“Return of the Osprey - A Season of Flight and Wonder” by David Gessner, 2001

I’m glad I read this book slowly. It’s calm and meditative, and I needed time to visualize and appreciate what I read. Gessner and his wife moved to Cape Cod in the late 1990s, living year round in an (unwinterized) summer cottage which belonged to his family. Their geographic preferences were at odds. She loved the mountains, he loved the salty Cape. They worked it out.   The book is a detailed account of one season in the life of four osprey pairs (and their chicks), at the time when these birds were recovering from near extinction due to hunting and the use of DDT. After that dangerous pesticide was taken out of use, citizens supported ospreys by building nest platforms and protecting some of important habitats.   Digression: I once helped erect an osprey platform in southern New Jersey, on the saltmarsh near the Great Egg Harbor River. The platform, impressively sturdy, had been assembled in advance. We reached the site on an old “party boat” called (no kidding!) “The Duke of Fluke”. Digging a hole to mount the platform was easy. So was sticking the post in the hole and pulling the post up to vertical. BUT we were cautioned to proceed very slowly with pulling on the ropes to drive the post down into the saturated salt march muck! Too much enthusiasm and the WHOLE THING would have just kept going down, burying itself right down to the crossbars! Luckily for us, experienced leadership was on hand and made sure it came out right. It was fun. End of digression.   Gessner is balanced in his approach to nature. He can’t help attributing human-like emotions to the birds, but he’s cautious, and makes clear his respect for their wildness, their “otherness”. Ospreys do not see us in the same way that we observe them. They are “driven” by forces and instincts we can study and appreciate but do not fully comprehend.   Return of the Osprey  includes lots of science, presented accessibly for non-scientific readers. It also acquaints the reader with past investigators and even literary and historical perspectives. I found a few familiar names and enticing possibilities for further reading.   In his later chapters, Gessner waxes philosophical. He values highly attachment to PLACE and ponders its role in family and civic life. My life, by comparison with his, is “rootless” and my family ties are few. But 45 years ago I married into a family that is quite the opposite! There is land, there is a “home place”… but we are without a clear path into the future. And I think my experience is much more common, here and now, than the home/place/family pattern Gessner describes.   In his closing chapter, Gessner says “I have a complicated relationship with hope.” Good! Me, too! I’m careful how I speak about the unknown and the unknowable.    How does Gessner resolve this? Admitting that ‘reality” often interferes with home, he asserts “…with hope, our energy surges, infusing us with verve and the excitement of possibility. Hope is…a juice we need if we are to fight on, to struggle. And hope is a physical trait, found in the body.”    Hope is a great deal more than “just” an emotion.   I think this surging energy is what John Vaillant (see my blog post dated 2/29/2024) invokes when he foresees the emergence of Homo veriditas, a new form of humanity… energetic, creative and GREEN.    Gessner says, “The things we look to for hope had better be as solid, or more solid, than the things that bring us despair.” This is a problem. Climate change has become an “existential” crisis. As a scientist, I believe both the future of the human race and the future of life on our planet are seriously at risk. We’ve changed the atmosphere so much that we are WAY outside the box.    Add to that a pandemic and two particularly nasty wars, and many of us are anxious. What was Gessner dealing with? DDT and ecosystem disruption to the point of extinction. He did NOT live and write Return of the Osprey in “comfortable” times.   I thank him for sharing his experiences and insights.