Chapters from "Soaring with Fidel"

An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
John Muir

"I don’t look at the sky."
A mechanic in Venezuela

PROLOGUE
This is not a bird book.

Okay, yes, sure there are birds in it. Lots of them in fact. But it is not a bird book. It is a book, among other things, about the nature of human happiness. About what happens when human beings, instead of focusing on their own selves, turn their attention to things with feathers that fly.

As you'll see, many of the characters in this book have done just that and seem the better for it. The high points in their lives have corresponded, not coincidentally, with the flight of the birds they follow. And they have, to a certain extent, become what they watched, that is have become imbued with the avian attributes of flight and freedom. Of course I don’t want this to all sound too healthy; there was an element of obsession in most everyone I met. But in an increasingly restrictive and xenophobic world, birds have pulled them across borders. More than that: you might say their empathy with these birds is a kind of flight in itself.

We all sometimes feel the tug of migration, of moving from one home to another, of leaving our old lives behind. Each fall and spring, the times of the great migrations, the world shifts into movement, almost every winged thing heading somewhere else. It’s a massive drama of movement playing out right before our eyes, and one year I decided not just to notice, but to partake in that drama. My own life had recently been unsettled by a move away from the place I was calling home, and by the birth of my first child.

And so I joined the great unsettling, the biannual feathered disruptions when urgency fills the air. My trip was, among other things, a different way to see the year. Not merely as days on a calendar or things to check off a list but as a dangerous journey along seasonal edges. And as a larger experiment in living in-between.

Birds expend a tremendous amount of effort and energy, and risk death, to find the right home at the right time. The trade off, apparently, is worth it, despite spending the good part of the year moving toward a place they aren’t.

But back to human beings. After a year of following birds and following people who follow birds, I have reached this not-so-scientific or original conclusion: humans are never happier than when they are chasing something.

So this is a book about people and flight and obsession and freedom and empathy. And okay, yes, it's also a bird book.

1. FIRST CONTACT
The journey starts on September 9, 2004 with my having flown 1000 miles from North Carolina to Cape Cod, where I will turn around and follow the ospreys back south. The first twenty-four hours of the trip are a flat out failure. Anxious that I will not see any birds, I bomb around the Cape in my rental car, looking for ospreys. After a series of mishaps I finally see two young ospreys, siblings in all likelihood, engaged in a mid-air battle over a fish. The larger of the birds, a beautiful young female, rips the fish away from her brother and flies back to the nest. I watch her eat for over a half hour. She looks strong, and I have a sudden thought that this is one bird that will be athletic and lucky enough to make it all the way to Cuba.

2. SHRINE
From Cape Cod I head down to Westport, Massachusetts, home of the largest osprey colony in the northeast and a shrine for osprey-lovers everywhere. In fact , two of the world's most prominent osprey experts, Gil Fernandez and Alan Poole, make their home in Westport. This chapter is about Fernandez, Poole, and all the ospreys I see at this remarkable place.

3. STALKING THE VIRTUAL OSPREY
From Westport I drive to Long Island for an extraordinary meeting at the home of Dennis Puleston. Dennis died two years ago but is still a hero to birders everywhere for his part in getting DDT outlawed, as well as his writings on natural history and his beautiful osprey paintings. After Puleston's death, a camera was placed inside an osprey nest on his property and this, the first of its kind, displays streaming footage of osprey home life that can now be accessed on the internet. The website that shows this footage has spawned a group of devoted followers who watch the ospreys round the clock, rooting them on as their eggs hatch and they raise their chicks. During this stop in Westport, I meet the members of this eclectic internet group.

4. HAWK MOUNTAIN
My next stop is Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, the oldest hawkwatching sight in the United States, a place where humans and birds come together each fall in huge numbers. I meet Keith Bildstein, Hawk Mountain's affable director and a famous raptor expert. Keith foreshadows my Cuba trip with his own stories of his time in Cuba with Freddy Rodriguez Santana and he fills out more specifics of Freddy's great discovery.

5. OLD PROS AND YOUNG GUNS
My next stop is Cape May, at the southeastern tip of New Jersey, the epicenter of birding life in the U.S. There I watch ospreys migrate toward Chesapeake Bay and spend the night with a house full of fascinating birdwatching interns, up and comers in the birding world, still in their early twenties.
From Cape May I take the ferry south to the Del Marva peninsula, driving through three states in three hours, in time to take a dip in the Chesapeake Bay at sunset where I am accompanied, of course, by an osprey hunting for fish above me.

6. FISHING THE SKY
Once in Santiago I finally meet Freddy Santana, but only for an hour. We agree to go to La Gran Piedra, the site of Freddy’s great osprey discovery, the next day. But I can’t wait. I hail a cab and take the winding ten mile ride straight up to the top of the mountain. I climb the 452 steps through the rainforest and then up the ladder drilled into the side of the rock itself. La Gran Piedra is everything I imagined. The mountain itself is eight thousand feet sheer up from the sea and La Gran Piedra, the big rock, juts from the mountaintop like the prow of a huge ship. To the west, is the spine of the mountains leading to Santiago; to the south is the blue-green Caribbean; to the north another mountain range; and to the east, directly behind me, is Guantanamo Bay. And it is there, to the east, that I catch sight of my first osprey.

7. FREDDY’S FINEST HOUR
My week in Cuba is the most intense and absorbing of my life. Freddy and I go to la Gran Piedra and watch ospreys stream out of the clouds. He and his wife Iliana also tell me more about the big day in August 2003 when Freddy saw 607 birds. This chapter recounts Freddy’s big day but also many sights and smells of Cuba.

8. SOARING WITH CASTRO
With only two days left in Cuba I decide to spend a night in the mountains. The next morning I climb to the top of la Gran Piedra for the last time. The winds are perfect, light and from the West, and for one midday hour, from about 12:10 to 1:10, ospreys are everywhere. It doesn’t compare to Freddy's big day, of course but it gives me a sense of what that day must have been like.

9. WINTERING GROUNDS
Late in the winter Keith Bildstein puts me in touch with a young Venezuelan birder named Adrian Naveda. I decide to fly to Venezuela to see wintering ospreys. My companion on this trip is Mark Honerkamp, or Hones as I call him, a carnivorous, sometimes flatulent friend who also has a surprisingly sharp eye for birds. We fly into Caracas in early March and drive through a late night barricade where we are stopped by machine gun-toting guards. The next couple days are extraordinary. Adrian Naveda, our guide, takes us deep into the jungles of Venezuela and there we see hundreds of ospreys who have made it to their winter destination, the end of their long trip from Cape Cod.

10. THE RIVER NORTH
After Venezuela, I begin my own trip north. I follow the birds back up through Florida. After Florida, I head back to North Carolina, and, soon after, my family begins our own annual migration north for the summer. We arrive back on Cape Cod not long after the local ospreys. We have made similar journeys, both going out and coming back. But while my adventure is almost over, for the ospreys the year is a continuous circle. They are back where they began but already feeling the pressure of the year, the need to mate and incubate so that their young can hatch and learn to fly and fish in time to make the trip south. For me this is an ending, but for the birds it is just another beginning.