Building

An osprey nest is a giant pile of sticks, seaweed, grass, and whatever else the birds can get their talons on, a seemingly random mess of crosshatching and emphatic Jackson Pollack splatterings and slashes. People have found everything in the nests from the heads of rag dolls to beer cans to toy sailboats to doormats. Alan Poole has compiled a list that includes “corn stalks, hunks of dried cow manure, empty fertilizer bags, and discarded rubber teat holders from milking machines,” as well as “sections of TV antennas, hula hoops, remnants of fish nets, old flannel shirts and rubber boots, Styrofoam cups and buoys, a broken hoe, plastic hamburger cartons, and bicycle tires.” Samuel Johnson was of the opinion that literature was worthless unless put to use, and the birds apparently agree. In 1932, writing in National Geographic, Captain C. W. R. Knight reported finding a book called Lucile, Bringer of Joy in one of the Gardiners Island nests (he immediately dubbed the female bird Lucile). The captain added, “Ospreys are much addicted to the habit of bringing to their nests various decorative oddments, such as dried carcasses of birds, crab shells, pieces of board, derelict shoes, bits of clothing, and so on.” This was a kind way of saying that ospreys are indiscriminate pack rats. I’ve noticed that our local birds have a particular fondness for the shiny and artificial: plastic shopping bags, string, twine, the green fluorescent stuffing of an Easter basket, and large dark-green garbage bags that fly off the platforms like flags off pirate ships. All these have become parts of the nests I watch as building intensifies with the season. The early neighborhood prize for the most original choice in building material goes to the pair at Chapin Beach, who have added a nearly naked Barbie doll to their nest’s northeast wall.

A slob myself, I feel a kinship with the ospreys. Not for them the artistic subtleties of the African weaverbird, who can tie at least a half dozen different stitches and knots and construct elaborate tunnels. Ospreys aren’t minimalists, preferring sheer mass to dainty perfectionism. From up close their nests sometimes look more tall than wide, up to four feet high and weighing close to a quarter of a ton. Dennis Murley, the naturalist at the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, reports word of a nest ten feet high and six across. Like eagle aeries, the nests usually weather the winter and are built up higher and higher with each passing year. Most are not as big as eagle aeries, however, or nearly as sturdy, as Alan Poole found out when he attempted to make like John Muir and climb up into one after it had been deserted for the winter. Poole’s report is that they barely support the weight of a man.

One of the most striking things about the nests, other than the preponderance of tacky materials, is how such big birds disappear into them. Three or sometimes four almost full-grown fledglings, along with a parent bird or two, fit in the nest, apparently comfortably. Despite the fact that I’ve been told the nests don’t really have much of a cupped depression, the birds can vanish almost completely out of sight. Considering the ospreys’ size, this is extraordinary. More than once I’ve thought of Snoopy’s mythical doghouse, and how he would disappear inside it to take a dip in the pool, look at his van Gogh, or shoot billiards. I’ve already made plans for spending a little time up in the nest during the fall, once the birds have flown south. Then I hope to get to the bottom of their mysterious depth.

As well as building with anything, ospreys will build on almost anything. Telephone poles, windmills, buoys, electric towers, billboards, duck blinds, and even shipwrecks can serve as homesites. In their book Raptors, Noel and Helen Snyder relate the story of an osprey pair that built their nest in a temporarily inactive construction crane: “The owner, to his everlasting credit, retired the crane from active duty, allowing the Ospreys to follow through with their nesting efforts.” Despite this willingness to adapt, modern ospreys often opt for artificial platforms built by humans. For instance, in Massachusetts, 97 percent of osprey pairs sit on top of platforms, the poles and pallets frequently provided by Commonwealth Electric.

This year I plan on observing four nests: Quivett, Chapin, Simpkins Neck, and, finally, my home nest at the harbor. The ospreys are all returnees, coming back to nests they have built up in years past. While all four of the nests I watch are built on top of artificial poles and platforms, each has a different character. For instance, the nest across the harbor is the highest, sitting atop a thirty-foot pole above the noisy, exhaust-filled parking lot. Being brand-new, however, it’s also the shallowest—and the sloppiest, the harbor pair apparently the least concerned with aesthetics: long sections of rope trail down and plastic shopping bags billow like parachutes in the wind. This confirms my belief that the harbor birds are the youngest pair I watch. While the urge to build is instinctive, tied to hormones triggered by the warming weather, skill in building increases with age and experience.

Early in the season, just after the Quivett pair returned, I was convinced that I saw the harbor birds, and I peered long and hard through my binoculars, taking earnest notes on coloring and habits. “Ospreys at the harbor still lying low,” I reported in my journal on the third day. It was only on closer inspection on a particularly clear afternoon that I realized that the birds I was seeing were in fact Hefty garbage bags. I dug out Poole’s book to find out what was going on and discovered that abandoned nests are common early in the season, as some birds shop around or create secondary sites and, recovering somewhat from my embarrassment, was reassured that if I hadn’t seen actual ospreys then at least I’d seen evidence of them. When the harbor pair did return, Nina and I took to calling them the “lazy, good-for-nothing” ospreys, because they exhibited many of the classic characteristics of osprey immaturity. For instance, the male didn’t share his food as readily as the more “responsible” Quivett bird, sometimes eating a whole fish right in front of his mate, and they both seemed generally lackluster about getting down to the business of nesting. Playing the early spring oddsmaker, I gave them little chance of successfully reproducing.

