Late one afternoon last month, Jenn and I visited the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. We meant to go again yesterday, but were deterred by the surprise blizzard.
It’s amazing how insignificant the skyline of Manhattan looks when seen at this distance from behind some feathery grasses. It’s hard to believe you’re still in the city.
In his book Return of the Osprey, David Gessner explains that ospreys are the only raptors that will dive entirely underwater to catch their prey—though he found it hard to catch them in the act. The ospreys’ grip is aided by their oversized talons and toes that are cleated like golf shoes.
The toes are scaly, the bottoms of the toes studded with projections called spicules. The spicules barb down into the fish, and the grip is sure and spiky. Moreover, an osprey’s legs are exceedingly long, so that they can stretch down into the water with what Pete Dunne calls a “boardinghouse reach.” The legs also act as shock absorbers, muting the impact upon hitting the water.
Return of the Osprey prompted me to look some of the passages in Thoreau’s Journal where he describes the bird he called the “fish hawk.” Thoreau doesn’t seem to have observed a dive himself, though he does see an osprey attempting to skim a fish from the surface of the Concord River.
Dec. 30, 1851
When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen-hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing [to] lay his axe at the root of that also.April 15, 1855
The Great Meadows are covered, except a small island in their midst, but not a duck do we see there. On a low limb of a maple on the edge of the river, thirty rods from the present shore, we saw a fish hawk eating a fish. Sixty rods off we could see his white crest. We landed, and got nearer by stealing through the woods. His legs looked long as he stood up on the limb with his back to us, and his body looked black against the sky and by contrast with the white of his head. There was a dark stripe on the side of the head. He had got the fish under his feet on the limb, and would bow his head, snatch a mouthful, and then look hastily over his right shoulder in our direction, then snatch another mouthful and look over his left shoulder. At length he launched off and flapped heavily away. We found at the bottom of the water beneath where he sat numerous fragments of the fish he had been eating, parts of the fins, entrails, gills, etc., and some was dropped on the bough. From one fin which I examined, I judged that it was either a sucker or a pout. There were small leaches adhering to it.May 12, 1855
From beyond the orchard saw a large bird far over the Cliff Hill, which, with my glass, I soon made out to be a fish hawk advancing. Even at that distance, half a mile off, I distinguished its gull-like body, — pirate-like fishing body fit to dive, — and that its wings did not curve upward at the ends like a hen-hawk’s (at least I could not see that they did), but rather down. It came on steadily, bent on fishing, with long and heavy undulating wings, with an easy, sauntering flight, over the river to the pond, and hovering over Pleasant Meadow at long time, hovering from time to time in one spot, when more than a hundred feet high, then making a very short circle or two and hovering again, then sauntering off against the woodside. At length he reappeared, passed downward over the shrub oak plain and alighted on an oak (of course now bare), standing this time apparently lengthwise on the limb. Soon took to wing again and went to fishing down the stream a hundred feet high. When just below Bittern Cliff, I observed by its motions that it observed something. It made a broad circle of observation in its course, lowering itself somewhat; then, by one or two steep sidewise flights, it reached the water, and, as near as intervening trees would let me see, skimmed over it and endeavored to clutch its prey in passing. It failed the first time, but probably succeeded the second. Then it leisurely winged its way to a tall bare tree on the east side of the Cliffs, and there we left it apparently pluming itself. It had a very white belly, and indeed appeared all white beneath its body. I saw broad black lines between the white crown and throat.
Photo by Mark Courtney/AP.
Like Bernd Heinrich’s Ravens in Winter, David Gessner’s Return of the Osprey is a book about watching birds. In different ways, both authors succeed in making a potentially tedious subject quite involving. Here is Gessner’s description of the osprey’s untidy nest.
An osprey nest is a giant pile of sticks, seaweed, grass, and whatever else the birds can get their talons on, a seemingly random mess of crosshatching and emphatic Jackson Pollack* splatterings and slashes. People have found everything in the nests from the heads of rag dolls to beer cans to toy sailboats to doormats. Alan Poole has compiled a list that includes “corn stalks, hunks of dried cow manure, empty fertilizer bags, and discarded rubber teat holders from milking machines,” as well as “sections of TV antennas, hula hoops, remnants of fish nets, old flannel shirts and rubber boots, styrofoam cups and buoys, a broken hoe, plastic hamburger cartons, and bicycle tires."… The early neighborhood prize for most original choice in building material goes to the pair at Chapin Beach, who have added a nearly naked Barbie doll to their nest’s northeast wall.
