"Soaring with Fidel" Reviews

January 29 issue of Publishers Weekly

At the outset, Gessner tells readers that "[t]his is not a bird book"; indeed, it's more about what Gessner came to understand about himself by spending day after day studying one particular species of bird, the osprey. Gessner, who previously wrote Return of the Osprey , which focuses on the effort to rescue ospreys from DDT annihilation, this time turns his attention to migration-why ospreys migrate to Central and South America every winter, and what they do when they're there. He tracked ospreys on one basic migration route-from Cape Cod to Cuba and back. While Gessner weaves in the science of tracking the birds, it's his rowboat-and-binoculars approach to the subject that will most attract readers. Spending days watching ospreys and chatting with other bird-watchers, Gessner discovers the "joy in reducing life to one thing." Gessner writes beautifully, with grace and humor.

January 15 issue of Kirkus

One man’s serendipitous adventures and misadventures as he follows the annual southern migration of his favorite birds.

Longtime osprey observer Gessner (Creative Writing/Univ. of North Carolina Wilmington; Return of the Osprey, 2001, etc.) began his journey on Cape Cod in September 2004. Armed with the usual birding equipment, plus a cassette recorder and journal for recording his impressions, he seems to have also taken along Lady Luck as a traveling companion. On a tight budget and schedule, he was repeatedly given advice, directions to good sites and even room and board by fellow birders he met along the way. While focused on the behavior of a particular species, this is also about birders and their highly competitive sport. The author himself was in competition with a British television crew that was tracking five ospreys on their southern migration with the aid of a satellite and sophisticated telemetry. One osprey, dubbed Bluebeard by the Brits, Gessner renamed Fidel, hoping he would see it in Cuba. Getting to Cuba was an adventure in itself, as was getting around the country once he arrived. The author went back to North Carolina for a brief stay with his wife and daughter before setting out for the jungles of Venezuela, taking along as a sort of bodyguard a friend who resembled “a large, hairy scarecrow.” Much beer and many birds later, they returned home safely.

Gessner’s account is filled with nitty-gritty details about the days and nights of an itinerant birder and beautifully detailed descriptions of ospreys in action. When actual observations were not possible, he imagined what the ospreys were doing and writes intelligently of that. In the final chapter, while summering on Cape Cod, Gessner learned that Fidel had been tracked back to Martha’s Vineyard, and it was there that he got to see his special bird.

A grand adventure, not just for birders and nature lovers.

Carl Hiaasen
acclaimed author of Tourist Season, Double Whammy, and Nature Girl

Soaring with Fidel is a grand and cheering journey on the wings of one of nature's most sociable predators. It's impossible to watch an osprey hovering above a crystal calm bay and not envy the great bird's freedom. Now, thanks to David Gessner, we are invited to follow.

George Black, OnEarth Magazine

If you’ve ever seen an osprey ride a thermal or dive-bomb an unsuspecting fish, you’d have to agree that it’s a glorious creature, physically imposing and a marvel of evolutionary efficiency. As such, it inspires great passion in people, and for a nature writer that kind of passion is often expressed in a hushed voice and the purplest of prose. To his great credit, David Gessner is a writer who determinedly, even militantly, resists that temptation.

In 2001 Gessner published Return of the Osprey , which has acquired a reputation as a minor classic of the genre. But his response to his sudden celebrity was, essentially, "Aargh..." His next book was a collection of droll and iconoclastic essays titled Sick of Nature , a phrase echoed in one of the world’s more uncompromising opening lines: "I am sick of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean."

What bothered him most, it seemed, was the company he found himself keeping. He was repelled by the "pompous humility" of other Nature Writers; the activists were worse. In the same cranky mood as George Orwell’s as he considered his fellow socialists ("every fruit-juice-drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature-Cure Quack,’ pacifist and feminist in England"), Gessner griped in Sick of Nature that he and his cohort of Cape Cod environmentalists "looked like a reunion of Unabombers: solitary, hollow-eyed, scraggly-bearded characters ranting against progress."

But the guy just can’t help himself. Having gotten that off his chest, Gessner returns to the osprey, inviting us to join him on a pilgrimage that traces the bird’s winter migration from the salt ponds of New England to a mountaintop in southeastern Cuba, and thence to Venezuela, where ospreys like to winter. He offers himself as a kind of gonzo/doofus/poet/adventurer/tour guide, fueled by copious injections of caffeine, beer, and rum, his cultural horizons framed by Walt Whitman at one end and Ultimate Frisbee at the other. And even in the most banal parts of his trip -- like the dash to get his rental car back in time to avoid late fees -- he makes an engaging companion.

Although his travels take him through Castro’s Cuba and Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Gessner doesn’t evince much interest in human politics. More than anything it’s an annoying distraction. Havana’s charms elude him; it’s just an ugly place for a quick stopover in an uncomfortable hotel. Machine gun–toting soldiers and officious immigration clerks are notable mainly because they rob him of time better spent chasing ospreys and seeking out drinking buddies. The characters he meets along the way, from a Cuban bird-watcher named Freddy to a watched bird called Jaws, are nicely drawn, and each newcomer speeds us along smoothly to the next mini-adventure. There’s plenty of humor and warmth in these encounters, yet not an ounce of sentimentality. The story of a runt osprey chick being pecked to death and then fed to its siblings, for example, isn’t for the fainthearted romantic.

This probably isn’t a book that will change lives. There are only so many ways you can describe the sighting of an osprey, and some musings (the osprey’s restless journey mirrors our own quest for a coherent plot line in life) are a little familiar. Even so, Gessner’s travels are filled with small delights. He has a great gift for conveying reverence without sanctimony, and even at his most sardonic and self-deprecating, his sense of wonder at the osprey never falters. As he stands on a rock above Cuba’s Sierra Maestra, watching ospreys rocket past, we wish we could be up there beside him, binoculars in one hand, a cold beer in the other.