Neighbors, Good and Bad

Ospreys make good neighbors. Not just for humans, but for almost every other animal. There are some notable exceptions: raccoons, owls, crows, the occasional Canada goose, and, of course, nearly all fish. But it’s precisely because their diet is almost exclusively piscine that ospreys are more tolerant than other raptors of small mammals, rodents, and most birds, which is to say they don’t attack and kill them. Studying ospreys seventy years ago, A. C. Bent reported that meadow mice sometimes made their homes in osprey ground nests, an arrangement that certainly wouldn’t work if the bird were a kestrel or merlin. “The fish hawk bears a good character in the avian world,” testified Captain C. W. R. Knight in his 1932 National Geographic article. “He is harmless to most other birds, and so well do they know it that smaller species often build in the interstices of his bulky home. Although courageous in defense of his nest and young, the osprey is seldom an aggressor.” At Quivett, Chapin, and the harbor, house sparrows occupy the downstairs apartments of the osprey nests, building their own homes, not exactly as Knight describes, but in the gaps between the slats of the platforms. You can watch them work, zipping in and out—building, copulating, fighting—while the ospreys sit, relatively impassive. To a certain extent the birds mirror each other: the sparrows bringing back twigs instead of sticks, string and thread instead of rope and boat line, but the smaller birds, besides being substantially neater, are industrious to the point of hyperactivity, needing to make use of their shorter time on earth and not able to survive on just a few fish feasts a day. The sparrows look like a kind of pilot fish for the larger birds, darting around the nest with a wingspan measurable in inches rather than feet, busily housekeeping, the males flashing their formal black bibs. But they lack a pilot fish’s function. While ospreys provide a kind of built-in big brother, protecting the sparrows from other raptors and raccoons, for instance, it’s not quite as clear what the sparrows do for the ospreys. Maybe what they do is amuse them, I decide during my idle time at the nests. Maybe their fast-forward lifestyles seem funny to the larger birds. Nest life is a fairly dull life, after all, and the house sparrows are the closest thing the ospreys have to TV.

The most social of raptors, ospreys also get along exceptionally well with their own kind. “Where possible, Ospreys like to nest near other Ospreys,” writes Alan Poole. “Good nest sites are often clustered—in swamps, on islands, or on power pylons, for example. In such situations, pairs breed colonially with nests 50–100 meters apart, although loosely spaced colonies are more common.” According to Poole, one of the reasons they cluster may not be particularly neighborly, as ospreys sometimes hope to usurp existing nest sites. But the fact is that the birds usually manage to coexist quite well, to the extent that neighbors often fish together, as I witnessed in the hunting party over Wing Island this spring. Once again they owe this sociability in large part to what they hunt. The fact that they eat fish is what allows for colonial living, because, unlike most hawks and eagles, they can’t readily establish and defend a feeding territory, since fish are always on the move. For this reason ospreys, while still territorial about their immediate nest areas, can be more tolerant of their fellows who nest nearby.

A less harmonious relationship exists between the ospreys and red-tailed hawks, at least at the Quivett nest where the hawks’ hunting grounds overlap with the ospreys’ immediate nesting territory. Red-tails are powerful, short-tailed birds with broad wings, usually identified by their chestnut-red tails, though the coloration of this area often varies. In fact, almost everything about red-tails varies—from the coloring of their breasts and bellies to the nests they build to what they prey on—so much so that the bird we now call the red-tailed hawk was once thought to be several different species. If the osprey is the hawk world’s great specialist, the red-tailed hawk plays the generalist—the utility infielder, adapting to whatever situation presents itself. This adaptability, combined with the red-tails’ less chemical-heavy diet, allowed them to continue thriving throughout the DDT era, becoming our most well-known hawk. The Quivett red-tails nest less than a mile from the osprey platform and hunt the small mammals in the marsh, encroaching on the ospreys’ nesting area. The hawks have shorter wings than the ospreys by ten to twenty inches, but they are strong fliers who seem to give the ospreys all they can handle. I’ve witnessed a couple of aerial battles, but more often what is involved is a whole lot of threatening and warning, upward spiraling punctuated by the distinct high-pitched cries of each species.

