The Comeback Bird

A review by Patricia Paladines and Carl Safina

Ospreys: The Revival of a Global Raptor by Alan Poole

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019

220 pages, hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 14921 

When it comes to us and Ospreys, it’s deep and personal. Around 1970, a neighbor took an adolescent Carl to a secret fishing spot on an eastern Long Island pond. He saw a huge stick nest, and from what he’d been reading he knew some things: it was an Osprey nest, abandoned, and Ospreys were nearly extinct. DDT and other pesticides, “elixirs of death” in Rachel Carson’s words, had wreaked their havoc. And they were all still very much in use. Carl couldn’t believe he’d just missed the existence of birds who could make a nest like that. To him, for him, what future could there be? All seemed lost.

But the worst of those pesticides were banned in the early 1970s and we watched Ospreys begin a long, slow, gathering recovery. The two of us didn’t meet until the mid-1990s when we both worked at a nature sanctuary. We got to know each other by taking walks to the bay, where we’d look for—Ospreys. Nowadays, married, in March we usually take a special morning to seek out the first Osprey sighting of the year. And we usually have a bit of a contest about who’ll get the first glimpse. Ospreys have been, and remain, a big part of each of our lives and remain a touchstone of our life together. Patricia will always carry the memory of walking to get her Bachelor’s diploma at an outdoor graduation ceremony and having a vocalizing Osprey circling the proceedings, adding propitious uplift to a triumphal moment.

So we were delighted by the publication of Alan Poole’s deeply informed and superbly produced, Ospreys: The Revival of a Global Raptor. Poole tells the story of seeing his first Osprey when he was around 7 or 8 years old. One morning in the 1950s, shortly after dawn, Poole and his father had launched their canoe into a lake in the northeastern United States headed to a trout stream on the other side. Nearing their destination, he writes, “I barely noticed a large dark bird flying slowly along the shoreline as we approached, hovering at treetop level and moving on, then hovering again, long legs dangling. Suddenly the bird folded its wings and plunged, feet stretched forward, talons wide. The lake surface erupted in a shower of spray. Instantly I was awake and riveted. A few seconds later the long dark wings reached high, slowly lifting the bird from the water, a flash of struggling silver in its grip.” Many of us who are passionate Osprey groupies can relate to that riveting first thrill of watching a “Fish Hawk” catch a meal.

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