A Deeper Vision

My new telescope, a Bushnell 60mm Spacemaster, changes everything. It arrives via UPS, and the world transforms. A technophobe, I’m loath to admit that a tool can make such a difference, but it does. Where I’d feared that adding another lens would put distance between me and the birds, it has the opposite effect. Much more than the binoculars, which I’m forever setting down or adjusting, the scope forces me to leave myself behind. All that exists is what I see through the viewfinder.

Suddenly there’s a whole new level of vision. I’m inside the nest with the birds. Everything becomes more vivid, colors and shapes taking on an almost hallucinatory intensity. I see the pink insides of the nestlings’ mouths, the buff streak down the backs of their necks, the reddish hue in the trout’s tail that the Chapin male devours. The ospreys become individuals; for the first time I really see their faces. The white tufted crowns above the masks, like pompadours, the sharp black overbite hook of the bill, the swirling chocolate masks around the eyes, and, most of all, the eyes themselves. The eyes shine a fierce yellow, perfectly round, containing a perfectly round black pupil, the outer eye encircled by another ring of black, as if painted with savage eyeliner. But that is the wrong image: with the scope anthropomorphism becomes harder. The eyes look predatory, intent, like nothing human. And it’s not just the eyes, with their glaring stares and black pupils, but the tongue, too. The nestlings’ tongues dart out pink, the color of grade-school erasers, but the older birds’ tongues are darker, and now it’s not so hard to believe that these birds evolved from reptiles. Sometimes the warning cries and the movements of the bills don’t quite match up, like in an old Japanese Godzilla movie, and the tongues stick out when the bills open. What kind of tongues do ospreys have? I write in my journal. It seems a new kind of question, better than my old vaguely philosophic ones, reflecting the specificity of my new vision.

Feedings become events. Now I can really see the delicate placement of food in the nestlings’ mouths, and it’s even more savage and beautiful than I’d thought. I see the ripping of the fish, the mother’s head shaking as she pulls off a long strand of skin, the quick pull back when it rips free, a sight so visceral that you’re surprised you can’t hear an accompanying tear. Then she delicately tilts her head and places the morsel into the gaping mouth of the chick. Her bill is much more hooked and pointed than I’d noticed before, more dangerous and sharp, and her talons, which pin the fish to the nest, much larger, like grappling hooks, which makes the gentleness of the act all the more impressive. She tilts her head like a nervous teenager hesitating before making out for the first time. But as delicate as her act is, there’s a jostling among the nestlings that I couldn’t see before through the binoculars, an intense yearning and battle for the scraps of fish. The pecking order, formerly a concept I read about in books, becomes real. With the scope I make out four nestlings at Chapin—an exceptional nest!—and while the first chick eats, the second and third battle for position, a battle that number three consistently loses. The mother takes her time, doling out chunks, most to the dominant bird but occasional bites to number two. When they are both full she turns to number three, while the smallest of nestlings, the runt, clearly out of the running, stays on the other side of the nest—dejectedly, I can’t help but project—moving tiny sticks around and patting them down in miniature imitation of his parents’ housekeeping.

