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Openings
March is the waiting time. Everything poised, ready to become something else, a world in need of a nudge. The buds on the old post oak bulge hard as knuckles, the ?rst blades of grass cut through the dark purple rim of the cranberry bog, and the willow branches yearn toward yellow. Almost every morning I watch the sun edge its way up over the harbor, and the world it lights grows steadily greener and warmer. While the season itself may waver uncertainly, the birds insist on spring. As I head out for my morning walk, all of Sesuit Neck seems caught in the upward twirl of birdsong. Cardinals whistle their upward whistle, mourning doves coo, and the brambles ?ll with the chittering of ?nches and chickadees.
Down at the beach two hundred sanderlings cover the end of the jetty, and when I walk toward them they take off as one, veering east, showing their white bellies, skimming over the water before banking and heading right back toward me. Just when it looks like I'll die a silly death-pierced by the beaks of a hundred small birds-they split like a curtain around my body. Then the split groups split, heading off in seemingly random directions before joining up, reshuffing, and then-one again-banking, their white bellies ?icking to blackish backs like a magic trick. They put on their show for some time before tiring of it, and I watch, half stunned, thinking how this sight has come like a sign of early spring or the de?nition of grace, an undeserved gift.
Is it my imagination or do all of us-animal, plant, and human-take a raw, near-doltish pleasure in the coming season? This, more than January, seems the time of year for resolutions, and I have already made mine. I have vowed to spend more time outside. It's true I've lived a fairly pastoral life over the past two years, walking the beach daily, but this year I want to live more out than in, to break away from desk and computer, and see if I can fully immerse myself in the life of Sesuit Neck, the life outside of me. "Explore the mystery" was the advice the Cape Cod writer Robert Finch gave me long ago. That is what I'll do. Speci?cally, I have vowed to spend more time with my neighbors; more speci?cally, with those neighbors who nest nearby: the ospreys. Also known as ?sh hawks, these birds, with their magni?cent, nearly six-foot wingspans, will soon return to Cape Cod from their wintering grounds in South America. One man-made osprey platform, which will hopefully be the site for a nest, stands directly across the harbor from me, the pole on which it rests bisecting the March sunrise. In anticipation of the opsreys' arrival I, like a Peeping Tom, aim my binoculars directly from my living room into theirs. Other nearby pairs have nested out at Quivett Creek, on the end of the western jetty, on Simpkins Neck, and on the marsh by Chapin Beach, and so I set out every day on my rounds, wanting to be there to greet them, hoping to catch the return of these great birds on the wing. So far there's been no sign, and I fear I'm being stood up. But that just adds to the building anticipation of this indecisive month, and soon enough they'll ?ll the air with their high-pitched calls, strong eagle ?apping, and ?erce dives.
These were sights I never saw growing up in the 1960s and '70s. Not a single osprey pair nested on Sesuit Neck when I spent summers here as a child. For me these sights were as mythic and distant as those described by early pioneers heading west: migrations of thousands-millions-of birds, when the sun would be blotted out and the whole sky darkened for an hour.
Of course, the ospreys weren't that chronologically distant. Only thirty years earlier, in the 1930s, they had dotted the New England shore, nesting on every high perch they could ?nd. In the late 1940s Roger Tory Peterson wrote of how the abundant osprey "symbolized the New England Coast more than any other bird," and when Peterson moved to Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1954, he found, within a ten-mile radius of his home, "approximately 150 occupied Osprey nests." But soon after this the decline of the
ospreys began, a decline caused directly by residual DDT in the ?sh that made up their entire diet. The birds were nearly killed of in New England, pesticides contaminating their eggs and preventing them from hatching, wiping out 90 percent of the osprey population between 1950 and 1975.
The situation on Cape Cod was even more complicated. Here the birds had been dealt a double blow. This land is a recovering one, coming back from earlier environmental devastation. By the mid-1800s there was hardly a tree left on the Cape, all viable lumber having been cut down for the building of ships. Without their primary nesting requirement-trees-few ospreys nested here. A century later, DDT did in those few. The writer John Hay, our most penetrating local observer, has little memory of ospreys on Cape Cod in the years after World War II. Twice within two hundred years, in ways characteristic of each century, we found ways to expel birds that had likely bred here since the Ice Age.
Now the birds are back. It has been a gradual comeback, a re?lling of old niches. By the late 1970s a few birds had returned, by the '80s many more, and now a sudden rush. Only recently, in the mid-'90s, have the ospreys begun to reinhabit my town, East Dennis.
The story of the ospreys is a hopeful one in many ways, a rare example of humans reversing our tendency to try to control nature, of recognizing that we have done wrong and then correcting it. It's also the story of the possibility of cohabitation. Who could imagine a more wild sight than an osprey spotting a mere shadow of a ?sh from a hundred feet above the sea and diving into the water headlong, emerging with the ?sh in its talons? And yet this wild creature next turns the ?sh straight ahead for better aerodynamics, carrying it like a purse, ?apping home to a nest that sits directly above a car-littered parking lot. Ospreys aren't picky about their homesites. In addition to trees, they commonly nest on utility and telephone poles, above highways, and atop buoys near constant boat traffic. Osprey expert and author Alan Poole sees this as a sign of their remarkable adaptability. Thanks in large part to this adaptability, the birds give us the gift of the wild in the midst of the civilized. I understand that it's a fallacy to see nature as a kind of self-help guide for humans, but there may be a lesson here. Perhaps we, too, can retain some of our wildness while living in this increasingly cluttered, concrete world.
While I've vowed to spend more time with the birds this spring, I will try not to draw too many lessons from them. That is, I'll try to resist the temptations of my own hyperactive imagination. It isn't easy. A few years back, during a year spent on Cape Cod, I saw my ?rst osprey, and couldn't help but also see my own life mirrored in the phoenixlike rise of the bird. I was thirty going on eighteen, and my world spun in tight solipsistic circles. Perhaps I made too much of the fact that DDT and its residues had also been found to lead to an increase in the rate of testicular cancer. Having suffered from that disease and survived, I felt even more connected to the ?sh hawks, and even more joyous about their comeback and return to the Cape. Connections crackled; their ?erce revival boded well for my own. The interconnectedness of our worlds excited me.
