On Osprey Time

I’m feeling good after seeing the dives, satisfied, maybe too satisfied. If I’m due for a comeuppance, Alan Poole provides. I brag to him over the phone about the spectacular sights of my last two weeks. He takes a moment to respond.

“It’s fine to be running around on your bicycle or kayak and seeing a dive here and there,” he says finally. “But you’ve got to slow down, and spend hours at the nest. You’ve got to live on osprey time.”

When I hang up my reaction is, at first, defensive. I’m not a scientist, and this isn’t a science experiment: I don’t need to record the nest’s minutiae, how many bites of herring the female takes or what type of fish flavored this morning’s guano. While I respect Alan Poole immensely, our goals, I tell myself, are different.

But after a few minutes of rationalizing, I realize he’s right. Something’s missing. My encounters with nature tend to have a vehemence, or even a violence, to them; I like to jostle, move around, dive into. “Nature apprehends you,” a friend said to me, and that phrase makes nature itself sound aggressive, like a perpetrator. I need to stop rushing and being rushed. To put away the bike, take a deep breath, and slow down. Despite my choosing to live in a quiet place, worry often wars with peace, and worry often wins.

Nature hardly guarantees peace of mind. It’s easy enough to make our “wild” experiences as anxiety filled as anything else. Look at the campers who might as well be at home or the office, neatening up every corner of the tent, loving their gear and their lists. Or the competitive birders who could be playing Monopoly, so intensely do they go about identifying (“Aha, a ruby-throated warbler!”). This year I’ve tied my fate to the fate of the birds, and so I get anxious about “how they will do,” as if I were hoping they’d get into a good prep school. While this hasn’t turned me into a basket case, it has given an edge to the experience. I look at the way I made seeing a dive into an overweening goal, heaping all the necessary anxiety, panic, and intensity on the outcome. Now that I’ve seen a dive, and checked that item off my list, it’s on to the next worry. For the last week I’ve been fretting that none of the nests I watch will be “successful.” Success, in osprey terms, means having young that fledge, that is, fly from the nest.

We can see only so much when in movement, and I’ve been running between my four nests like a nervous nanny. To keep an eye on the immature “good-for-nothing” birds at the harbor I need only walk out my back door, but to see the other nests I now drive our fake-wood-paneled Chrysler station wagon to the sites. Since I don’t have much confidence in the harbor male as provider, I spend most of my time away from home. It’s been hard for me to give up on the Quivett nest, since the ospreys returned there first, but I must face the fact that that nest will fail. Though she might be sitting atop a second batch of eggs, my books caution me that success is unlikely. That means my hopes lie with the lopsided nest at Chapin Beach and the Simpkins Neck nest, both of these built atop platforms anchored along the winding tidal inlet known as Chase Garden Creek. Because Simpkins requires a twenty-five-minute hike through thorns and ticks, Chapin has become my regular viewing spot, and the repository of most of my hopes. Even though the other day I saw both birds off the nest at Chapin, further fueling my worries, I believe in the Chapin male’s hunting prowess. Because of this and, honestly, convenience, I find myself focusing more and more on the lopsided nest to the exclusion of the others.

As I sit and stare at the Chapin nest, it slowly sinks in that Alan Poole is right. I need to take his words as a prod to go deeper, to slow down. I’ve always liked my nature on the move, but it’s time to stow my kayak and get off my bike, and see what I can learn from stillness.

Alan has described how he and his colleagues would watch ospreys for whole days, trading on and off in four-hour shifts.

“It’s a good life the birds lead,” he said. “You’ve got to watch them do nothing. And they do a whole lot of nothing. You’ve really got to spend a lot of time at the nests to get to know them.”

And that’s what I’ll do. I’ve forced myself to do many things before, though those things have usually been of the active variety. Now I will stay still. Despite myself, I will live on osprey time.