Great horned owls are far worse neighbors. These nocturnal birds of prey are a mortal threat to both ospreys and their young. At first I was doubtful that a bird with a plentiful food source of rabbits, mice, and voles would attack another raptor. But, in response to my skeptical e-mail, Alan Poole wrote back, “I don’t think owls will kill adult ospreys just for food, or at least not often, but I suspect they may do so when adults are protecting their young… . I have found dead adults near nests, obvious victims of owl predation (puncture wounds, head missing)—but not often. Maybe 3–4 times in 5 years of checking 80 nests per week at least one time. This, of course, doesn’t include the amount of times that owls preyed on nestlings without evidence.”

Stealth and night vision, as well as the power of a surprise attack, apparently make up for the owl’s slightly smaller size. Also talons that, if not as long, are just as sharp and deadly as an osprey’s own (as well as sharing the same sort of reversible toe). Not long ago I found a great horned owl corpse on the beach, the talons so black and piercingly sharp that to touch them gave credence to a story I’d always thought apocryphal: that an owl hunting in tall grassland had mistaken a boy’s scalp for prey, and had killed the boy by taking off half his head. Dennis Murley, the longtime naturalist for the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, tells of a naive woman who excitedly related how she had watched a mother osprey teaching its young to fly at dusk by carrying it through the air. Murley explained to her that it was likely an owl swooping off with an osprey nestling. When Murley and others erect osprey poles, they are careful to put them out in the middle of marshes, where the birds can have a good 360-degree view and some distance from the woods. To erect a pole and platform too close to the trees is to invite a night raid by owls.

One final enemy should be mentioned, this one more annoying than deadly. Not all raptors get their meals as cleanly and athletically as ospreys do. While an osprey will turn his or her nose up at a secondhand fish, bald eagles aren’t above a little piracy. Where the two species coexist, the eagle will often watch an osprey do the work of fishing before swooping in to plunder. For those of us inclined toward ospreys, this gives us yet another reason to root for them. “The osprey is a clean sportsman and prefers to catch living fish,” writes A. C. Bent. “It is not a carrion feeder like the bald eagle and will not touch a tainted fish.”

While ospreys do have enemies, in the main they get along well with their neighbors. Perhaps more important for their survival, ospreys get along well with people. Despite the warning cries and agitated flights, ospreys are remarkably tolerant of humans and will nest in places other raptors wouldn’t dream of. The harbor pair is a stunning example, going about their wild business while the harbor parking lot is being rebuilt, jackhammers and drills shaking the ground, dredges dredging and pile drivers driving pilings. While the other pairs are more shy, these two seem great extroverts, habituated as they are to all sorts of human movement. With the male’s tousled crown, they seem a punk-rock pair, the least Thoreauvian of the birds I watch, comfortable with trash, crowds, smoke, and noise. Fortunately, the humans around them are also relatively tolerant. The harbor dredging crew, who begin work each day with a loud round of swearing, respect the birds they work next to, or at least that’s what they say. When I ask them about the birds, they respond excitedly, telling me what they’ve seen while they worked. Though fish hawks were once shot around fisheries, we now know that their take of fish is relatively minimal, and the local fishermen that I’ve talked to see their return as a good omen.

Early in the second week of June, Nina and I become involved in our own experiment in neighborliness. During the winter we live here as if it were our home, but in the summer it again becomes a family place. My mother migrates up from North Carolina, and we make the shorter migration to the upstairs room that I use as a study during the off-season. I’m not oblivious to the implications of moving back into what was my childhood room, but the view of the ocean and the sounds of the harbor ospreys counterbalance my anxieties. It is good to see my mother after a long winter.