More and more, my time centers on Chapin, due in part to the sheer excited activity at that nest. I am specializing, centering in on what I want to see. I often focus the scope on the Chapin female during the feeding, but when I enter the world through the viewfinder there’s something particularly fierce about the profile of the male. While she hasn’t had a bath in a while, and looks as disheveled as the nest, his feathers still present a sharp contrast of black-brown and clean white. Wind sometimes adds devil’s horns to the tufts of white atop his head, and when he returns with a fish, he will rip into it, no matter the commotion of begging at the nest. This practical selfishness is particularly necessary now, since he has to spend up to three or four hours a day fishing to support the brood. When he tears at a fish you can really make out the screwdriver twist—he gets his shoulder blades down into it—and if he tears off a particularly long strand he will sometimes throw his head back and catch it in midair. If athleticism is variable in the animal world, I stick to my original contention that the Chapin male is the neighborhood’s best fisherman. Were I to choose one bird to support a brood of four, he would be it. Unlike the harbor male, who, despite his new title as father, seems to like to show off the fish he catches, flying by the nest in taunting circles like a football player dancing in the end zone, the Chapin bird works in a direct, no-nonsense fashion. He can’t afford the fancy stuff. The harbor pair are a bit like teenage human parents; they don’t quite believe parenthood is happening, sooner than they expected, and sometimes seem to half-play at what they are doing. But the Chapin male is deadly serious. When he flies the remains of a trout over to the nest I study his long, vivid white legs, built for reaching down into the water. White feathered knickers grow halfway down, until they are replaced by the scales, the bottoms of the toes studded with spicules. The talons themselves look awkward and oversized, and when he stomps around the nest, he sometimes gets sticks or seaweed caught in them by accident. But if awkward here, how perfect when set to the task they were built for, the catching of fish. Through the scope I can see that the poor fish must not just be speared but also trapped, enclosed, when the enormous and deadly cage of the talons descends on it.

The scope makes empathy with the birds more intense, but it also brings me closer to the fishes’ plight. It’s no longer so easy to haze over the sheer savagery of the ospreys’ daily work. One morning, June 13, I watch the Chapin male fly back to the nest with a still-wriggling trout. The fish must weigh two pounds, more than half as much as the bird does, and its gills still open and close, struggling for breath. As usual, on the nest the male ignores his prey. He stares off in the distance with an impassive deadly gaze, his head held up, proud and still, wind ruffling his feathers. There is nothing extraneous to the Chapin male’s body, or to his attitude. Certainly he has no time to waste on pity. He holds the fish in one foot, not even in all the talons but between two, as if pinned there by calipers. He opens and flaps his wings once or twice, adjusting his stance, but is generally content to let the fish die on its own. I study the yellow and black stripes of the scales, watch the fish flop again, and then I’m surprised, caught off guard, when the osprey jabs its bill violently down into the still-living trout’s head. Meanwhile, the female tries to feed the nestlings the remains of an earlier catch, but they’re not interested. They know fresh fish when they see it, and they crowd around the male, their oversized wings flopping, staring up at the pink-red meat of the trout. He ignores them and rips the fish apart, taking particular pleasure when he gets to the intestines, slurping them up like long spaghetti strands. Finally, over half the fish eaten, he pauses and weighs his decision, balancing the tastiness of the trout against the needs of his family. The trout wins. I know exactly how he feels when he turns more slowly back to his meal. He bends down, looking almost reluctant, tired, staring at his food just the way I do when Hones cooks dryrub ribs—bloated but not quite ready to quit.

The telescope makes me feel part of the family scene, and it’s revolutionary in another way, too. When I focus in on the nest itself, the background trees, another hundred yards off, become hazy and unfocused. The oak trees turn vague and then fluid, a background mosaic of pulsing green, and last year’s phragmites shine brown-yellow even as this year’s green swallows them. Against this arty backdrop, like an impressionistic stage setting, the actors in the nest gleam even more defined and sharp. Occasionally this presents a contrast of the pastoral and gritty, like when I see the sun glimmer off the male’s bill and, focusing in, realize that its sharp black point glistens with fish blood.

In some light the ospreys’ eyes have that same gleam, as if the pupils themselves were wet with the insides of fish. Again and again I’m drawn back to the eyes. There are moments when the female will turn her yellow irises right on me, with vision nearly as strong as my scope, and stare until I grow uneasy. There’s a cartoon element to the eyes, a perfect circle and black dot, easily drawn, but if you try to stare down an osprey you’ll soon find there’s nothing funny about it. I wouldn’t want to go eye-to-eye with the bird. They bring us directly into our past, when we weren’t so firmly ensconced on top of the food chain. They present an aesthetic of savagery, leaving little doubt about what they would do to us if we were small enough and swimming.