At first it isn’t so easy. One thing that sometimes gets in the way of seeing, of settling, is writing itself. There are times when I look down to see my hand moving, scribbling in my journal all on its own, like Cousin It of the Addams Family. Isn’t this need to capture every detail a type of greed? Isn’t it, as much as moneymaking, a symptom of unquenchable acquisitiveness?

Back in early April I tried a small experiment at the Quivett nest. I wondered if I could put my journal aside and sit still, sinking below words for a while. Stowing my watch, pens, tape recorder, and journal in my backpack, I hiked out near the nest, sitting on the bank above the creek. I tried to empty my mind of thought, tried to stop narrating my own life for just a short while. My goal was to see the place, and nothing but the place, and not let the mosquito-like hum of worry interfere.

I hunkered low, out of the wind, and watched the nest. Two Canada geese landed in the creek in their silly way, like awkward puppets held up by wires, and as I watched and thought—wanting desperately to grab a pen and write down the bit about “awkward puppets”—I realized just how ingrained my need to scribble had become, how deep my fear of losing my thoughts by not writing them down. But I didn’t let myself run for my journal, and I resisted the urge to carve sentences in the mud with my boot. Instead I tried to quiet myself again and stare at the opposite bank, focusing on the pockmarks of muck. They looked like something out of a dream, miniature Anasazi dwellings.

For a short while my experiment seemed to work. I stared at the incoming creek with dumb wonder, not letting any thoughts adhere or cling, ideas soughing like the wind through the phragmites. In no time I felt reawakened, felt I was beginning to achieve the stillness I desired. Then, soon enough, the old sensation of uneasiness replaced that of peace. I got antsy and cold. But I forced myself to sit still. Finally, after a seemingly interminable period went by, I gave in. I walked over to my backpack, took out my watch, and stared at it. Seven minutes had passed.

If I want a role model for patience I need look no further than the incubating female ospreys. For all four females, even the Quivett mother and her second batch of eggs, this is a period of concentration and the slowing down of time. In some species of raptors, females lose even the instinct to hunt and kill while incubating. All food is provided by the male. While the osprey males do all the hunting, they are relatively modern fathers, taking occasional turns at incubating. But most of the sedentary work is done by the female and, according to Poole’s book, the distaff bird always takes the night shift. In the “hawk book,” Brown and Amadon write that more observation needs to be done on the incubation period, but they note that watching incubation is “an exceedingly boring pastime.” After a whole lot of “boring” time at the nest, Alan Poole calculates that incubation lasts from thirty-five to forty-three days, with an average of thirty-nine. That’s a long time to sit. While other birds of prey spend time off their eggs without harming them, at the nests I watch the eggs are rarely left uncovered, perhaps, I speculate, because an osprey nest is so open to both the elements and enemies.

At Chapin and Simpkins Neck deep nesting has been going on since just past mid-April, which means they should be hatching and makes me worry that something has gone wrong. The eggs, if there are eggs, would have been laid at intervals of a day or more, the first being the largest. First laid, first hatched is the osprey rule, giving the eldest a great competitive advantage of age and size. Among birds of prey, the smaller species generally have the largest clutch size—kestrels, for instance, sometimes lay half a dozen eggs or more—and ospreys follow this precept, usually laying three eggs, though sometimes two or four.

Every expert weighs in with a different description of the eggs, probably because there is some variety, but basically they are large, white or whitish, and splattered with brownish or red markings. The three eggs that I see, in a box in a drawer in a back room at the natural history museum, are beautiful: creamy yellow-white freckled with chestnut blotches that clump together at the ends of the eggs. The spotting and clumping of the freckles remind me of my father’s back after too many summers shirtless out on his boat. The eggs have been drained through a tiny hole in one end, leaving them nearly weightless, and I delicately turn them over and over. The small sheet of paper within the box tells me that they were found seventy feet up in a live cedar fir on May 11, 1900, almost exactly ninety-nine years ago. Back then naturalists and bird lovers were just as likely as poachers to want to add these beautiful eggs to their collections.

