Foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition

In one sense, Return of the Osprey is a simple story of a man watching the ospreys that nest in his Cape Cod neighborhood and following their fates as the year unspools. But this is a simple story in the way an osprey can seem simple if you’ve only ever seen a picture of one in a book. In reality, ospreys are breathtakingly arresting, complicated creatures. Extravagantly heraldic black-masked raptors with vast wingspans, hackled napes, and acerbic yellow eyes, they’re specialist fish hunters. And while many birds of prey—bald eagles, for example—will glide down and snatch up unwary fish from the surface of a lake, ospreys don’t snatch. They commit. Plummeting toward the water, feet outstretched and talons spread wide, they plunge deep into a different world, sometimes becoming fully submerged before rising into the air, tightly gripping their prey. Ospreys break our categorizations and assumptions about birds of prey—and as such they are a perfect subject for David Gessner, who likewise breaks all manner of literary assumptions and categories. Return of the Osprey is very far from a simple story.

Gessner has hugely influenced how I write about nature. In fact, without him I might not have tried to write about it at all. There are few writers with his facility to turn the searching eye of the naturalist upon themselves, able to muse just as keenly on nature itself as on what nature and place can do to, and for, a human mind and soul. The first time I came across his work I was astonished—and delighted. I’m not the only one who sometimes gets bored in the wilderness, I thought, relieved. I’m not the only one who finds the reverent, hushed tones of so much nature writing frustrating. Here was a writer who could conjure magical evocations of place but was also as funny as hell. Someone who was highly cognizant of the literary tradition of writing about the natural world but who spoke with rare honesty, too, about what it’s like to actually be outside and encounter nature in all its baffling complexity. Gessner’s work was deeply serious. But it wasn’t portentous. He could, and did, poke fun at himself. Yes, I thought, encouraged. Maybe I’ll give nature writing a try.

In Return of the Osprey we follow Gessner as he searches for encounters with his ospreys, visiting their habitat by foot, by car, in boats, through binoculars and telescopes and the naked eye, granting him access to all manner of ways of interacting with them and their locale. “I want to become more than a watcher,” he writes of his quest. “I want immersion as well as contact. I want to learn everything I can about these wild birds, and not just by the book.”

Gessner understands that knowledge is more than something gained from books, experts, or through simple observation; to reach it, one must be in possession of a clear eye about one’s own stake in the pursuit. He writes in what an anthropologist would call a reflexive way—that is, taking pains to make clear his own relationship to the subject of study. This allows him to reveal the biases that his own social, literary, and personal histories bring to what he sees. It is necessary work in the cause of seeking a “deeper, truer intimacy” in which the ospreys aren’t just a reflection of himself but “themselves.”

To find out more about ospreys, he visits experts and deep dives into the scientific literature; his epistemological range is formidable, and his curiosity contagious. One of the signal triumphs of Return of the Osprey is that as a reader, one never feels talked down to. We learn with Gessner. We suffer his mistakes, his confusions, share his revelations, his joys, fears, moments of secular grace. We learn an enormous amount about ospreys. But we also learn how long hours of fruitless observation can teach one a new way of seeing and how one might learn to be patient. We learn, too, what it means to try and meet these birds on their own terms. To exist in osprey time, not human time. Because this is not just a book about ospreys, it’s a book about how to see and how to feel at home in a place. How, ultimately, to connect.

Like the marsh and coastal habitat of the osprey, a bird whose life spans land and water and air, Gessner is a writer who thrives in that fertile, complicated area between things. His work mediates between disciplines, between science and art, between outward observation and deepest meditation on the self. “If I can put aside my defensiveness, my tendency to polarize, I might begin to understand that the richest territory is just this land in between,” he writes.

Perhaps all this makes Gessner’s quest sound dry. It is not. It is a gloriously gonzo, whole-souled pursuit. He wrenches at raw fish with pliers to see what it might feel like to feed like an osprey, leaps into water to try and catch herring in a manner as much like an osprey as a human can manage. There is a transporting lyricism in this book’s pages, along with passages of raw horror and moments of glorious weirdness, as when Gessner imagines the female osprey delicately feeding torn pages of his writing notebook to her young.

Like Gessner, I tend to recoil from manifestos on art or life, but Return of the Osprey is a glorious exception. This is a manifesto in disguise, a work of enormous pedagogical value in addition to being an exquisite natural history of a raptor and its locale. It’s the story of a man who taught himself to see, taught himself to know, discovering all kinds of things about himself and the wider ways that humans relate to wildness and the world around us. “The more time I spend out here,” he writes, “the more I understand—and don’t just believe intellectually—that there are ways to be other than the human way.”

—Helen Macdonald