An osprey’s vision is almost eight times greater than a human being’s, but that only begins to hint at their acuity. All birds rely heavily on vision, predators in particular. A raptor’s eyes are one of nature’s great inventions, the most acute in the animal kingdom. Some eagles and hawks have eyes as big as a human’s, obviously much larger in proportion to their body size and taking up a good portion of their heads. The section of the eye we can see, the exposed cornea, is only a small part of the eyeball, an eyeball that’s virtually jammed in its socket. Because of this ocular tight fit, the eyes themselves don’t move much, but this is made up for by the great flexibility of the birds’ heads and necks. In A New Dictionary of Birds, A. Landsborough Thomson writes, “In birds such as hawks or owls which have frontal eyes, and therefore a relatively small visual field, the head can turn well over 180 degrees.”

Like all diurnal birds, ospreys see the world in living color. Having never quite recovered from reading as a child that dogs viewed life in black and white—like a grainy 1950s TV, I imagined—I was glad to learn that most birds see the world pretty much as we do, if with far greater accuracy. Raptors, scanning the ground or water from hundreds and sometimes thousands of feet in the air, must be able to focus in on prey as intensely as I focus through my scope. “Birds of prey have rounder or almost tubular eyes,” writes Roger Tory Peterson. “These take in less territory than flat ones do, but see farther and in greater detail, pinpointing living targets with the precision of a bombsight.” A falcon, for instance, can recognize a dove from three thousand feet—or ten football fields—away and can pick out a waving handkerchief from fifty-one hundred feet. Peterson continues: “A bird has more sensory cells in its eyes than other animals have, particularly in the area of the fovea, a small depression in the retina at the point of acutest vision. The fovea’s convex sides help magnify part of the image—as much as 30 per cent in some bird species. The retinas of hawks are from four to eight times more sensitive as those of humans, making these birds the keenest-sighted of all living things.” Birds, then, see not only farther but more clearly than we do.

An osprey is a hawk adapted for fishing, the variations most obvious when looking at the size, the scaliness (the gripping spicules, for instance), and the flexibility of the legs and talons. But evolution has also fine-tuned osprey vision for peering into sun-spangled waters, even down to the smallest details. An eye structure called the nictitating membrane allows birds to focus while diving, and some biologists believe that genetic specialization even accounts for the bandit masks they wear, dark eyebands that reduce glare, like the eye-black that pro football players smear on during games.

At Chapin I’m given daily demonstrations of the birds’ ocular superiority and my own inferiority. If there is a visual pecking order, I know who the runt is. The mother and nestlings start their begging calls, a chorus of high-pitched pleas, well before the one they beg for becomes even a dot on my horizon. Sure enough, soon enough, the male will appear, gradually coming into weak human sight, carrying a fish.

A new clarity illuminates the days. Honeysuckle sweetens the air and the post oak’s leaves wave big and waxy, no longer mere drooping half leaves. We approach the solstice, the annual climax of light, the days when we see longest and clearest. The other night a luminescent apple core, cleanly split in half, stood in for the moon, and later fireflies sparkled. I sleep rocked by a larger rhythm, the ocean breathing in and out. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand why ospreys choose to live near water. On some nights I walk down to watch the world’s eye sink: the sun drops into the water of the bay, staining the sky with pinks, yellows, and oranges.

On June 14 the air swirls with pollen like snow, covering windshields. That night, over drinks, I set up the scope for Nina and my mother, who ooh and ahh as the ospreys feed at the harbor nest. Never before—at least not in the last fifty years, and probably a good deal longer—has the town of Dennis witnessed such a profusion of young ospreys. With three nestlings at Simpkins Neck, three across the harbor, and four at Chapin, our town is doing its part in the New England osprey comeback. These are fecund days, with three of the four nests succeeding, and I haven’t entirely given up on the fourth. I now have a crazy hunch, with everything going so well, that the Quivett nest will be successful, too. Why not? I feel the luck of a gambler on a roll and the next morning, June 15, I’m there early. I clean bird droppings off my father’s grave and throw out the old geraniums. The marsh bristles with a rainy, lush green, nothing like the marsh I first came to back in March. Two young white-tailed deer, their coats brownish-red, graze right in front of me, not fifteen feet away. When they notice me they run off like stray dogs, only transforming back into deer to hop over the creek. Once they’ve run a hundred feet, they stop and stare back at me. I train the scope on them: their coats shine red-brown and beautiful, their bodies slender, with no fat at all.