Eggs just like these are now, hopefully, being incubated in at least three of our neighborhood nests. Osprey eggs spend a month or more in the soft grass padding at the bottom of the nest, resting below the female’s belly or, more specifically, her brood patch, a patch of skin that develops specifically for incubation. This featherless spot thickens and pumps full with blood vessels, producing heat, and is common among all birds.

The ospreys seem to be hunkering down even further as May nudges toward June. At the Simpkins nest I can barely see the mother’s head and hooked bill, and even the harbor pair is getting the hang of it. Though their home is still a slipshod mess, like the remains at the end of a bad yard sale, there are encouraging signs. While I can’t shake my prejudice against this trashy couple, living in the midst of a construction project, by June 1 the female seems to be nesting deeply, lowering herself and tightening the seal, and the formerly irresponsible male has been more conscientious about bringing home the fish.

If they can do it, why can’t I?

In my attempts to be more still I enlist habit as my ally. Without habit, after all, I wouldn’t be able to do anything. Perhaps the most important lesson that daily writing has taught me is the iron strength of routine. Nonwriters have funny ideas about “inspiration,” about how it must catch a person up in a romantic frenzy and send them running for their pen. Of course, this does happen once in a great while, but more often it’s just a case of sitting down at the same time every day. Strangely enough, the simple activity of placing your butt in a chair with some regularity can start to fool the mind into mimicking the “inspired” state. “Workaday exaltation” doesn’t just apply to Emerson and the ospreys.

If inspiration can become habitual, why not patience? I’ve tried to bring more of a sense of ritual to my osprey mornings. My routine consists of getting up at dawn, stretching my back, and putting on water for tea. While the water boils I walk out on the back deck to check in with the harbor nest. When my water is ready, I take binoculars, boots, journal, and field guides and throw them in the back of our station wagon. Though I feel a vague, occasional prick of disloyalty, I rarely check in with the failed Quivett nest, instead heading directly to Chapin. I drive down roads lined with just-blooming rugosa roses and lilacs that drip like grapes from the trees, sometimes growing as high as the phone wires. As I head north toward the beach I pass a stone wall from another life, a wall I built with my younger brother for ten bucks an hour. Then Wild Hunter Road comes up on my right, a sign that I usually note with pleasure (hoping secretly, as I do, to become a wild hunter myself). Next I pass Joe Mac’s, its sign, in the maroon and blue color scheme of an old Schlitz can, featuring a cartoon clam with big eyes. Sometimes I remember my miserable days working as a dishwasher within those walls; most times, thankfully, I don’t.

I pass Gina’s by the Sea, our local bar-restaurant, and take a left on Dr. Botero’s Road, which constitutes the home stretch to Chapin Beach. If ospreys are sometimes called “trash birds,” then the last streets leading to Chapin are trash streets. Old sandy roads where my father occasionally got stuck on his way to fish, roads lined with dune shacks giving the area a scraggly, forever-summer feel, places constructed in a sloppy osprey style of architecture. I park in the Chapin lot. While ospreys could live in the houses along the road, this parking lot, with its Porta Potti and overspilling trash-littered dunes, is the kind of place where gulls would congregate if gulls were people. It’s a hot spot for four-wheelers, and from here the oversized cars bomb down to the beach, windows rolled up, air conditioners and radios blasting. This lot acts as their launching pad, where they make final preparations, letting air out of their tires before setting about destroying plover and tern habitat. It doesn’t do any good to try to convince them that the time the birds expend avoiding their monster cars means less for eating and resting, that is, less energy for survival. Most of them remain happily combative, conceding nothing, and sport bumper stickers that read piping plover tastes like chicken.