As for my osprey neighbors, they’re doing just fine. With increasingly greater frequency and reliability, my trips to watch the nests have brought me delight. I now enjoy spending time with the birds every day, and relish the feeling of easy intimacy that grows as spring turns to summer. One of the odd things is just how much I find myself liking the birds. Not just the Chapin male, my admitted favorite, but all of them, even the punk-rock pair.

If visiting the birds suits me, it’s largely because I’ve always preferred fairly domestic adventures. One of Thoreau’s less extreme lessons was that you can experience something profound in the natural world without going to the Himalayas, that you can find everything you need in your own backyard. In other words, you don’t need to live with grizzlies or gorillas to live deeply. We need to love the near with the same excitement that we love the exotic. Besides the ospreys, I’ve found myself enjoying the intimacy of catbirds this spring, particularly the one who flew close to me on the deck the other night. I was drinking the night’s first beer and watching a full moon dis-impale itself from a sailboat mast in the harbor when the little bird hopped to within two feet of me. I admired the simple and elegant lines of the wings, its little black cap and lighter gray-black feathers, but even more than that I liked the simple fact that it came close. If not particularly melodious, spitting out the mumbled mewings that give them their names, catbirds have the virtue of being the most neighborly of birds.

Despite the famous saying, familiarity is not always such a bad thing. Neighbors sometimes ask me how I can walk the same route down the beach each day, but what they don’t understand is that the beach changes with every tide. “To find new things, take the path you took yesterday,” wrote John Burroughs. While it might seem that the novelty would wear off during my trips to the osprey nests, the opposite has proven true. I’m constantly being surprised by what I see. This month, in particular, plays a leitmotif of variety. The weather continues warm and rainless, perfect unless you’re a plant, and Hones, back home in Boston, reports that the fish are still biting. He’s after stripers now, driving down to the South Shore after work and on weekends. Using his rod, a Shakespeare “Ugly Stik,” he recently caught another keeper, this one thirty inches. With few storms and fish plentiful, it’s no real surprise that the ospreys are thriving, and, a week after watching the nestlings at Chapin, I see two heads pop up over the nest at Simpkins Neck.

But it’s my next-door neighbors, the harbor pair, that give me the biggest shock. Just the other afternoon the harbor male flew low over our back deck, pausing above me, as if showing off his vast wingspan, before banking and lapping around the house. Today, June 12, the shadow of an oak branch plays across my journal page as I scribble down notes at dusk. The cooing of the mourning doves sounds different this evening, too aggressive, almost savage, and the flapping of our flag provides a back beat to my viewing. I watch the female osprey, a lighter chocolate brown, exactly the color of our house’s post and beams, as she rests alone on the nest. When she flies off, my long-held suspicions are confirmed; the harbor nest, the junk nest, is a failure. But having made this same mistake before, I hold off on judgment, and soon I’m glad I did. She circles back to the nest and takes up a begging call, and not long after, the male flies by with a nearly headless flounder in his talons, passing low over the nest once as if taunting her before circling back and landing. The light is fading, the water streaked with dark blue paint slashes, but something about the way she begins eating makes me shiver. She tears off a piece and dips low in the nest, her tail up, and I now recognize this as the sign of what it is: a mother feeding her young.

Despite the fact that I’ve never given this nest much respect, I’m overjoyed by its success. It’s a success I really don’t deserve to have right out my back door, seeing as I’ve bad-mouthed this pair all spring, but I’ll take it. Like many young parents, they invite second-guessing—he seems just beginning to get the concept of sharing, and just in time. As for her, though she started getting down to nesting later than the other pairs, the results are undeniable. Once again reality has contradicted my expectations.

As in the human world, appearances can be deceiving. The conscientious Quivett pair fail, the easygoing harbor pair succeed. I decide not to think about it too much, and jump on the bandwagon. This is my next-door nest, after all, my home nest, the only nest I can see from inside the house, the only birds I can hear begging from my bedroom. Also, now that they have young, it adds a new social element to my osprey viewing. During cocktail hour, I can hand the binoculars to my wife or friends and let them look in on what I’ve been seeing at Chapin. This gives me the tour guide’s thrill of watching others watch, pointing things out. And it is a thrill: particularly when Nina first sees the nestlings’ heads pop up and witnesses the mother’s delicate feedings. She imitates the action with her head and mouth, as if it were beyond humans to observe this act and not mimic it.