The female osprey is off the nest, and there’s no indication of nestlings or feedings or even eggs. Maybe the second batch, if there was ever a second batch, has failed, too. I feel a pang of sympathy for this early-bird pair, having seemingly floundered despite their conscientiousness. They are the neighborhood nerds, shining an apple for the teacher and stacking their papers neatly, doing everything right but felled by that uncontrollable variable: bad luck. It isn’t something you want to think about too long: how preparation and hard work sometimes don’t mean a thing. I still don’t know what did them in. Likely the thief was a raccoon shimmying up the pole—but how did he get past the mother? Or maybe it wasn’t a predator at all, but bad weather or wind. I don’t know. The demise of the Quivett nest will remain a mystery, open for speculation. But whatever the reason, it appears to have failed.

Even this fact can’t depress me for long; June isn’t the time for depression. On the drive home I’m granted a lifting vision. The sun sets behind Bridge Street, the road that leads into Sesuit Neck like a bridge over a moat. The tidal creek tints rose-colored, and I stop and watch a great blue heron fish in the shadowy light. The heron itself presents just a knife-thin silhouette, the silhouette reflected in a bluish-rose circle of water that it now spears. Ripples spread where the heron jabs, but it comes up empty-billed. The bird begins to stalk again, waiting, rising up taller, as if on tiptoes, to get a better look from high up, its reflection stretching farther down into the water. I turn my scope on it just in time to see the second plunge, its bill violently jabbing into the water, destroying a painting of rose hues while spreading a circle of blue outward like an aureole. This time the bird emerges with a fish.

Sights like this one convince me that I’m beginning to see better, to notice more. Or maybe I’m just getting luckier. The telescope brings me closer to the nest, while my white journal pages fill with black marks: drawings of hawk eyes, bills, and talons.

The telescope also brings the Barbie on the side of the Chapin nest into greater focus. Her long plastic legs are open in a particularly unladylike fashion. But she has the good sense to wear more clothing than I’ve given her credit for. Extensive observation reveals that she is decked out in a skimpy green-and-yellow striped leotard. And that’s not the only difference I notice: I’m even beginning to question my initial hypothesis that she is indeed a Barbie. “Maybe it’s a Spice Girl,” I note in my journal.

Of course, as always, I have my doubts about what I’m doing out here. I’ve been calling this an “experiment,” but an experiment in what? Neighborliness? I’m not so sure a good neighbor is one who points a telescope into your bedroom. What’s undeniable is that I’m seeing new things. The other day I walked down to the beach and surprised the Chapin female, who was making a rare trip off the nest and seemed to be bathing in a foot of water, cleaning off the season’s grime. Another too-hot morning I swear I saw her shading the nestlings with her wing, like a parasol, and when I got home my books confirmed what my eyes had witnessed.

Maybe then, if forced into a corner, I’d call what I’m doing an experiment in seeing—in vision. More and more I doubt that things are all in my mind. A better bet would be that they’re all in my eyes—if, that is, I can manage to keep my mind out of the way. To see, to look for long moments without preconception, to watch without judgment, that may be the beginning of deeper understanding. If we can quiet thought and see, then, our minds refreshed, better thought will come to us, and this must hold true for both scientists and artists. The ospreys’ dive is blunt, to the point, aggressive, but, I remind myself, the seeing before is as important as the dive itself, the direct act preceded by a vision of what will come. The best hunters spend energy frugally. Before ospreys dive, they look long and carefully.