As for the nests themselves, the most interesting one to me is at Chapin, and not just because of the naked Barbie. Like the other three nests I watch, it sits atop a man-made platform. This platform, however, slants dramatically to the west, and the birds, as if to overcompensate, have built the west side of their nest even higher than the east, so that it now slopes in the opposite direction. The whole affair looks precarious, like a boy balancing on a skateboard. A more fastidious animal might abandon such an absurd homesite, but I never hear the Chapin birds complain, at least not about architecture. Like the lairs of the villains on the old TV show Batman, their home is permanently, drunkenly tilted.

April’s theme is building. Unseen by most of us, nests of every variety are being constructed, from the hanging sack of the oriole to the rooty ball of the winter wren to the small eggcup of the redstart. Variety thrives not just in the final products but in the arts of construction: woodpeckers drilling, ovenbirds baking, chimney swifts practicing masonry by gluing their semicircle saucers with saliva onto brick. So many strategies and techniques, from marsh wrens creating dummy nests in the cattails to house wrens nesting almost anywhere—in the skull of a cow, for instance, or even in the pocket of a coat. One of the things we come to nature for is quiet, but if these birds had our human tools and machines the roar would be deafening. In the spring all of nature becomes a vast construction sight.

Even among birds of prey variety in nest building thrives. The most famous of raptor nests, of course, are eagle aeries, giant battlements on remote cliff sides. Christopher Leahy’s The Birdwatcher’s Companion informs me that “it would not be incorrect” to refer to an osprey’s nest as an aerie, and I can see why as the sticks pile higher and higher. Watching the ospreys add to their huge nests, I experience something like the childhood pleasure I felt building forts with couch cushions and blankets in the living room and, later on, with branches and boards in the woods.

Raptor homesites fill almost every niche: ground, crag, cliff, church (a kestrel favorite), and tree. I prefer the habits of the osprey to those of most falcons, who take over the nests of other birds (both occupied and unoccupied), or the notoriously unhygienic vultures, who contradict the old maxim by constantly soiling their own nests. On the other hand, you can’t help but admire the flourish of the red-shouldered hawk, who will place a sprig of greenery on its newly adopted home, a tasteful way of saying “Occupied.” In Brown and Amadon’s Eagles, Hawks and Falcons of the World, I read, “The possession of a green branch seems to be connected with heightened excitement.” The last phrase, heightened excitement, captures the feel of this building season.

Though much of the works remains invisible, there’s evidence of activity all around. Flickers rattle the phone poles, and a beautiful chestnut-brown house wren pokes a hole into the windowsill of our shed. On a kayak trip up the Herring River I find a red-winged blackbird’s nest interwoven with strands of grass, and on the path down to Quivett I watch a chickadee carry twigs into a perfectly round hole high in a dead red pine. The bark is peeled off halfway down the tree, the wood barkless and smooth near the hole, and the little bird flits in and out, back and forth to gather material, dipping inside and arranging frenetically, showing only its bobbing tail to those outside its home. The bird virtually vibrates with movement, activity, effort. This, in a more hyperactive variety, is the same energy that sends the ospreys off on their relatively unhurried, loping flights.

While I understand the energy of the chickadee, nervous for its success and the success of its mate, I prefer the luxuriant sprawl of the osprey nest. Though they can make up to a hundred flights a day in pursuit of nesting material, they take their time about it. If there’s an urgency to the season, for these large birds it’s a fairly lazy urgency, particularly for the Quivett pair, whose nest remains mostly intact from the year before. The birds remind me a little of our cats in the way they lounge, preening, scratching, and soaking in sun.

By early April the marsh begins to show hints of green, though for the most part remaining the red-brown of the red-tailed hawk’s tail. I sit on the other side of Quivett Creek, watching as the female lines the inner cup of the nest with softer materials, sod and grasses. At times she appears hulking compared with the male, a bulky pheasant, while he looks more delicate and hunched. She also seems on the tall side, maybe twenty-five inches. I can’t make her size, particularly when she flies close by, jive with a fact I have just learned from my books: that ospreys weigh only about four pounds. This strikes me as nearly preposterous, since she looks like she could easily scoop up our house cat, Tabernash, who weighs three times as much. My book explains this away by saying that birds have hollow bones and bodies streamlined for flight, but it’s still hard to swallow.

While the birds do sit a lot, she on the nest, he on the crossbar, they don’t exactly sit still. The binoculars reveal the birds as less Zen-like than first glance would indicate: they fidget, look around, listen, let go with their peevish warning cries. At one point the male chases a crow away from the nest, tailing it, brilliantly mimicking the flight of the smaller bird. When he tires of the chase, he retreats to the nest and the female takes over, tag-team style, flying just as beautifully, the sun backlighting the dark-light pattern of her primaries. When the excitement dies down the male turns to foraging, flying out and then coming back to the nest with a clump of grass, which the female immediately sets to tamping down as lining. The next trip he brings back a veritable cudgel, knotted at one end and long like a tail. He has trouble dipping then rising up to the nest, delivering it only with a powerful exertion of wings. His heroism goes unrewarded, however, except by a glance that seems to say, “What am I supposed to do with that?”