While the four-wheelers drive to the beach, I, after pulling on my rubber boots, set out in the opposite direction, to the marsh. On foot now, I follow the road for a bit, past beach plum and bayberry. I climb down onto the marsh’s edge, over mussel shells and spongy glasswort. Poverty grass, sea lavender, and marsh elder usher me into this place between water and land, and crab shells litter the spartina, some baked orange by the sun, some bleached white, so well cooked that they crumble, not crunch, under foot. Then comes the standard osprey greeting: as I get closer to the lopsided nest they let off their shrill warning cries but, used to me by now, remain on the nest. This pair is smart and understood quickly I would come only so close. Which is another reason I’ve begun to watch Chapin almost exclusively.

I set up camp at a respectful distance, a hundred feet or so away. Mine is a fairly amateurish operation, and, still waiting for my mail-order telescope, I use only my old binoculars. I unfold a nylon beach chair with a blue-and-white checkered pattern, take out the binoculars and journal, and set to watching.

Despite the consistency of my new routine, the first few days are failures, at least as far as living on osprey time goes. I’ve managed to spend more time than I ever have before “in the field,” though not nearly what Alan Poole recommended. My mind constantly races back home to obligations, to my things-to-do list, to the computer that’s been gathering dust. I agree with the hawk book authors on the frustrations of watching incubation. What is the point of just sitting here? The birds, for their part, do very little.

Finally, on June 3, during the second week of my attempt to live on osprey time, something unusual occurs at the lopsided Chapin nest. The ospreys greet my morning arrival with more than the usual vocalizations, both of them lifting off from the nest and buzzing me, warning me away. Showing respect, I stay farther back, but I worry that this is a dire sign, especially when the female stays off the nest for a full five minutes. It occurs to me that she would never leave her eggs for that long if she were still incubating. The implications are obvious: she can no longer be nesting, and I unhappily conclude I’m watching another failed nest.

“They are definitely not nesting and they don’t seem to have any young,” I write despairingly in my journal.

Everything changes the next day, June 4.

Tired of my half-hearted efforts, I promise myself that today, finally, I will live on osprey time. In keeping to this promise, I’m out on the marsh early. Beach grass shines silvery green against the ocean’s blue, and, as I slosh up to my watching point, the Chapin birds greet me as they did yesterday, both flying off the nest, leaving me with a sinking feeling. Today’s warning is even more aggressive, the female expressing a higher degree of agitation, whistling a singular whistle, not the kew-kew-kew of standard warning. When she dives near me, tucking and darting, I decide to take her seriously, and back off a full fifty feet from my usual spot. She settles down just after I do; by sitting, I signal I’m coming no closer, and she, understanding this, retreats to the nest. The thing that puzzles me most about this new greeting is that they’d grown so used to me just a week ago. Even if the nest has failed, her adamancy strikes me as odd.

Two minutes later she’s forgotten about me and proceeds as if I’m not here. It seems I’ve interrupted a meal, which may, I decide, be the reason for her agitation. It’s sushi for breakfast again, and I watch her tear into what might be a trout, pinning the fish with her talons and ripping at it with her sharp bill. “They must like fish a whole lot,” Nina said the other day, and I couldn’t argue. The female bends down to tear and then lifts her head to swallow, bobbing slightly. Occasionally she bends low in the nest in an unusual way, a behavior I haven’t observed before. I note this in my journal.

After the meal the morning lags. For the next two hours the male mans the ground roost thirty feet from the nest while the female putters around on the nest itself, occasionally dipping her head low. Practicing my own new art, that of patience, I watch the long shadows and shifting sun, the spartina lit up an Easter-basket green. Over the course of the morning the sky’s blue gradually erases last night’s sliver moon, while I sit, listening to the whine of the nearby aquaculture plant and watching a small band of green herons hunt. The morning’s big event occurs when a kamikaze wood duck flies by, looking for a minute like it will crash into the nest.

I watch swallows indulge in their usual sky dances, racing their own shadows over the grass. The swallows actually provide more entertainment than the ospreys, which makes sense, given their hyperactive lives. The small birds peep as they fly near, little rocket bodies feinting and jabbing, then darting away. The other night I wasn’t surprised to read that some swallows, like swifts, mate in the air. It makes perfect sense since air is their element, and to do anything while attached to the ground would seem against their natures.

