Living on Osprey Time

(Adapted from Return of the Osprey)

All Spring I’ve followed the birds, tramping across the marsh, kayaking up tidal creeks, and biking down the dirt paths near Bell’s Neck. I’m trying to learn everything I can about ospreys, to really understand them, and I’m lucky to have Alan Poole, the world’s foremost osprey exert, as my Obi Wan Kenobe.

He is slightly suspicious, however, of my hyperactive pursuit of the birds.

"All that running around is fine and well,” he told me over the phone the other day. “But you've got to slow down and spend hours at the nests. 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 minutia, how many bites of herring the female takes or what type of fish flavored this morning's guano. While I respect Alan 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. I need to stop rushing and being rushed. To put away the bike, take a deep breath, and slow down.

Nature, after all, 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 ("Ah-ha, a ruby-throated warbler!") I need to take Alan’s words as a prod to go deeper, to slow down.

During that same phone call he 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."

And that's what I'll do. I've trained myself to do many things in my life, 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.

Back in early April I tried a small experiment at the Quivett Marsh 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 came in for a landing 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 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 re-awakened, 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.

* * *

But I’ve kept at it and, slowly, stubbornly, I’ve begun to get to know the birds. By day I follow the ospreys, and by night I read everything I can about them. Something is missing however. Despite having spent the past two months roaming the marsh and the last two years walking the beach, I've never seen an osprey dive. This is a fairly major failing for a budding Ospreyologist. By all accounts the dive--the search, hover, tuck, and foot first plunge--is the pinnacle of osprey artistry. It's also how the birds survive. As a species, pandion haliiaetus has taken Thoreau's advice and simplified. An osprey is built for fishing, and over the last fifteen million years or so has been perfectly honed by evolution to get its food solely by diving from the sky. While most raptors hunt a variety of prey, and in a variety of ways, ospreys eat fish almost exclusively. Despite the nearly constant vocalizations of the Quivet female to her mate, one question she never asks is "What's for dinner?"

An osprey nest is ideal for the beginning bird watcher. It's big, conspicuous, and the birds, who are also big, go about their behavior in a fairly obvious, even-paced manner, as if winking and making sure you get it. With a pair of binoculars and a little patience you can be a perfectly successful voyeur, watching them mate, nest, feed, preen, sleep. But seeing a dive is another matter. The foraging range of an osprey can extend as far as fifteen miles from the nest, depending on the weather and what's running, and ospreys fish in ocean, pond, lake, and tidal inlet. I've spent a good part of May kayaking up the creeks along with the herring, hoping to put myself in the right place to watch a dive, or jumping on my bike and desperately chasing the male as he flaps inland toward the Brewster ponds. 

Despite my failures, and a creeping sense of inadequacy, something about the activity itself excites me. For the first time in my life I'm taking what I know about nature--about wind, water, weather, and animals--and trying to put this knowledge to use to achieve something. Though what I'm mainly finding out is that I don't know much, there are times when I feel perfectly content, consumed with the process of hunting for the hunt, fishing for fishing. There's a primitive satisfaction in reducing life to one goal, and I sometimes remember the biologist Alan Poole's speculations about a Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon osprey people. Think of the raw simplicity of a hunter's life. Get food as a commandment is thrillingly reductive. If there is anxiety about the task, at least it's specific anxiety. To track, to hunt, means to focus on one thing, the prey, but to focus well the whole world must be taken into account. My own commandment over the last weeks has been only a little more complex than primitive man's. Mine is: See Bird Dive.

I'm not above sniffing the air, or playing my hunches. One thing I hope for is that I'll soon have osprey dreams. I fully expect to, not out of any mystical alliance, but because osprey is what I do all day. It's been my experience that dreams steal from life, particularly life's more exciting parts. When I played Ultimate Frisbee in college I'd sometimes spend the better part of the night skying or diving after discs. In The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen writes about his young son's art work: "Ecstasy is identity with all existence, and ecstasy showed in his bright paintings; like the Aurignacion hunter who became the deer he drew on the cave wall, there was no 'self' to separate him from the bird or flower." This sentence may also be less mystical than it sounds, more practical and obvious. To be good hunters we must look at what we're aiming at, seeing and becoming what we stalk.