The telescope allows me to focus. Strangely enough, this odd (and expensive) tool with the stork legs performs the function of the best sort of teacher, facilitating, pointing beyond itself. With the binoculars I spend too much time fumbling with the tool, but now, on my best days, I focus beyond the lens, to the nest, like a Zen archer seeing the target. The other complicated tool I need to get beyond is my mind. I know that when an osprey catches a fish it isn’t worrying about how it compares with other birds, how foolish it will look if it misses and “fails,” or whether that failure will reflect poorly on its birdhood. Rather, it focuses on the fish alone, intensely, brilliantly, seeing beyond itself—seeing the fish so clearly, so accurately, that even the water’s refraction is naturally taken into account—seeing and spearing down through the surface into the thing itself.

That would be a good way to see.

Seeing ospreys up close, I’m constantly reminded just how perfectly built they are for what they do. This isn’t accident but evolution; like humans they become what they do all day. In fact, they’ve become what they’ve been doing for millions of years. They fish, they focus on fish, and so they become, more and more with each evolving minute, fishermen.

It’s easy to forget that people are always evolving, too, constantly becoming what we see. To turn to a less learned source, consider the words of Flip Wilson’s Geraldine: “What you see is what you get.” There is more than comedy here; like the chameleon, we’re colored by the leaf we rest on, and, since we’re colored by it, we’d better watch where we land. I look at my friends as they get deeper and deeper into their given professions—lawyers, movie producers, carpenters—and see how, with each passing day, they turn into what they do. But even more than what we do it’s what we focus on. What—and how—we see.

I wouldn’t want to be restricted to just one way of seeing the world, but if I were somehow bullied into choosing only one mode, I think I would see the world as a painter. I would see shades pulsing and dashes of silver, the red shine of bittersweet on a gray December day, the long blue shadows on snow, the midfall silver shining at the edges of leaves. I would see the cranberry bog flooded blood-red during its wet harvest and whitecaps crashing in at dawn while the morning slant of light rides their back. I wouldn’t see essays or theories but russet, scarlet, raw umber, geranium, salmon, fawn, spectrum blue, and olive-brown.

During my twenties, working at various jobs, I also tried to paint for a while. Of course, like everything else, it happened on Cape Cod. Though I hadn’t planned on painting, one particular October overwhelmed me. October was a month when bayberries turned a chalky blue, tree swallows spotted our roads with shadows, and the marsh blazed like a green-gold fire. It was a month when the full moon rose over the pink-blue pastel of the harbor sunset and the blue-gray juniper berries shone iridescent at dusk, and when masses of speckle-bellied starlings filled the trees (and the air with their squeaky-wheeled sounds); a month when the ocean vacillated between the foreboding slate gray of November and a summery, almost tropical blue (while occasionally hinting at its darker winter shades). Most of all, it was a month of color, a month when the entire neck caught fire in a hundred shades of red.

That year I painted not out of any desire to create great works of art or out of a belief that I’d actually become a painter, but from a simple need to react to the swirl of color around me. I drove to Orleans to buy tubes of oil. My motives, I suppose, were superficial—superficial as in surface, surface as in color. If I may be forgiven my romanticizing of a time that was romantic to begin with, I think it’s fair to say that for a while I became drunk on color (and on the notion of being drunk on color). I wanted not just to ooh and aah like the Sunday foliage viewer, or even to hoard color, but to live steeped in it. I stood and watched as the bluff burned red: the brilliant scarlet of Virginia creeper, the husky maroon of poison ivy, the peach color of sumac, and, in the lower pasture, the oddly patriotic red of the few cranberries left after the harvest. Below the bluff, more red: the ever-bleeding tips of the olive cordgrass. Thoreau called himself the “inspector of snowstorms,” and for that short while I became the examiner of cordgrass. Cordgrass was the bluff’s calendar, how I told seasonal time, and I recorded the changes day to day.