Though there are exceptions, nest building among birds of prey follows a simple rule: males bring and females build. Females most often dominate the process, from site selection on, nest building being inextricably entwined with mating. As with humans, osprey males seem at their most energetic when hoping to procure sexual rewards. Osprey courtship isn’t subtle. While a male red-tailed hawk begins each year shyly, involving himself in an elaborate, almost bashful, courtship ritual, ospreys are more direct. The open plains that the sage grouse use for their courtship dance are called the “strutting grounds,” and male ospreys strut too, though not on the ground. They prefer a wild up-and-down flight, the “sky dance,” a glorious display often performed with fish in talons.

While the dance is glorious, the act itself is more simple and direct. More and more frequently, I find myself voyeuristic witness to osprey intimacy. As with the first time I saw it, the whole action of mating takes a matter of ten or fifteen seconds, both the birds on the nest, the male flapping in from behind and the female tilting up. The male, perching on her back, continues to flap his wings throughout the act, for balance probably, and balls up his feet to make sure not to claw the female with his talons. They aren’t shy about sex, the whole act fast and without noticeable foreplay, other than the bringing of food. The male, once sated, will often fly off immediately afterward. Alan Poole points out that much osprey mating occurs at the nest not because they are exhibitionists but for a very commonsense reason: that is where the female spends most of her day.

Ospreys are cosmopolitan birds. The building and breeding that I watch on Cape Cod is also taking place all over the world, from Corsica to Scotland, from Florida to Siberia. As the pairs I watched flew up from South America over the Caribbean, European ospreys migrated from Africa over the Mediterranean. Every spring the great feathered exodus occurs, and every spring nests like the ones I watch are built all across the planet.

But for all their worldliness, when it comes to locating their nests ospreys have just a few unshakable criteria. For one thing, they insist on living near water, a choice that I respect entirely. Living by water has such attraction that I’m always baffled when animals, particularly humans, make other arrangements. Admittedly, for a bird that survives by catching fish, this is a practical as well as an aesthetic choice. Like humans, ospreys are fond of islands; and on islands without natural predators, they will happily build their nests right on the ground. Since there are fewer and fewer places on earth untouched by man and the species he brings along in his train, there are, naturally, fewer and fewer ground-nesting ospreys.

Before man-made sites cluttered the landscape, their preference was for the tops of tall dead trees, especially over water. Like billboards and platforms, these older sites were created by another species—in this case, the beaver. Flowing water would be stopped up by beaver dams, and when it rose it killed trees and simultaneously created dream homes for ospreys—island poles surrounded by predator-protecting water. One reason for this preference for dead trees is because, as powerfully as they fly, ospreys can’t maneuver well in tight quarters and so need to have open space above their nests.

Platforms provide this. This is the upside of poles and platforms, along with the fact of their greater stability, making them much less likely to blow over than tree sites. The downside is that platforms increase the birds’ dependence on humans, and create a less wild home. Despite this unfortunate fact, platforms seem to be the only real alternative at this time on places like Cape Cod, where the bird’s old nesting habitat is still being destroyed daily. I have friends in the West who spit out the oxymoronic words wildlife management and who might think a platform bird a compromised bird. But in the crowded East the ospreys could never have come back to anywhere close to their old numbers without the efforts of a fairly heroic band of platform builders. The banning of DDT let these birds live, but the platform builders gave them homes to live on.

Massachusetts has been lucky to have two particularly tireless groups of platform builders. By 1963, Gilbert and Josephine Fernandez of Dartmouth had already become concerned with the small colony of ospreys along the Westport River. Over the years they erected dozens of platforms, making sure that, when breeding rates increased after the banning of DDT, the new birds would have places to nest. Unlike the power poles, these platforms are low structures that blend in well with the marsh, like old duck blinds. The Fernandezes’ work has led to Massachusetts’s largest colony, with over seventy pairs, and our most dense concentration of birds. The second group, led by Gus Ben David, is made up of amateurs and professionals from the Audubon Society’s Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary on Martha’s Vineyard.

When I visited Ben David at the sanctuary, he interrupted our conversation to point out a red-tailed hawk to a group of children touring the grounds. A compact, energetic man, he shouted like a carnival barker as he gestured up at the hawk. This same energy has served him well over the years. In 1970, with only two pairs of ospreys left on the entire island, he helped erect an artificial pole after a pine tree with a nest on it blew over in a storm. The next year that pair returned in March to build their nest on the platform, and the revolution began. Ben David, aided by Tim “Rangus” Baird and a band of hearty volunteers, began the long hard work of “shepherding” (in his words) the ospreys back to the Vineyard. “It’s been a story of people,” he said. “Of cooperation. And, of course, of birds.” Ben David and his gang have erected over a hundred platforms all over the island. Now, almost thirty years later, seventy-five pairs nest on Martha’s Vineyard. Last year ninety young fledged.

The nests that the Felix Neck volunteers erect are thirty-foot-tall poles with four six-foot pressure-treated crossarms that form the nesting platforms. Mounted on the pole with center bolts, the crossarms are further strengthened by metal braces, capable of withstanding even hurricane winds. As on the Cape, these poles are provided by Commonwealth Electric. At the risk of sounding like a booster for the electric company, without Com Electric supplying the platforms, the comeback would have been much more difficult, if not impossible. Recently, searching for a birthday present for a neighbor of ours who had everything (including beachfront property), my mother and I called the power company and asked them to erect a platform on his property, which they promptly did.