Since the Chapin nest is two weeks ahead of this one, I have seen the future, and so can play the expert, if not quite a full-blown psychic. When the birds enter their reptilian phase, I predict they’ll soon crouch, and sure enough they do. But it isn’t just ego gratification I get from having a nest so close to home; there is also sociability. Now the people close to me can understand what it is I’ve been ranting about.

I aspire to be a good neighbor, to be part of my neighborhood, and that means human as well as animal and vegetable. Despite a growing prejudice toward ospreys, I’ve also enjoyed the company of my human neighbors since returning to the Cape, and I might even have learned some lessons from them as well as from the birds. In a tourist town, there’s a distinct difference between your summer and winter neighbors. During my first year back, I feared the melancholy of February, but when the dreaded month hit I found that, surprisingly, I was settling in and really starting to enjoy it here. Winter insists on its own pace, dispensing with ambition. I felt curiously free. Sometimes I would eschew my writing altogether and split wood on a solid, perfectly flat chopping block of locust. The block was a gift from Danny Schadt, who ran, and still runs, the Northside Marina, across the street from us. When he dropped it off I asked him if he liked his job.

“Ya, I do,” he said. “I like the fact that if I get bored pulling boats I can work on the computer in the office and if I get bored with that I can cut wood for the stove.”

This confirmed my own impulse toward variety. Cape Cod in summer becomes run over by specialists, by orthodontists and stockbrokers, but my winter neighbors are generalists, jacks-of-all-trades. As the sun pulls away we move back in time, concerned again with the basics: wood and warmth. My neighbor Glen exemplifies this warm-blooded philosophy. After the big ice storm last winter he came by, hooded by a sweatshirt, with ice tinging his droopy mustache. We talked a minute before he started to chainsaw the branches and trees we’d lost during the blizzard. I pulled the wood down to the curb, stacking what I could use.

After we finished piling the wood, he talked to me about why he’d moved down to the Cape.

“When I came here one of the things I wanted to do was be neighborly. I fixed up our house and made some changes, but I think I did it with respect to the neighborhood. I didn’t want to come in here and change the way it was. I just wanted to have a garden in the back and live by the ocean. Now these people come in who don’t even live here and they tear down the little houses and put up big ones, ruining views and driving up property taxes. It’s changed so much.”

I nodded. He’d said everything I felt. Inevitably, talk of loving our neighborhood leads to anger, talk of paradise leads to the serpent. This is an unfortunate consequence of living in a beautiful place, but in one way at least it’s a good thing: it simplifies the world. While we still have patches of wildness and while ospreys still fly over our waters, it’s no exaggeration to say that all is threatened, and that the threat runs like a steady burbling undertone through our neighborhood gossip. Grumbling is our genre of preference on Cape Cod, and we have plenty to grumble about. New houses sprout up hourly, four permits per town per day, in fact. Sesuit Neck presents the extremes of both dramatic beauty and rapacious destruction. That is one thing becoming part of this neighborhood has done for me; it has telescoped the world down to this single place. My cosmology is simplified. Sesuit Neck is the world.

The heart of that world is the bluff. A hump of land that rises from the beach like a great whale-backed beast, a jutting heath transported from a nineteenth-century romantic novel. This is the place where I first watched the jetty ospreys forage for sticks for their nest, making slow trips back and forth from the jetty’s end to the land below the bluff and back. It’s also a place that, due to a coincidence of wealth and geography, has long remained undeveloped, and so has become a refuge for many of my neighbors. Not all of us get down to the bluff, of course, but many do, some to walk their dogs, some to think, some to get away. Even those who don’t actually spend time down below the bluff must be reassured by its presence, by the fact that our neighborhood contains, within it, a place apart. If the English had their commons, the best American neighborhoods contain within them a still-wild place. For many of us the bluff has been the epitome of a good neighbor: minding its own business, keeping quiet, giving much, taking little.