Maybe the word visionary means nothing more than seeing well, and ospreys, therefore, fit the visionary bill. You could argue that van Gogh simply saw better than other people. Sometimes I think that Emerson was right, that to see is everything. For humans, as for ospreys, vision comes first, affecting all else. “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all,” wrote Emerson. If this image of the eyeball sometimes seems awkward and goofy, it is nonetheless vital. Before we smirk at the notion of a giant, well-groomed eye, or consign transcendental ideas to the history books, we might remember that “it” can still happen to us at any minute. Who hasn’t had brief moments when we’ve seen better and so glimpsed a better way of seeing, when we were part of the world, not lost in our own world, when, as Emerson says, “all mean egotism vanishes”? It’s simple: when thought stills, we see. Referring to the moment of transcendence, Emerson’s biographer Robert Richardson writes: “Its point is exactly the opposite of narcissistic self-absorption.”

Empathy for the nonhuman is not achieved through proper language or scientific objectivity. No shaman ever became an animal through logic; and only through very human moments can we glimpse a nonhuman world. First we must see.

Not long ago I had a run-in with Emerson. I teach a class in Boston once a week, and in late May I stopped in at Harvard’s rare book collection in Houghton Library. At first I wasn’t quite sure what was leading me, but after applying for admission, putting my bag and coat in a locker, and entering the inner sanctum, I heard myself asking the librarian if they had the original copies of Emerson’s journals. They did, and so I sat at the long oak table and waited for the books to be brought up from wherever they were stored. Pens weren’t allowed in that silent, churchlike room, only pencils, and the etiquette sheet informed me that pages should be turned from the corners, one at a time. Four of the journals were brought to me and placed on a large black foam reading stand, and I paused for a minute, staring, before opening the first. I felt some of the scholar’s excitement, and some of the detective’s, the excitement of tracing things back to their root causes. The first journal I opened was about seven inches by nine, and wore a semipsychedelic cover more fitting the 1960s than 1830s, though that might have been due to the wear of age. I carefully lifted the cover and stared down at the yellow-white pages and sepia handwriting. The journal, still bound fairly well, was from 1838, when Emerson was thirty-five years old. The epigraph he’d written on the front page was from Donne: “For virtue’s whole sum is to know and dare.” As I carefully turned the pages, one at a time, Emerson became more and more real. Despite the aphorisms—“the Poet is a namer,” “There is no history only biography”—there was a distinct humanness to the whole enterprise, like the way the writing became less legible when he grew excited or rushed. It wasn’t impossible to see Emerson as a young, if not particularly meek, man in a library. One especially poignant entry came in the next journal, beginning in 1841, when Emerson was my age, thirty-eight. It was written on the night his son died of fever. It read: “28 January 1842—Yesterday night at 15 minutes after eight my little Waldo ended his life.” Four blank pages followed.

Reading the books it occurred to me that Emerson has suffered a horribly ironic fate for a determined iconoclast; he has been turned into a statue. The lover of fluidity and flux has been settled, frozen, and while Thoreau remains alive for so many of us, Emerson has, to use his own words against him, been “turned to stone.” In fact, not a hundred yards from where I read there was a statue of the man, sitting leisurely and Lincoln-like, inside a building called Emerson Hall (with tall windows, out of which bored students stare). He’s become the stodgy Concord sage, unable to get his hands dirty trundling that wheelbarrow with Thoreau, a dispenser of epigrams that at their worst read like self-help affirmations. Richardson’s biography has revivified Emerson for me, shattering the plaster and revealing the man as human, passionate even. I’d accepted the cliché of the man and forgotten the Emerson who woke me up when I was young, shaking me alive. The real Emerson would have liked our local salt marshes—they have the right instability, change, daily chaos. Richardson makes clear that those ecstatic experiences, those times when he felt like the famous “transparent eyeball,” were the foundation on which Emerson built his life. This is not quite as mystical as it sounds. Emerson was convinced that these moments were “natural, not supernatural,” and as they spilled over “exhilaration became a habit” and his life, as Richardson notes, took on that “workaday exaltation” I’ve mentioned before. Of course we’re made uneasy by the suggestion that we may still be able to experience the world as intensely as Emerson once did.