It seems to me that all those who built the platforms did good work, work that intertwined them with the world and put to healthy use our constant human need to meddle and build. While I’d prefer to be watching the birds in more purely natural settings, there is something appealing about the result of the platforms: a teaming of human and avian construction, a marriage of domestic and wild. In the end, the platform builders have created a wonderful sort of organic architecture, a bridging as well as a building. In their efforts to aid those whose original homes other humans destroyed, they have rebuilt the stages on which osprey dramas play out.

A few weeks ago, back in March, I made a pilgrimage to Westport, Massachusetts. I did this in part to see the site of Massachusetts’s largest colony—dozens of platforms, many erected by Gil and Joe Fernandez. Unlike other raptors, ospreys are social birds, happy to nest near one another, just as they did on Gardiners Island when Dennis Puleston first saw them after World War II. Though the birds hadn’t yet returned to the Westport marsh, it didn’t take much imagination to see the place as it would be later in the summer: the air filled with a hundred large raptors, high-pitched cries, and beating wings. A wild community filled with osprey concerns and osprey interactions.

As good as it felt seeing what humans had helped hammer together, my real reason for going to Westport was to meet Alan Poole, whose book had become my guide and practical bible. I was happy to discover that Alan’s own nest was a delightfully proportioned one-bedroom cabin right on the shore, nestled in the surrounding trees and briers, with a bedroom door that looked out at the water, and a telescope aimed directly at the osprey platform that jutted up out of a tidal inlet not three hundred feet away. Alan turned out to be a thin, handsome man whose blue eyes and high forehead reminded me of James Taylor. He had the kind of natural quiet composure that I, a born blowhard, always find somewhat disconcerting. I’d wondered if he might be somewhat territorial about his osprey knowledge, but he couldn’t have been more helpful, answering all my questions as we sat in his glassed-in living room, sipping tea, listening to the wind howl, and enjoying what there was of the March sun.

Now at work on editing a massive modern version of the life histories of the birds of North America, he happily recalled his early osprey days.

“I started at grad school and I came on the scene in the late seventies,” he explained. “The birds were just starting to get the DDT out of their systems, just starting to recover, and it was a fantastic time to be working on them. They’re resilient birds, no question about it. It was a hopeful time for environmentalists, and ospreys were kind of the star players. They were coming back, nesting on platforms, getting an article in the New York Times at least once every summer. They were the golden boy.”

Despite a calm scientific demeanor, his words were spiced with an unavoidable romanticism as he recalled the seasons out at the nests, seasons of observing behavior, inspecting the nests themselves, even once almost losing an eye when he was dive-bombed by a bird that didn’t want him so close. Becoming increasingly aware of the patience required for fieldwork, I listened to the stories with admiration. Then, when he was done, I asked him about the migration that was already under way. I’d been wondering how the birds knew when to start.

“The sun’s the clock that determines when they begin migrating,” he said. “Weather determines how quickly they move, though the older ones pretty much do it on schedule no matter what the weather is. Of course they may not get around to nesting as quickly, if they come back and find it like this. They may stop in Long Island or New Jersey, but essentially they’re being driven by the sun.

“By and large the birds that were born here all come back to the same area. Fifty percent come back to the exact areas where they were born. What we don’t know is if all the Westport birds always come back to Westport, and then some sort of look around and say, ‘Not enough room’ and move on.”

Alan explained an aspect of osprey migration unique among raptors. Fledgling ospreys, just a few months old, will fly down to South America for the winter, as do their parents. But unlike other birds of prey, the young ospreys do not return north the next spring, waiting another year, until they are two going on three, to return north. On the tape recording I made of the conversation I, at this point, hear myself interrupt and blurt out a rhapsodic spiel about how “miraculous” it is that two-year-old ospreys, who have last been in the Northeast when they were only three months old, somehow manage to make their way back to their natal nesting grounds. It wasn’t my first such interruption, and it is followed by a pause on the tape, during which Alan was likely staring at me and wondering whether I’d come to talk or to listen. However he felt, he responded politely. While admitting it was remarkable, he stopped short of declaring it a miracle, quietly making the point that those three-month-old birds were, in fact, adolescents: “If you could fly and you were a teenager and spent the summer flying around Cape Cod, you would certainly know that landscape. And when you came back there, there would be certain things you’d recognize—obvious landmarks. What we don’t know about ospreys is what they recognize: is it the configuration of the marsh and beach … or what exactly?”

Despite my interruptions, I quickly began to feel comfortable with Alan. Soon we finished our tea and took a walk down the path to the beach, into the sting of the wind, and watched the dark blue swell of winter waves. On the way back he pointed out birds for me. When we returned to the house he demonstrated with his hands how a joint in the osprey’s foot allowed the bird’s reversible outer talon to swivel and grab a fish from behind, and he described the feeling of raw power of holding an adult osprey during banding. He also talked about a thesis by a student who lived among the Senegalese tribesmen, and how the tribesmen would paddle out to fish and watch the ospreys dive. At my prodding, he speculated a little about the roles that ospreys might have played in the mythic life of primitive man. The idea, mentioned briefly in his book, had caught my imagination: this fierce hunting bird becoming a totem for people whose survival was dependent on their hunting or fishing skills.