Just as the ospreys imprint images of their natal nesting grounds, the land below the bluff has been imprinted on me. I have walked the path to the bluff since I was a small child, first holding my mother’s hand, then exploring on my own. All my life the bluff has stood in counterpoint to the development that has been a constant of Sesuit Neck. The sound of hammering is never far off on Cape Cod, but neither is the sound of the ocean, and the ocean insists on wildness. Approaching the bluff by beach from the harbor, you have the sensation of moving from tame to wild, first walking past the overdeveloped private beachfronts, then past the public beach and Bagleys beach, and finally leaving all houses behind. As an adolescent I had a distinct sense of relief when, moving past the last of the homes, no longer feeling windows or eyes staring down at me, I began to walk faster, excited, out to greet the bluff alone.

Part of what ensured this solitude was the rocky terrain. Except at dead low tide, the land below the bluff could only be walked by jumping from rock to rock, and most beachgoers, fearing bloody shins, didn’t take the risk. But the brave were rewarded. Once past the sandy stretch and headed toward the point, anything could happen. Seals basked on Tautog rock, floats of eiders bobbed offshore, and, if you got there before dawn, you might see deer licking salt off the rocks. It was as if by walking less than a mile from the Dennis Yacht Club, you’d pass through a door into another world.

Not a quiet world. Weather reached the bluff first, and, often, summer turned to fall when you arrived at the jutting spit. The sky above would pile up with clouds, enormous cloud continents with dark violet interiors and flashes of gold escaping from the coasts. Long shadows shafted down the sand, my own goofy dark doppelgänger stretching out in front of me as I walked. Sometimes the open beach barely let me approach—warning me off with sand stinging my face. Gulls drifted by sideways. Trees and grasses bent and ran from water and wind. Light dry sand flew spectral over the darker sandbar sand like a curtain revealing the blue-gray ocean and purpled clouds. Even on the rare days when the waves rested, the rocks seethed with life. Barnacles hissed and crabs scuttled and swallows darted and swooped down from their cave homes in the brown cliff wall.

As with any good relationship, mine with the bluff deepened over time. Not long after college, I came to Cape Cod to work and write, and that fall, standing on the point like the bow of a ship, I watched as the wind swept out summer’s clinging heat and ushered in the clarifying Cape light. When the real weather blew in, the leafy world reddened, poison ivy and sumac bloodying the edges of the cranberry bog. Not wanting to squander any opportunity for joy, I often reached the beach before dawn, and returned at sunset to catch the dying rays of light, sipping a beer and watching a pumpkin-orange moon rise.

This overindulgence, this binge of color, led to a long hangover, and I had to leave the Cape for a while. But over the years, I’ve kept coming back. In 1994 I returned again to spread my father’s ashes out on the bay beyond Stone’s point (burying half of the ashes at the Quivett plot), after which I walked out alone toward the bluff at sunset. Now I am back with my wife living close to the bluff again.

But things have changed, the way they always do. Not long ago, just before Nina and I moved to the neighborhood in 1997, the bluff and the beach were bought and we found ourselves with a new neighbor. Over the last two years, I’ve stood by and witnessed that neighbor’s methodical destruction of the bluff, first the tearing down of the old mansion that was the neighborhood landmark, and then the saddling of the bluff’s wild whale back with a trophy house the size of a castle. Walking out on the jetty’s end, I can no longer look in the bluff’s direction without a twinge of despair. We all know the feeling: our dream places ripped up for someone else’s dream house.

It’s true I’m not above the urge for a dream house myself, and I’d have been happy for my new neighbor if he’d built a grand house, even an enormous house. The bluff is of such magnificent scale that formerly a mansion—a mansion!—was able to fit snugly into place. But the sad and frustrating thing, the thing that still causes me daily depressions and stabbing pains, is that a dream house or mansion wasn’t good enough. My new neighbor could not tolerate merely becoming part of the beautiful bluff but felt compelled to dominate it.

