table, toasting the birthday boy with red wine and gumming meat off the bone. A full moon the color of a skinned plum rises over the harbor. We drink until just after midnight before heading to bed, happily stupefied. Despite the fact that I still haven’t attained my purported goal of seeing a dive, it’s hard to look at today as anything but a success, and, trying to keep hold of our journey as long as possible, I refuse to shower, sleeping with the day’s salt still on me. Before dozing off I think one last time of the scales we found near the creek’s source. The glittering silvery prize that was momentarily able to satisfy even my deepest, greediest needs.