Arrivals
Last week, on a short trip back to the island to check on our house renovation project, I asked my neighbor, “Have you heard the osprey?”
Most of us await harbingers that herald the approach of another season, particularly those that signal winter is giving way to spring. In my Illinois yard, there’s no more reliable messenger than the male cardinal who perches atop our hawthorn tree, a carmine point around which a dreary end-of-winter gray collapses, a bright chap who seems a bit overdressed but after several mornings of unrelenting, heart-bursting melody repledging his ardor to his mate and warning off any would-be suitors, appears instead to have been yoked to all of spring’s renewing color and hauls it into view, even as the sparrows, those opportunistic 19th century imports, go about their brisk business in dull, unchanging brown, as though trying to blend in unnoticed. On the island, spring – or at least mud season – is announced when ice eases out of the coves and Frost Heave warning signs appear on the roads. When warblers begin again to mob the feeders and peepers burst forth with song in ponds and flooded hollows.
And then there are the nearby Heart Island ospreys about which I inquired of my neighbor.
Usually, I’m not on the island until my seasonal return in late May, so ospreys are for me less a sign of spring. They’re a measure of arrival. Mine.
In those first days, I go about my usual rituals of reconnecting and renewal, of inscribing new chapters in what I hope will be a long history. I marvel anew at my journey to such a place, thankful again for all the riches that through a somewhat mysterious confluence of chance, opportunity and work brought me to this place and for the freedom and means by which I’m able to return each year. As I unpack, inspect the garden, begin lists, it’s not until I hear the high-pitched kew, kew, kew of the Heart Island ospreys that I recognize what I’ve been waiting for. The confirmation I need – the ospreys have indeed come back to their nest. Another arrival, another gift. And so at last, I can truly settle in.
Once I knew little about ospreys – that, for example, they are one of only six species to appear on each of our planet’s continents except Antarctica. Or how, in March, just as I’m beginning to get serious about my late May trip back to the island – perhaps showing some of the same kinds of restlessness birds exhibit prior to embarking on their migratory journey – ospreys, probably “ours” among them, begin leaving their wintering grounds in South America. Compelled by an urgency to nest and mate, they travel north 100-200 miles a day along a 4,000 mile migratory flyway, much of the route over open water and with hurdles all along the way – and making, relatively speaking, my first day’s otherwise impressive 700-mile Interstate drive in a car rigged with cooler, music and audio books a somewhat puny accomplishment.
Now, for me, ospreys, the Heart Island ones in particular, have become integral to the fabric of the island and, more place-specific, to what makes our house and property home. I’m convinced that I can now better translate their high-pitched cheeps into begging or peevish warning or vigilant alert. More important, I’ve heeded their demands to pay closer attention to the skies. Early on, they convinced me to buy better binoculars, and, with my ring-side seat to their aerial displays and spectacular athletic dives, I’ve been rewarded ever since. Were these resident birds not to return, as for a time last year I feared, it would be a loss I’d have a hard time accepting.
Once the entire country was impoverished by a loss of ospreys. Following its widespread use for decades, the pesticide DDT seeped into the food chain. A fat soluble compound, DDT doesn’t break down. It passes from one organism to another, accumulating and magnifying in concentration as it works its way up to the top predators, including raptors such as osprey. It’s estimated that between 1950-75, DDT wiped out 90% of our country’s osprey population.
Often called fish hawks, ospreys can reach 24 inches tall with a wingspan of six feet. Largely black above and white below, they sport prominent black cheek patches and handsome checked markings on the underside of wings and tail. A tufted crown and white pantaloons give them a decidedly cosmopolitan air. Hitting the scale at about four pounds, ospreys are capable of pulling from ocean, pond or lake a fish more than half its size. The nest built atop one of Heart Island’s tallest spruce is, from our deck and shoreline, impressively visible to the unglassed eye. And though not a whopper, it’s emblematic of the types of nests ospreys build, some up which can reach four feet tall and weigh nearly a quarter ton, massive, often messy arrangements of sticks, warp and cleverly recycled scavenged finds. In Return of the Osprey, David Gessner writes of one nest he observed throughout an entire season on Cape Cod. Among its building components was the clever re-use of a partially clad Barbie doll, surely not a purpose the Mattel folks had in mind for one of their top-selling icons.
To watch an osprey dive is to watch an athlete at the top of his game, driven by no less than survival. As much as 100 feet above the water, an osprey hovers with rapid kingfisher-like wingbeats. Then, having made its necessary adjustments, the osprey tucks its folded wings, and at speeds up to 40 mph plunges head long toward the water. Just before hitting, it flips, wings thrust back, talons forward, and strikes the water, disappearing in total immersion. Moments later, it resurfaces with thrashing wings and, if the dive was successful, rises with a fish clasped headfirst and torpedo-like in expert aerodynamic fashion. Only twice have I had the occasion to witness such an accomplishment. More numerous are the times I’ve watched repeated, admirable attempts that come up short, usually in aborted dives when whatever calculations osprey make apparently require recalibration. All very exhilarating to be sure, but each reminding me of the incredible maneuvers needed to fill a belly – no mere stroll to the refrigerator as Gessner has adroitly pointed out.
Experts say approximately 50% of ospreys born to an area return to the same spot. Osprey pairs are also considered monogamous, a trait, be it in osprey, swan or wolf, we humans seem eager to recognize, as though certain birds and mammals are in the business of trying to emulate us. But such faithfulness, osprey expert Alan Poole claims, is more a commitment to a nesting site than to one another. Were a supposedly beloved mate to prove suddenly incapable of bearing offspring, she’d be sent packing. The unattached will sense this and begin hanging out nearby. Who knows? Maybe that’s what the commotion was about two summers ago when, inexplicably, very early in the season, three ospreys, often in full cry, circled Heart Island for days. I assumed an unhitched offspring was hanging out, but maybe an impending new bride was already visualizing how she’d reposition the furniture.
Next to producing offspring and filling bellies, the deepest instinct ospreys possess seems to be for home, a biological imperative that’s tangibly lived in their commitment to a particular place. Returning to it, they’re pulled by an instinctual and unyielding urge, following inner compasses beyond scientific explanation.
Their journeys are, of course, different from mine. And yet, I feel we’re kindred spirits, that, perhaps, we experience similar stirrings in the blood, what poet Walt Whitman in “Song of the Open Road” referred to as feeling “called by an irresistible urge to depart.”
And, as scientists tell us, ospreys recognize landmarks along the way. So what, I wonder, are the landmarks of the migratory Heart Island ospreys as they home in on their final leg? The bridge crossing the Piscataqua? Or, more in the neighborhood, our bridge spanning the Reach? What do they hold in the sweep of their aerial view – one obviously far greater than mine atop Caterpillar Hill? Closing in, do they open into full, high-pitched cry the way my heart races, pings along Route 15? Is it possible that our shoreline, our house are among their recognized landmarks? Ones that tell them they, too, these birds of two places, of, like me, here and away, have arrived?