But, I remind myself, I’m not here to watch swallows, and I’m not here for “entertainment.” I’m here to slow down and settle, to watch the ospreys, and so I train my binoculars on them, blocking out the rest of the marsh while the birds laze through their morning. As with looking for the dive, and as with an osprey searching for a fish, a goal by definition limits and simplifies the world. I now limit my vision to the nest. Though little happens, I watch it closely for two hours, then three, then three and a half. If scientists can do it, I tell myself, then so can I. For good stretches I even manage to lose myself in their world, noting that from some angles the male looks almost like an enormous pileated woodpecker; from others, briefly, part vulture. By contrast, the female appears partridgelike and dowdy, browner, duller, maybe because she hasn’t had the chance to wash much while nesting (the male, of course, takes several daily plunges). At one point an intruding osprey flies over, a neighbor or migrant perhaps, and the Chapin pair rise up into the air in defense, letting off agitated guard calls that slur together with a sound close to clicking. The intruder, larger than the Chapin female, slowly circles up and away, toward the sun, revealing the angular band on his underwing and long feather fingers.

Though for moments—for glimpses—I’m drawn into osprey time, for the most part sitting here is an act of will. I glance at my watch, again drawn back to the business of the ordinary human world. Then, right before the four-hour limit is up, right before I’ve fulfilled my Alan Poole requirement and am ready to pack up and head home, the male flaps off toward the bay, leaving the female alone on the nest. I decide I should wait until he returns so that I can witness a second feeding, giving my long morning some closure. A half hour passes before he returns over the dunes and settles on an old wood post, his secondary perch, by the aquaculture plant, almost a quarter mile from the nest. This time I’m sure it’s a trout, though I wonder at this, since he’d flown off in the direction of the ocean, not the lake. Whatever it is, it flops under his great snowshoe talons while he glances around casually, letting his prey die its excruciating death. As well as ignoring the fish, he ignores his mate, who shoots her piercing begging cries across the marsh. Finally, he starts tearing into the trout’s mouth, revealing its shining inner white, ripping the skin free with characteristic savage screwdriver twists. He makes short work of the fish and in ten minutes is down to the eye. The female’s begging cries increase in intensity until they sound almost frantic, like a high-pitched whelp. Five minutes later, the fish half eaten, the male flies back to the nest and hands off what’s left. She snags it in her talons and takes a short hop-flight away from him to the nest’s other side, while he alights on the crossbar, a foot above her.

This is where I came in this morning, at this point in the feeding, and I can leave feeling I’ve watched a full cycle. But something about the way she feeds keeps me in my seat. The nature of what I’m actually seeing is finally beginning to dawn on me when she doesn’t dip quite as low with the next morsel of fish, and I see—or only half-believe I see—a quick flash of something pop up toward her bill. Though every ounce of me wants to believe that what I just saw was a nestling, I can’t quite bring myself to—not yet. But as I watch the female tear off another piece of fish and then bend low, tilting her head and delicately placing the food, it occurs to me that this must be what I’m seeing. Now her behavior makes perfect sense. It explains not only this new style of feeding but the recent intensity of the pair’s protectiveness. And of course, if she’s no longer incubating, it also explains her new willingness to leave the nest entirely.

I watch closer, excited now, though still doubting. When she gobbles the next few pieces without dipping down I start to lose faith in what I saw. But then I see it again. More clearly. First one, then another little ball-like head reaching up on a thin uncertain neck, popping up over the nest’s rim and into sight. There are nestlings here! Unbelievably, stupidly, I’ve somehow managed to completely misread the signs of what I was seeing, taking what was success for failure. Now the mother—mother!—tears off another strand and dips down to one of the little heads and I have my best view yet. This act of feeding beautifully marries savagery and delicacy. If the tearing of the fish is savage, the feeding itself is the most gentle, loving act: she reaches down with a bill more delicate than a debutante’s pinky finger and places the torn morsel into her child’s mouth. Sometimes after she’s placed the food and the nestlings are swallowing, she’ll study them with a cocked head, as if to say, Have you had enough?