Before returning to my car I mentioned all the platforms I’d seen while driving to Alan’s house, and my newfound respect for those who dedicated their lives to giving new homes to the birds. Alan spoke admiringly of the platform builders—“They’re the ones who have fueled this whole renaissance”—before adding: “But they aren’t biologists.”

That was a telling sentence, one that I got the feeling he could have applied just as easily to certain nature writers. If I left his house exhilarated, full of new knowledge and excited about getting down to watching my birds, I also left it with a minor sense of healthy chastisement. It’s possible that as a biologist, he found the species of nature writer on the whole a tad romantic and unscientific.

He had a point, particularly in my case. Though I love to take any opportunity to rail against specialization, I am pure hypocrite. I stopped taking science courses in high school, turning all my attention to literature. This now seems to me an unhealthy split, particularly as I hope to learn more about the natural world. At one point Alan mentioned something about those who write about nature without having a rudimentary concept of evolutionary biology. I took it personally, as perhaps I should have.

“They don’t understand what’s driving all this. And what’s driving all this is reproduction. Read Darwin, for God’s sake, read natural history magazines. There are basics in biology that you need to have to understand it. Sometimes I don’t see any inherent curiosity. For me, it’s about fascination.”

And so I drove away from Alan Poole’s not just with a new sense of excitement and deeper possibilities but with a reading list. If I was going to really learn about ospreys, I’d need to fill in some gaps in my learning. As well as observing the birds, I’d have to get out some basic texts and sit down and study. For the first time in my life, I’d need to learn some science.

Which I’ve tried to do over the past few weeks. Despite a sometimes comic ineptitude, I’ve set myself a fairly ambitious task of learning—biology, ornithology, geology.

At first I found myself rebelling. There were times when some of the texts, particularly the ornithology books, seemed to confirm what I saw as a rawly materialistic view of the world. I read about test after sadistic test: “Young chickadees were offered water that made them sick and learned not to drink the water… . A bird’s eggs were taken from the nest and we observed great distress on the bird’s part. [Duh!] … When we killed a bird’s mate, we learned …” And on and on and on. That’s when I closed the pages and headed out to the marsh, full of outrage. Who needs to know these things? Especially when the tests only prove the obvious. Isn’t too much justified by our constant hunger to unearth every last fact? Don’t we overly respect merely scientific truths? Aren’t we too in love with so-called hard facts? Science quickly becomes technology, losing its purpose and direction. And science, at its worst, ignores the validity of the intuitive, of the artistic approach to nature, forgetting that we don’t just get data in the woods, we get stories.

But having gotten that off my chest, I gradually began to learn from the books, and despite my objections and fears, my whining and kicking, it hasn’t been so bad. Happily, I find that again and again the facts confirm my best instincts. For instance, consider the deep intertwining of osprey breeding and osprey nest sites. Most ospreys are monogamous, but as Alan Poole explained to me in Westport, this is a monogamy based on the pair’s joint commitment to a nest site, as much as to each other. In other words, it’s the building of their homes that makes mere concept corporal. To the ospreys, love of place is more than a fancy idea; this is commitment as biological imperative, a deep instinct for home. While the birds may be compelled by the drive to reproduce, it’s significant that familiar ground, a home turf, dramatically increases, indeed is vital to, their chances for reproductive success.

Of course, even here I’m using science as story. The truth is that while I’ve tried to open my mind to more solid facts, I know I’ll never look at nature as a scientist. At best I can hope to wander that unstable but rich territory between science and art, though even to get to that murky place I have a lot of learning to do. But 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.

Let’s be honest. Sometimes sitting out on the marsh for hours on end is simply boring. Even Alan Poole must have occasionally thought so. One of the things I’m learning, one of my profound scientific conclusions, is that April is colder than I remember. The Cliffs Notes to my current mode of life would read like this: “The ospreys sit; I sit. The ospreys build; I scribble in my journal. The ospreys fly off to fish; I watch.”

For all the surface dullness—and it’s true my life wouldn’t make a good miniseries—there is still something exciting, even thrilling about it. To put myself out here, to watch, on the chance that I’ll be lifted out of my own life and into a world where the chief concerns are the birdly ones of procuring fish and fortifying the nest. And then, occasionally, to actually become immersed! This, when it happens, is anything but dull.

Take this morning, April 11, for example, when the Quivett male returns with what looks to be a trout. He flies right over the nest twice, the fish gleaming, while the female cries with greater and greater agitation. But instead of bringing the fish to the nest he suddenly ascends forty feet, hovers, drops, floats up, and hovers again, wings flapping wildly in extravagant display. Like a giant hummingbird, he stays in one place, rearing back and flapping like mad. I’ve seen this courtship ritual—the “sky dance”—before, with the jetty pair, but never from so close. It’s a kind of avian chest beating, a testosterone-driven celebration, with the clutched fish signifying competence, the male announcing to all the world both his capacity to provide food and, of course, his intention to mate. Later, the fish devoured, he will do just that, and the wild beating of the wings will repeat the flapping of the dance.