“It’s a goddamn desecration of place,” another of my neighbors said recently. That’s the word—desecration—that keeps coming up when I think of what has been done to the land. I don’t use the word lightly, but accurately: a sacred place made profane.

When I walk below the bluff now I find myself repeatedly thinking about how “out of place” the building seems. Since humans first settled in Sesuit Neck they’ve built their homes low and strong, a logical and organic reaction to the daily assault of wind and water. This is how things grow on Cape Cod and how they’ve long been built, a response that evolved directly from place, and an intimate knowledge of that place. For inspiration, the new owner needed to look no farther than the pitch pines and scrub oaks that crawl mangily across the humpback of his new backyard, a yard he will find to be one of the windiest places on earth. If he’d been in a listening mood, the trees would have spoken directly to him, whispering, “Stay low,” and, heeding that advice, he could have still built a large and beautiful structure. But, he may have reasoned, with modern building materials and techniques making the old restraints irrelevant, why not spread as far and high as I can go? Why merely become part of the bluff when I can rise above it?

Stifling the moralist’s urge to tell him to go back and read the story of Icarus, I’ll suggest that there may have been simpler reasons for restraint. He might have paused and considered his neighbors. Not just the deer whose paths have forever weaved through the brambles he tore down or the swallows who for countless generations have made their homes in the undercusp of the bluff where tractors now rumble, but the three hundred or so Homo sapiens who dwell here in different seasons. He might have—dare I mention it in this day and age?—minded his manners and said, Well, since I’m tearing down this mansion, this neighborhood landmark, I’ll consider the others who live here and, while of course building a large place, will try to fit gracefully into my new home.

This was not the option my neighbor chose.

Having spent the spring watching the ospreys, I believe that human beings could stand to become more territorial, that is, could stand to take a lesson from the birds. Destroy an osprey’s home nest, and she will keep coming back to it. She will fight off geese, raccoons, coyotes, even humans. She doesn’t care about trespassing laws. She will remain loyal to place, until you either have to kill her or let her settle.

“In most human populations, transgressions relating to spatial distribution and proprietary boundaries are enforced through courts of law,” writes Pete Dunne in The Wind Masters. “In birds of prey, territorial defense is the responsibility of the birds themselves.” Over the last two years I’ve begun to take things into my own hands, perhaps taking a cue from the ospreys. Recently I began to write articles, draft petitions, and attend conservation meetings; the other day, I wrote a long letter to my new neighbor. But if I’ve become more willing to fight for my place, I’d like to become more willing still. Loving these birds, this land, has led me to dramatically simplify my life, to pare it down. To remember what is most important and make my hours revolve around that. Ospreys teach passion, immediacy, directness.

In the cardboard box that I use as my “Neighborhood Fight” file, I also keep quotes and examples of osprey tenacity for place. “The Fish Hawk has a great attachment to the tree to which it carries its prey,” wrote John James Audubon in The Birds of America. “It shows the same attachment to the tree on which it has built its first nest, and returns to it year after year.” But it is an even stronger commitment than Audubon knew. Ospreys stake their lives on their places. In Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, Forbush writes of a friend of his who bought a farm in Touisset:

The house had been unoccupied for some time, and when the family moved in they found a great nest on the top of kitchen chimney with a pair of Ospreys in full and complete possession of the premises. Before starting a fire in the range it became necessary to remove the nest, which was accomplished by strenuous labor, as a great mass of material had been accumulated on the chimney top. Immediately the birds began to rebuild the nest. They brought large sticks and placed them across the chimney, and to hold them down they brought clods and stones. Destruction of their domicile did not discourage them in the least. At last in self-defense my friend was obliged to shoot the female. The male did not mourn long and in a few hours was back again with another mate (“just like a man,” the good wife said), and the pair, having first reconnoitered the place, decided to recommence building. When they had finished, they had filled the chimney from bottom to top with sticks, stones and rubbish, so that it became necessary either to destroy those birds or give up the house to them.