While she hunches maternally, attentively, feeding first one, then another, the male stands aloof on the crossbar, feathers ruffling in the wind, as if these matters barely concerned him. Most of the time I can only see hints of the brood, the female ducking down out of sight with the fish, and when I do get glimpses of the nestlings they look not so much like birds as inverted exclamation points. They wobble uncertainly, rising up for only a second or so on their brand-new necks. But as tentative, as purely goofy, as these cartoon silhouettes look, they fill me with excitement. There is something so basic, so archetypal, about this act of feeding. While understanding that new life is an ordinary thing, I can’t help but feel that what I’m witnessing is extraordinary.

I watch for another hour, thrilled every time I catch a glimpse of the newborn birds. But when the feeding ends, so do the sightings. From reading Alan Poole’s book I can roughly imagine the situation in the nest: the nestlings have now collapsed, exhausted from the effort of lifting themselves, falling back down into a downy bundle to sleep away most of the day, brooded by the female. Of course, they have already been through a great struggle to get just this far in life. It often takes a day or more of chipping for the newborns to break their way out of the eggs. In the raptor world, unlike the human one, parents don’t help much, maybe occasionally, almost inadvertently, giving a little aid in breaking open the shell with their own feet or bills. Most of the work is done with the egg tooth, the small hard knob on the upper mandible of the bill, which the emerging chick wields like a small spiked mallet. Following evolution’s perfect timing, the egg tooth will disappear over the next week, as will the mother’s brood patch.

If the chicks emerge tired, they also emerge hungry. The next month will be a constantly changing adventure of growth, a challenge not just for the young but for the parents. For instance, no sooner do the female’s incubatory efforts end than the male’s increased hunting requirements begin. I find myself experiencing a funny sense of companionability with the male osprey as he rests on his primary post. To put it simply, I am confident that this particular dad—sinewy, wily, a jock—will be up to the task ahead. To put it even more simply, I like and trust him.

My reading has taught me some things about the nestlings, but what I don’t know is just how old they are, and I excitedly flip back in my journal, trying to see if there were earlier days when I recorded the female coming off the nest. I figure they’re a week old, tops, maybe only a day or two, but I can’t be sure. I know that newborn chicks are covered in their first down—“a short, thick, buff colored plumage” according to Poole—but my binoculars don’t allow me to truly determine the coloring; from this distance they just look dark. Whatever their exact age, what concerns me most is that they are here. That I’ve seen my first young of the season.

On the way home I feel like pulling over to buy cigars. I can’t get over my good fortune. The moment of seeing the nestling’s head was so surprising that it rivals watching my first dive. If I’d left the nest after three hours, even after four hours, I’d have thought it was just another day, usual except for some minorly aberrant behavior. But because I stayed longer I was allowed to witness a great drama, a spectacle. Though it runs a far second to wonder, I also feel a little pride regarding the morning’s immersion. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t kept in one place, and though it was an enforced patience, it was patience still. And it lifted into something higher, the last hour and a half at the nest passing in no time at all, a blink. If this morning I felt annoyed, peevish, as if having to stay at the nest were an obligation, an item to be checked off a list, then watching the young feed was anything but. For a short while I felt absorbed in the world of ospreys, knee deep in meaning, exalted even, part of a larger cycle of birth and return.

The next day it’s a little harder to feel quite as exalted, in large part thanks to the gnats. They think I’m the greatest thing to hit the marsh since fish guts. While yesterday’s fall-like wind kept bugs away, today is summer still, and as I write in my journal my hair and arms, and the journal page itself, crawl with insects. I’ve settled back farther away from the nest now, though the birds greeted me with the usual lap or two of warning flight this morning. Today, of course, I didn’t take this as a sign of despair.