But that is later. Now, having teased her with the fish, he alights on his roost twenty feet from the nest to dine alone. Despite the dance, the fish still has some life in it and flops back and forth more than once. The male, barely glancing down, ignores this death flurry, content to grip it in his enormous talons and let it slowly die. After a minute he begins ripping into the flesh, starting with the mouth area, tearing the fish apart with savage screwdriver twists. He makes short work of it. In ten minutes he is down to the eye, the pink inner meat revealed. This is when the female, who has been silent, begins to beg again, but he still ignores her. I’m impressed by the savagery of his appetite. He is halfway through the fish and still going strong when her begging intensifies. Finally, he delivers the slimy, glittering prize, what is left of a decapitated and mostly detorsoed fish.

The times of change—spring’s bursting and fall’s death—are the most arresting times, and April, even more than March, is a time in between. It’s a month of uncertainty, of unpredictability, of opening. The mania for building continues to pulse through the animal world, the season waking the urge to construct in humans, too. Mid-April is also marked by excitement in another way. The big news here is that I’ve bought some boots, black rubber and knee-high. While I might look even more ridiculous now, decked out like a nineteenth-century English explorer with only my pith helmet missing, the fact is that they make life on the marsh easier. And with each day I’m getting more comfortable being out here.

There are few places that undergo as many daily changes as the salt marsh. It’s a true land-in-between, particularly at this point along Quivett Creek, close to where fresh water alchemizes to salt. Change is the constant here: flooding, drying out, flooding again, an environment for both creatures of land and sea, a place overly rich with life and a hundred stories. Furthermore, the Quivett nest is in-between in one other way, the ospreys having chosen to nest almost exactly on the town line, so that until they register to vote no one can be sure if they are in fact Brewster or Dennis residents.

Spring on the marsh constitutes a great resurrection. The marsh itself is a “detritus-based” ecosystem, powered by the rot of marsh grasses from the previous year. As winter ends, the marsh prepares itself for ospreys. It begins with the sun warming the mud. Bacteria comes alive; plankton and algae grow and feed the small fish, which feed the large fish, which feed the ospreys. In this way the birds are perfectly a part of their place, demonstrating what Alan Poole has called “the conversion of sunlight into ospreys.” On the salt marsh there is more of everything; the marsh is an ecological phoenix, rising to life off its own death.

Birds aren’t the only ones building on Quivett. Each day the sound of hammering thumps through the quiet of the marsh, a sound that would usually send me straight out of my revery and into a grumbling antidevelopment diatribe. But because I know where the hammering comes from, it doesn’t bother me. I admire both the builder and home in this case. Since spring green has not yet filled in the trees, the foundation of the slowly rising house across the way has served as my backdrop while I’ve watched the Quivett birds these last few weeks. And because Don MacKenzie respects this place, I take the construction as natural, no different from the male osprey lugging another huge stick up to its nest. If the instinct of spring is to construct, then MacKenzie’s home seems not so different from the ones I draw in my journal: the red-tailed hawks’ tree nest, the herons’ roost, and the Canada geese’s ground nest near the creek.

Almost two years ago, the first July after Nina and I moved back to Cape Cod, I tramped through what is now MacKenzie’s land but what was then the ruins of a place called Sealand. Sealand had once been an aquarium where I’d come as a child to watch ocean animals on display: dolphins named Salty and Spray jumping through hoops, fish behind glass, seals barking and clapping. The park had closed in the ’80s and had been abandoned, so that by the time I hiked through it in 1997, it felt like walking into a lost civilization. Tree branches reached like pickpockets through broken windows, glass glittered along the old paths, weeds and vines crawled the walls, and everywhere the wild broke up into rooms that had once tried to contain it. Walking toward the old turtle pool, which had become an algal swamp more aptly called an insect pool, I scared a little bobwhite with a yellow head and the brown-black speckling of a hen, setting it running down the path on its short comic legs before it attempted a kind of brief fluttery flight. Once the bird had scrambled into the bushes, I followed some ivy vines into what was once the “fish library.” The place was well vandalized: pink insulation showing like wounds on the walls, and glass and plaster spread across the rotting carpet. The remains of a twelve-pack of Miller Lite lay scattered over the occasionally gouged floor, and these appropriate words were spraypainted on the wall: destroy society.

After inspecting the library’s moldering remains, I walked over to the building that had previously housed Sealand’s main attraction. In faded letters—or, actually, in the space below where the letters had once been—I read the words dolphin pool. Admission was cheaper than it had been when I was a kid: there was a gaping hole in the wall I could easily climb through. The pool itself, empty except for trash and puddles of black rainwater, was about thirty feet at the deep end but still struck me as absurdly small, hardly enough room for what I remembered as being nearly jet-propelled dolphins. The reeking debris at the pool’s bottom consisted of old fertilizer bags, several cinder blocks, a long pole likely once used for training the dolphins, and a dead skunk.

As I climbed through the ruins I couldn’t help but feel that that was a more satisfying trip to Sealand than my childhood visits. The dolphins were amazing, and they did delight me when I was young, but I’m sure that now I’d see them through the usual haze of captured sadness. Though I’ve never gone on a whale watch, I’d always wanted to, at least until last summer, when one of the boats accidentally killed the whale they were “watching.” Voyeurism can be costly, I remind myself; watchers are complicitous, too.