One of my favorite passages in the book describes Gessner’s brief career as a painter.
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 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 at 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 eelgrass. Thoreau called himself the “inspector of snowstorms,” and for that short while I became the examiner of eelgrass. Eelgrass was the bluff’s calendar, how I told seasonal time, and I recorded the changes day to day.
Gessner quotes Thoreau a few times in this time, but oddly, he does not quote from Thoreau’s many descriptions of the “fish hawk” or osprey in his Journal. (More on that later.)
*An interesting slip in a book about fish hawks, as Pollock is a painter but a pollack is a fish. Gessner is a wonderful writer but not a very good speller, and his proofreaders—in this book and especially in his essay collection Sick of Nature—let him down repeatedly.
Concord naturalist and photographer Cherrie Corey, whose walking tour in Great Meadows I joined last month, also leads walks in Gowing’s Swamp, Concord’s only surviving peat bog, which she has helped to protect from development. The excerpt below is from a long and extraordinary entry in Thoreau’s Journal.
The person who had recently received a lucrative appointment to Liverpool, prompting Thoreau to go in search of the cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccus), was fellow author and Concord resident Nathaniel Hawthorne. Rupert’s Land refers to the region around Hudson’s Bay once owned by the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company. It includes all of Manitoba, most of Saskatchewan, parts of Alberta, Nunavut, Ontario, and Quebec, and a small area of the northern U.S. Cherrie has noted that Thoreau’s comparison of Gowing’s Swamp with Hudson’s Bay is not just metaphorical but reflects his understanding of the similarities of the terrain and flora.
August 30, 1856. Better for me, says my genius, to go cranberrying this afternoon for the Vaccinium Oxycoccus in Gowing’s Swamp, to get but a pocketful and learn its peculiar flavor, aye, and the flavor of Gowing’s Swamp and of life in New England, than to go consul to Liverpool and get I don’t know how many thousand dollars for it, with no such flavor…. I left my shoes and stockings on the bank far off and waded barelegged through rigid andromeda and other bushes a long way, to the soft open sphagnous centre of the swamp.
I found these cunning little cranberries lying high and dry on the firm uneven tops of the sphagnum, — their weak vine considerably on one side, — sparsely scattered about the drier edges of the swamp, or sometimes more thickly occupying some little valley a foot or two over, between two mountains of sphagnum. They were of two varieties, judging from the fruit. The one, apparently the ripest, colored most like the common cranberry but more scarlet, i.e. yellowish-green, blotched or checked with dark scarlet-red, commonly pear-shaped, or more bulged out in the middle, thickly and finely dark-spotted or peppered on yellowish-green or straw-colored or pearly ground, — almost exactly like the smilacina and convallaria berries now, except that they are a little larger and not so spherical, — and with a tinge of purple….
I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place that the very huckleberries grew hairy and were inedible. I feel as if I were in Rupert’s Land, and a slight cool but agreeable shudder comes over me, as if equally far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty? But why should not as wild plants grow here as in Berkshire, as in Labrador? Is Nature so easily tamed? Is she not as primitive and vigorous here as anywhere? How does this particular acre of secluded, unfrequented, useless (?) quaking bog differ from an acre in Labrador?… It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess in Concord, i.e. than I import into it…
Consider how remote and novel that swamp. Beneath it is a quaking bed of sphagnum, and in it grow Andromeda Polifolia, Kalmia glauca, menyanthes (or buck-bean), Gaylussacia dumosa, Vaccinium Oxycoccus, — plants which scarcely a citizen of Concord ever sees. It would be as novel to them to stand there as in a conservatory, or in Greenland.
Photo of Andromeda polifolia is by KingsbraeGarden at Flickr.
I hadn’t been back to the Boston area, where I used to live, for more than seven years, but the opportunity to join a wildflower walk in Concord’s Great Meadows took me there last weekend. The walks are led every month by local naturalist and photographer Cherrie Corey, and August struck me as the last month in the year when wildflowers might be really plentiful.
Whether or not that’s so, it wasn’t too late to see the showy white and pink blooms of the swamp rose mallow, the branched spires of the blue vervain, the oddly named mad dog skullcap, and the pretty but aggressive purple loosestrife and American lotus. Not to mention a very mellow rabbit (no telephoto required).
More of my photos are here, but for some really good shots from the same day visit Larry Warfield’s Great Meadows blog. Cherrie and I can be seen pointing at something in the second photo.
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