Excited by what I’ve seen here, I’ve decided to ignore the other nests for the day. I’ve been here four hours, since dawn, and despite the film of sweat and insect corpses covering me, it’s been another absorbing morning. One of the best sights was a tiny chick perched high on the nest, peering over the platform’s side as if off the edge of the world. At that moment I caught a glimpse of the bird’s tail, discovering it was a little bigger than I’d imagined yesterday. (Of course, given the furious rate of growth, it isn’t impossible to see day-to-day change.) When the chick got too close to the nest’s edge, the female bustled over to keep it from falling out, herding it back with maternal pips. I don’t think this demonstrated overly paranoid concern on the mother’s part, given the generally spasmodic nature of the chicks’ movements. They awkwardly propel themselves around the nest, flopping and flailing. Their necks wobble, and their wings, not really wings at all yet, flap out of control in a caricature of flight. So unwinglike are these appendages, in fact, that the first few times I see them flop I fear that one of the young birds has broken its long neck.

I still can’t be certain how many nestlings there are. I’ve seen at least two above the nest rim, and once thought I saw three. Whatever the number, they’re insatiable little creatures. When father brings a fish to the crossbar, they stumble, stretch, and strain toward it, the embodiment of yearning. I still can’t get over what a delicate operation the feeding process is—the ripping tear and gentle placement by the mother—and I try to get the head tilt just right when I draw it. I also find myself calling this movement “human,” as if members of our species were the greatest practitioners of all things delicate and gentle. Given the fact that even human locomotion, the way we walk, is little more than catching ourselves after stumbling forward, this might be a false assumption. And given the tools the female is working with, a hooked, cutting beak and sharp jagged talons, I doubt many humans could manage such delicacy. How many of us would want to try feeding a baby with hedge clippers?

When the migrant intruder makes his daily visit, the young disappear below the rim of the nest, as if on Mother’s order. Today she stays with them while the male drives off the strange bird. Later, the threat passed, she settles down low with the nestlings, and I take a break, walking over to the beach for a swim, hoping to clean off the heat and slime of the marsh. The water’s warm over the flats, but cold enough to rid me of the layer of muck and bugs. Since no one’s around I dry naked for a while. With the wind blowing over me, and two days of witnessing miraculous sights behind me, I’m feeling particularly strong and hopeful, but I’ve barely got my pants back on when I’m brought down to earth. A four-wheeler bounds and charges down the beach in my direction, its windows rolled down, blaring Neil Diamond’s “Turn On Your Heart Light.”

I hurry back to my seat on the marsh, worried about having left my journal on the lawn chair. On the way back to my chair I imagine the male osprey swooping down and snaring my journal in his talons, bringing it back to the nest, handing it off to the female. Then I imagine the female tearing my pages into small pieces with her beak, delicately feeding my words to her young.

Four days later the nestlings are entirely different animals. They grow at an absurd rate. They will become almost full-grown ospreys in thirty days, the most dramatic change coming over the next three weeks. I note that June 9 is the first time they look like real birds, like miniature versions of the adults. And that is the day that, for the first time, I can distinguish size differences between them, one definitely larger and stronger, as well as more alert, than the other two. When the male flies a short lap to defecate and then alights on the crossbar, the strongest nestling pops its head up quickly to see if it’s fish yet.

I find it easier and easier to get up early, to spend time out on the marsh. In The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen writes of watching mountain sheep in the Himalayas: “I chew bread, in this wonderful immersion in pure sheep-ness.” This has been a week of pure osprey-ness. I don’t pretend that a handful of days watching the nest through binoculars has transformed me; I make no claims to enlightenment. But I can say this: the more time I spend like this, the more days I spend outside, the closer I become to the creature I’d most like to be. Getting outside—both out of doors and outside my own brain—is how it starts. And the more I discipline myself to slow down, to notice things, to stay still, the more confident I become that I can really live a life in closer touch with older ways and older rhythms.