I read Emerson’s journals for a little while longer, engrossed, and then took a break. From the library’s foyer I called Nina back on the Cape, babbling excitedly about my discovery. Then a strange thing happened. A tall, silver-haired man in a yellow rain slicker was struggling to get in the door while carrying two large boxes in his arms. I naturally pushed the door open and, once he was through, grabbed the top box without thinking. Somewhere between when I took the box and when I set it down on a desk inside, I realized that the man was John Updike. The box I carried contained his papers, brought to Harvard so that maybe they could someday make a statue of him, too.

The only person I’ve ever known who responded cleverly during an encounter with the famous was my friend Dave, who, upon seeing Eddie Van Halen on the other side of a small tidal creek in Malibu, said: “Go ahead, jump.” I wasn’t as quick-witted. Instead I muttered “your welcome”s to his gracious “thank you”s, then retreated to my locker and grabbed a copy of one of my own books, which I proceeded to crassly jam into his hand. Emerson would have no doubt counseled that no man should be intimidated by the past, and would have had me toss a playful punch at the Updikian shoulder. I retreated back to the inner sanctum and back to the journals. “With the past as past I have nothing to do, nor with the future as future,” I read soon after. “I live now, I will verify all past history in my own moments.”

I browsed haphazardly for a while, even more excited after my encounter in the foyer. Then I remembered something from the Richardson biography. Emerson had been a fanatic organizer, indexing each journal extensively. I turned to the end of the journal I was reading, and sure enough, subjects and page numbers marched down the inside back cover. A half dozen listings fell under Eyes. “He that hath rich eyes, everywhere falls into true relations with his fellow man… . I think sometimes that my lack of musical ear is made good to me through my eye. What others hear, I see.” I couldn’t read all the words in one entry, written in his rushed, excited hand, but made out enough to get the meaning: “Go out and walk with a painter and you shall see for the first time groups colors clouds … and still have the pleasure of discovering in a hitherto barren ground … as good as a new sense in such skill to use an old one. When the telescope turns on our own barn and chimney we like this new sight better than the finest foreign … .” I noted the date so I could fill in the blanks from the collected, edited journals.

Before I left I found one last sentence about vision, which I thought the day’s finest. On page 263 of his journal of 1838, Emerson wrote: “Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the body.”

On June 24 I make a different sort of pilgrimage, heading down to Alan Poole’s Westport cottage again, this time a little more confident in my osprey knowledge. Since I last visited in March the year has filled in its green blanks, and, after parking in the crushed-shell driveway, I walk through an overhanging tunnel of leaves and brambles. There’s an Edenic quality to this little house, with its gray shingles, red door, and wild roses climbing the side, and I emerge from the path in time to see a newborn tree swallow pop its head out of a birdhouse. When I climb up on the porch and look through the sliding glass door, I’m not particularly shocked to see Alan down on the floor, stretching in a yoga posture. The truth is that, so perfect is this day and setting, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear Disney music playing or to see a little band of wood elves dancing around the gnarled tree that grows up through the deck.

In the absence of elves, Alan will do. He greets me with a calm smile; we’re more familiar now since we’ve spoken and e-mailed several times. Even more than I remember, his eyes are clear, blue, intense, looking directly at me. When we walk to the beach he points out birds and I happily play the acolyte. We watch a kingbird demonstrate territoriality, chasing off a willet; a beautiful orchard oriole, burnished a darker red than the Baltimore oriole; and a bobolink—“A skunkbird, some call it” says Alan—which sings ecstatically, looking distinct in its black and white plumage. When we get close to the ocean, in an open meadow, Alan stops and has me listen as a grasshopper sparrow snips out its ticking then trilling song.

At the beach we spot a mother eider and her ducklings, just two days old, bobbing in the surf. “At the utmost south of their range,” says Alan, with the authority only someone editing and writing the definitive guide to North American birds could muster. When the ducks paddle away we watch terns dive—avian arrows thwucking into the water—leaving little or no splash, like Olympic divers. Soon enough we join the eiders and terns, plunging into the surf. “Even the seaside goldenrod is shriveling because of the drought,” Alan says as we wade in, and it’s true, we haven’t had rain for weeks. Now we rid ourselves of the day’s heat, diving down deep to the bottom, where it’s coldest. A small but strong man, Alan has something of the sparsity of the Chapin male about him. While we dry off I ask him about the books I’ve been reading, particularly the ones that suggest birds may have a more complex emotional life than previously thought.