But that July, as day turned to night, I did my share of greedy watching. That was the day that I had my memorable twilight encounter with the mother osprey protecting her young. After I turned away from the depressing space of the dolphin pool, I headed down, past the library, to the marsh. It was dusk by then, and I noticed that marshland had encroached on Sealand, phragmites whispering behind the backs of the buildings. Red-winged blackbirds flitted across the tops of the grasses as I climbed atop an abandoned refrigerator and stared toward the tidal inlet, catching a glimpse of the osprey nest. Not satisfied with a mere view, I crashed down through the reeds, trampling a path through breakable grasses that grew five feet above my head. Between the phragmites I could see a nearly full orange moon rising over Quivett Creek. It was appropriate, I thought, that the marsh bordered Sealand, as it, too, was an in-between place, caught between land and water, and it might easily have been called by the same oxymoronic name as the park. The richest zones of food and life are those between the tides, places not quite water or land, living places that give off the constant smell of death and decay. By the time I emerged from the soughing grasses my shoes were encased in black, stinking muck, and I found myself surprisingly close, too close, to the osprey nest. It was then that I saw the mother osprey swooping back and forth, warning me away.

As moving as being close to the osprey was, it was Sealand itself that I thought about as I walked back up to my car. On the ride home I tried to make sense of the satisfaction I felt with the park’s dilapidated state. Crossing the marsh on Bridge Street, catching a glimpse of our neighborhood mute swans like bright question marks in the dark, I decided that the thrill came from the reversal of the place’s nature. That is, it came from seeing a place that once contained wildness now being contained by it, a place that had been for merely watching nature now overrun with it. And a place where human debris was on display, where wilderness, or half wilderness, had won for a while, as if it had thrown over the cages and exhibits and broken free.

Liberation stirred in my chest for all of five seconds, until I turned right, off Bridge and onto Sesuit Neck Road. At that corner a huge square barn of a house stood on a manicured lawn, and it, like so many places on the Cape, served only to remind me of what had once been there. In this place I remembered a copse of locusts that I had tramped through as a boy, reminding me of the Cape’s diminishment. Maybe that was another part of Sealand’s appeal: it was one of the few places on Cape Cod where what was was more wild than what had been.

But, as always, the future intrudes. Now it is 1999, two years later, and the ruins are no longer ruins. Not long after that July day I drove by Sealand and noticed the real estate agent’s sign. A year later the bulldozers were at work, plowing down the old structures to make room for what I supposed would be condos. A quaint stone wall sprouted, a wall that I feared would mock the values it mimicked. I responded to this loss with the usual anger, and felt great relief upon finally learning that it was the MacKenzies who would be building there. It’s true, dozers did plow down a couple of the old ruins, but, as it turned out, this was a labor of love, not cash. The best arts make healthy use of what is already there, and, like the Quivett ospreys, MacKenzie built on an already established foundation, relying on found materials to construct his home. A man who crafts violins, Don MacKenzie and his son have spent the last year involved in the most organic sort of architecture, raising a home built not just on the land but on the human past. The foundation of their two-bedroom house is the aquarium’s old foundation, and they have made ample use of all that was there before. What once was the corridor between the tanks, where children stared through green glass at sand sharks and blowfish, is now a walkway of stones between a garden, where pink zinnias, strawflowers, marigolds, and bachelor’s buttons will soon bloom. The old fish library has lent its foundation to a vast barn, with white pine floors that smell of sawdust; part of that barn will become a studio for Don and his violins. Not long ago seventeen friends and neighbors helped him move the deck that was by the turtle pool, so that it now juts off the barn’s back, providing a perfect view of the osprey nest. Old benches from Sealand dot the yard that slopes down to the marsh, placed in shady spots under trees. And near another flower garden, by some rocks, is the spot where the first two Sealand dolphins, Salty and Spray’s predecessors, were buried. Throughout the place the old serves the new, compost for growth.

Just a week ago, on April 23, I pulled into the MacKenzies’ driveway to ask them some questions about the ospreys, since they were, with the exception of the Canada geese, the birds’ closest neighbors. Don and his son stood by a bonfire, into which they fed brush. Smoke turned our view of the marsh rubbery while Don told me about the drama of the previous year, when one of the young ospreys had refused to leave, staying at the nest until November. He then described watching ospreys chase a coyote away from the nest, battle with great blue herons, and fish close to home, plunging right down into Quivett Creek. And he spoke proudly about the short-eared owl in the neighborhood, and pointed across the street at the pine where the red-tails nested. As he talked, it was obvious that he and his family weren’t just physically close to the birds. As surely as the ospreys built their wild nest on a tame foundation, the MacKenzies had built their new home on a foundation of the wild.

Don gave me a tour of the stockpile of the old Sealand materials that they planned on reusing: two-by-fours, two-by-eights, walls, shingles, window frames, windows. Even the bricks could be reused, because the original mason had stuck with the old formula, which, unlike the modern one, made it easy to chip mortar off individual bricks. The old masons understood the fact that materials could be used again, as do the MacKenzies. Even the thick blue-green aquarium glass was going to be put back into use; Don didn’t see why he couldn’t use it for showers, or as kitchen counters.

One of the things Don and I discussed during my visit was a bit of bad news. Coming out daily to the marsh behind his house has been a bit like reading a good book, right down to the surprising plot twists. Two weeks ago in early April, it had looked like the Quivett ospreys were down to some serious nesting: they had mated, and the female was spending her days down low, only occasionally relieved by the male, presumably incubating the eggs. But then, after business took me away for a few days, I came back to find the nest temporarily abandoned. Don filled me in on the date, around April 18, that they’d suddenly left the nest and we agreed that something—a raccoon, probably—must have gotten to the eggs.