The discipline, of course, is the hard part. It’s easy to look back at the first day I saw the nestlings and only remember the joyous sight of the first head popping up. But for hours that day the most interesting thing about the nest was the naked Barbie doll plastered to the northeast wall. As with almost anything worthwhile, it’s the dull hours spent staying in your seat that are the foundation, the fundament. The seat of learning, in this case, is the butt. We talk about patience as if it were an innate trait, like being tall or blue-eyed, a thing we either have or don’t, not something learned. But while I’m naturally about the least patient person I know—always wanting it all right now—I’ve gradually come to see that I can train myself to slow down, to look, listen, and occasionally actually be in the present, holding back from shooting off to future plans or retreating to past comforts. Real patience means putting in the dull hours and trusting that the occasional lift will come. And while you can’t force grace, you can put yourself out where grace is.

That’s the central paradox of slowing down: it leads to excitement that is often dazzling. What, after all, surprises and delights us? Speed. Growth. Quantity. Vibrancy. Variety. These are the qualities the natural world presents if we simply sit still and open our eyes. This world may seem dull at first, but when it opens to you, it opens like spring, in a great rush: rapid, enormous change flowering in a thousand ways. Like the growth of the birds over the last few days, it presents everyday miracles. In this respect, living on older rhythms proves to be a bit of a cheat. It turns out you can have it all: when you live more slowly, the world’s excitement intensifies, and you end up walking around smiling like a man with a secret. I only have to think of all the things I’ve never seen until the past two months to elicit that same smile: An osprey dive. An oystercatcher. A marsh wren. A green heron’s hunt. Grosbeaks and towhees. A red-winged blackbird’s eggs and nest. And if I really want to grin, I can think of that moment when I saw the nestling’s head pop up. I’ll put that up against a good day on the stock market anytime.

“Time is money,” I joked to Hones once when he was lagging during a hiking trip in the White Mountains. Time can be money, or power, or control, or lots of things. For me there have been plenty of occasions when time was writing, working frantically to erect monuments of words, sentences, books. Sometimes, taken by these ambitious moods, I like to secretly plot out the next two, three, or even five years: imagining the books I’ll write, the dates I’ll finish them. Like many of us, I have a hunter in me who enjoys throwing spears at targets, and targets fill life with a certain juice. But, having said that, I find that being too goal-conscious, looking too hard for the dive, leads to a rigid way of seeing, a constant comparison of some fictional life with the actual moments you’re living today.

On the one hand, goals greatly reduce our chances of living on osprey time. Out of fear we put blinders on, forever narrowing the scope of our concerns. We forget that the concerns that seem so passionately important to us are just concerns, not too different from those that other creatures have. When the Chapin male flies over toward his hunting grounds, he couldn’t care less about me. Money and success, seen through another set of eyes, are just so much fish. On the other hand, fish are how ospreys live. Fail, and they die. In fact, you can’t get much more goal-focused than the ospreys, particularly at this time of year. They live by killing, by achieving enough kills per day, every day. I admire the Chapin male because his life seems as focused as an arrow; I laugh at the younger harbor birds, who fritter away their precious energy.

If watching the birds makes me question specific goals, it doesn’t make me question the importance of goals themselves. I am still ambitious; it’s just that my ambitions are changing. Why not go directly to the root of the thing? Our complex relationship with time, our many names for it, revolves around the fact that someday our time will end. I need to directly face the fact that this body that holds me will rot—has already begun to rot—and to not run from this fact. Of course, this leads to the inevitable pun on “settling.” We get jittery when we commit to a place because it reminds us of our final commitment. My father has settled in East Dennis in a way that I can’t yet hope to rival.

Though I want to slow down, I’m not quite ready to sink into the dirt. If I don’t believe that I’ve managed to completely live on osprey time—and I don’t, nowhere close—I do believe that being with the birds and watching their lives has made a difference. Over the last week or two I’ve become a little more patient, and I’m beginning to understand a little better what patience is. For now I’ll just keep driving myself out here, putting my butt in the chair, and keeping my eyes and ears open. That, at least, is a start.