“Could ospreys feel joy?” I ask tentatively.

He towels off his hair and takes a second to answer.

“Joy?” he says. “Who knows? Maybe. But I suppose I’m too much of a sociobioligist to believe it.”

When we get back to the house, he takes a tin pot down to his backyard sandbar and forages for our lunch. He walks the short path, through the phragmites that he’s fought back with a machete, and digs up some clams. There’s something happily ospreylike in this direct link between the getting and eating of lunch. We slurp down littlenecks, cool and raw, along with goat cheese, bread, and strawberries. He tells me about his new diet, a Thoreauvian attempt to eliminate sugar, meat, booze, and caffeine, and I nod, admiring from a distance. It’s natural enough for Alan to be studying Buddhist thought; he seems calm, predisposed to it.

For dessert I eat enough jam and bread to bloat myself, and when Alan retires to meditate, I indulge in my own less-conscious form of meditation, napping on the lawn. I know it would be pushing it to ask him to fire up the wood-burning hot tub, so I take the mat he gives me and roll it out on one of the sun-dappled paths by the water. When I wake, groggy, I walk down to the water’s edge and notice that Alan’s osprey platform on the marsh remains empty, the pair not returning this year. It makes me appreciate my own nests back home: full, loud, crowded with young.

Later, close to six, Alan takes me down to the marsh at the edge of the Westport colony, the place where he did much of the fieldwork for his book. In March the platforms were unpopulated, a ghost town, but now they surge with life. I’ve never seen so many ospreys in one place before. A dozen or more active nests stand within my sight, and by aiming the telescope from one to the next, I can check in on pairs at all different stages, as if moving instantly forward and back through time. One brood is far more developed than even the Chapin family, and I watch a youngster make its first tentative efforts at flight, flapping and jumping from one side of the platform to the next. “They’re only a few days away,” Alan says before he leaves.

After we say good-bye, I stay for another hour, excited by this virtual osprey city. This is the place where the ospreys held out in Massachusetts, their last foothold, during the bad times of DDT in the ’60s and ’70s. Most of the ten nests that remained during the historic low were right here along the Westport River, many on platforms built by Gil and Joe Fernandez, which earned them the title of “Mother and Father of the Massachusetts Osprey.” It wasn’t an official title, of course, and I doubt they were often addressed that way, but they have merited some recognition. All of us who’ve come later owe them something.

At dark I finally pack up my scope and cross the highway to where Alan had me park my car, near a bar called The Back Eddy. It’s a long drive back, so I stop in, drink a Tremont Ale, then decide to make it an all-clam day, ordering a bucket of steamers. The sun has stained my face red, but driving home, beer and clams in my belly, I sink into a kind of sated animal satisfaction. Once again I can’t help but think that sitting out watching birds all day is a good human activity, one I’m lucky to have stumbled on. If we become what we do, then I wouldn’t mind becoming what I do here, that is, wouldn’t mind becoming better adapted to watching, to seeing. I envy Alan Poole his years on the marsh. It’s worthwhile, if somewhat quirky, work. The fact is, I think as I start the drive home, I’ve begun to love it.

I point the car north and it occurs to me that a bird or person’s angle of vision may be as important as vision itself. Alan and I began our hunts with different “search images,” to use his terminology, and to a certain extent, despite attempts at openness, each of our minds predetermines what we will see.

I stare at the glowing embers of taillights. As much as I love theorizing, I’ll admit that maybe a grand synthesis of science and art is a little ambitious for a two-hour car ride home. Enough philosophy for today. My eyes are tired, bleary and red, by the time I cross over the silver hump of the Sagamore Bridge back onto the Cape. I need some sleep. For one day at least, I’ve seen enough.