Return of the Osprey

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.