Forbush’s friend ended up killing the new pair, though, based on the law of desire, he might have considered handing over the house keys to the birds, since they wanted to settle there to the point of dying while he only to the point of killing. If this shows a lack of flexibility on the ospreys’ part (not to mention the humans’), it also demonstrates an admirable example of making a choice and staking everything on it. Forbush gives another example of osprey tenacity, this one with a happier ending. A pair of birds insisted on nesting on a certain electric pole, despite a lineman’s continued attempts to rid the pole of the nest. In this case it was the humans, not the birds, who gave ground: “The lineman tore down the nest but the birds persisted until one day the superintendent happened along and told the men to take the wires off the pole, and set up another pole back in the field and string the wires to that. This was done and the birds triumphantly occupied the nest on the first pole.”

Currently the greatest threat for wild animals is habitat loss, their places being methodically chewed up. What we don’t seem to recognize is that every time we blindly tear up woods to build homes, we are destroying the homes of others on a massive scale. With each passing year our building, our development, as we unironically call it, has become more and more destructive to our wild neighbors—and to wildness itself. Of course humans feel the instinct to build as surely as birds do, but in some of us this instinct, unencumbered by a sense of proportion (and unlimited by modern technology), has run amuck.

Despite the platforms we’ve built for them, habitat loss poses a growing threat for ospreys. For the New England birds summer means living on the coastline, where all the trees are being gobbled up by and for homes, where platforms are the only option. Winter means flying to rain forests that, at the current rate, will be gone halfway through the next century. When a landscape is imprinted in you, how does it feel to be internally compelled to return to a place, only to find that that place is gone?

I know that this is a familiar drumbeat, and I know that when hearing it over and over again, we recoil into apathy, a kind of mental fetal position. Saving the rain forest is remote to us, impossible, a cause for rock stars and ice-cream tycoons. I, too, would rather not think about it—but that becomes impossible when they start to destroy places imprinted in me. Maybe it’s healthy to take these losses personally, and then to act without thinking. The writer Jack Turner offers intimacy as at least the first part of an antidote for apathy. Fall in love with what you are losing and it will be harder to be blasé about the loss. “To reverse this situation we must become so intimate with wild animals, with plants and places, that we answer to their destruction from the gut,” he writes. “Like when we discover the landlady strangling our cat.” Exactly. Only when a thing is close does it become immediate, urgent.

It may be entirely presumptuous, but I believe that my new neighbor on the bluff has helped teach me a little about what habitat loss must be like to the birds. I may be oversensitive, but with each new building that goes up on Sesuit Neck I wince, as if they were developing on some part of me. Now the dozers rumble up by Paddock’s Path, and there is one particular apple tree that I worry for. To love this neighborhood is to be constantly open to loss, like committing to a woman who keeps fooling around.

But I hold to hope. The changes in how we’ve treated the ospreys over the last thirty years give me faith in the ability of human beings to grow, though I’m not sure I have faith we can grow fast enough. Too often we have evolved too late. The trick, and it’s quite a trick, is regretting before the fact, imagining what might be and stopping ourselves. This means taking local action, though we all resist the step. I know this resistance well: I’m the least political animal imaginable, no more likely than an osprey to carry a picket sign. There’s a humorlessness in advocacy, I understand, and if I’m becoming an advocate it’s a truly reluctant one. Fanaticism doesn’t come naturally.

The letter, the plea, that I wrote to my new neighbor was my own declaration of dependence—dependence on this land. How am I to be a good neighbor? I’d better start by trying to preserve what’s best about our common place.

That means that, like the ospreys, I may need to warn off intruders, may need to screech and flap and drive them out of my territory. After all, I’m vocalizing essentially the same things the birds are—Respect my home and leave me alone—the only difference being that I can talk. And since ospreys can’t write letters, I’d better help defend them while I’m at it. It is, after all, the neighborly thing to do.