The birds came back a day later and are back at it now, rebuilding the nest and mating again, but when I called Alan Poole to report on what had happened, he told me that it’s likely their second efforts will fail, too, since failure is the norm for osprey second clutches. Though it may seem odd, given the many warm months ahead, ospreys that start late are often unsuccessful, as if their genes, anticipating fall’s cold, understand that they are too far behind schedule. Those born late have less time, before fall migration, to learn the skills that help them survive, and this somehow translates to the parents of second clutches, who often look, in Poole’s words, “as if they just aren’t trying as hard,” as if they know that their offspring are doomed. In other words, though they were back first, at Quivett the early birds may get nothing. This came as a shock, and I’m not quite ready to accept it. It’s still only April, after all, and they are carrying on with such patience, with such earnestness, that I can’t help but believe there is reason to hope. Of course, ospreys whose clutches fail, like young ospreys, still funnel their reproductive energy directly into the nest, spending hours gathering and fixing up the walls—“housekeeping,” as it’s called. It’s almost as if, having failed at their main goal, they throw themselves into the second, and, to the human eye, there is something almost desperate about all this building. But, as I say, I’m not ready to concede defeat at Quivett yet.

Meanwhile, there are early signs of success at all the other nests. At the lopsided nest on Chapin, the female is nesting deep, rarely switching places with the male and depending on him almost exclusively for food. The scene is repeated at the Simpkins Neck nest and, to my surprise, across the harbor. Two weeks ago I’d written off the harbor birds, but one morning, while stretching my back, I heard the familiar kew-kew coming through our walls. I walked outside to find that they were both on the nest and that the nest itself had somehow bulked up while I wasn’t looking. Perhaps they will not prove so good-for-nothing after all.

Still, while the other nests flourish, I return to Quivett, sticking to my routine, coming to the marsh daily, like a supplicant. I sit in my spot where the grass is matted down and watch and wait, occasionally flicking ticks off my sweatpants. As the season deepens, the flush time is almost here: everything is blooming except the hoary post oak (which takes its stubborn time), and soon the smell of honeysuckle will permeate the air. Downy woodpeckers fly like swallows up at Scargo Tower, and barn swallows, of course, fly even more like swallows: they zip and dart over the marsh, flashing bellies the color of cooked mussels, carving up the air. They seem intent on expending as much energy as possible at every moment, the opposite of the ospreys, who pick their spots.

I sit here, watching the birds bolster what may be a doomed nest, and listen to Don MacKenzie hammering on his house in the background. MacKenzie’s house helps me organize my thoughts on human building and helps me answer a question I consider vital: how do I use my own instinct for building to the best purpose? I like nothing better than to rail against those who construct enormous dream houses in our neighborhood, destroying Sesuit Neck’s character, but I know I’m driven by similar impulses. MacKenzie’s house reminds me of the need to root my ambition in the natural world, to keep in touch with the earth. Certainly his house is ambitious, the result of an obsessive project he will likely work on for the rest of his life. Though his energy to make a home is not rawly instinctive, it does spring from an animal base, like the osprey’s instinct for home. But he has also given consideration to what is to be done with this instinct; he has married it to thought, to reason. This is an ambition that remembers its roots in the wild but also embraces the particularly human gifts of imagination and foresight.

At the moment I am more falcon than osprey, settling in another’s home, though the other is my parent. I live here for free, squatting in a family house that would otherwise go abandoned. But I’m bothered by my inability to make my own home. Besides a few minor repairs, I’ve constructed nothing. I suppose it’s building my life here with Nina that really concerns me. This project involves patching together various, random means of support as we attempt to live close to the ocean and close to our passions. At times it isn’t easy, like the other day, when I discovered that we had a balance of $3.25 in our joint checking account. But at other times I’d like to nail a sprig of greenery to our door to convey our heightened excitement. The key seems to be that, like the MacKenzies, our lives are built on a foundation of the natural world. Before starting to write each morning, I take my tea out on the back deck to see the sun rise, and for a break I walk down to the beach to greet the seals. This may sound romantic, but it’s also practical. More and more I find that not just my work but my life depends on this direct connection with the world. It may be as simple as this: human constructs, whether architectural, philosophic, scientific, or literary, are strongest when nature serves as their base. The best of our creations are a marriage of the human and the wild, thought and instinct, the product of a place in between.

And if it’s the places in between that are most interesting and the most nourishing, then they are also the places that hold the most hope for the future. Though the footing is uncertain, I know this: it is in these lands—the lands between sea and water, science and art, low tide and high—that I’ll gather my own material. There is a life that is between our present and our past selves, our self-consciousness and our wildness. It’s a better life, I’m convinced.

Though I know I’m supposed to be out here looking for science, not stories, I can’t help but find one more lesson to be learned from house and nest. Both build on a foundation of what has come before, relying on found materials. The ospreys get what they need where they can: lately they’ve added a mesh potato sack, yellow marine line made of nylon, a white plastic grocery bag. Like the ospreys, I am somewhat sloppy of method, taking what I can, picking randomly, haphazardly. I, too, gather found materials to put to use in my life, driven by an instinct to build something, however unkempt or goofy, and I, too, frown on the persnickety, the neat, the overly proper, preferring to build a large and unkempt nest.