Reflections on Soaring with Fidel

I never thought that I could get engrossed in a book on bird migration. After reading an article about David Gessner in The Writer’s Chronicle on a long train ride from Hartford, CT to Washington, D.C. last year, my interest was piqued enough to buy his book, Soaring with Fidel. An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond (Beacon Press, 2007).

As Gessner states in his introduction, the book is not just about birds. It’s about the nature of human happiness. And “humans are never happier than when they are chasing something,” Gessner concludes after spending a year following birds and people who follow birds.

The book is about “people and flight and obsession and freedom and empathy,” Gessner says. And, yes, the birds.

Ospreys are large, nearly eagle-sized birds with a six-foot wingspan, I learn from Gessner. (He also wrote a book about the birds prior to this one called The Return of the Osprey). They are known for their daring dives for fish and physical features – “dark brown masks and vivid brown-and-white wing patterns.”

Gessner, a professor of creative writing at a university in North Carolina, set out on his trek during September 2004. He had lived on Cape Cod for several years and got acquainted with Osprey while they nested during the summers on the Cape. Now he wanted to see what they did after the fall.

That migration path took him from Cape Cod to Westport, MA; Long Island, NY; Hawk Mountain, PA; Cape May, NJ; coastal areas of NC; Florida; and culminates on top of La Gran Piedra – a huge rock in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba. And, then, on to Venezuela where many of the birds spend their winter.

Where does Fidel come into this? The BBC, apparently, was making a documentary on the migration track of the Cape Cod Ospreys with scientist Robert Bierregaard around the same time as Gessner started on his trek. Five birds on Martha’s Vineyard were outfitted with satellite transmitters so they could be tracked from Cape Cod to Cuba and beyond.

Gessner thought that he could collaborate with the BBC crew during his journey since they all had the same goal. However, the BBC producers decided they wanted to keep the story of the tagged birds under wraps until the documentary aired. This fired up Gessner's competitive spirit and he thought of himself as a rebel racing against the Brits.

Bierregaard, though, kept a web site on which he posted the movements of the birds along with interesting travelogues, so whenever Gessner had access to the Internet or contacted friends who had computers, he was able to keep up with the activities of the five birds. One, an adult male the BBC crew named Bluebeard, was one of the last birds to leave the Cape.

An attentive father, Bluebeard stayed in the area until late September caring for one of his young ones that couldn’t seem to get the knack of fishing. He would go out and come back wet but with no fish and then would sit on his nest screaming for food. Bluebeard would wind up bringing him fish. Gessner renames Bluebeard, calling him Fidel and has grand visions of meeting him as he flies over La Gran Piedra.

Do the bird and bird watcher/trekker unite? Well, you’ll have to read the book to find that out.

But, I must say that Gessner opened up a world I didn’t realize existed – a community of osprey watchers –experts and lay people , young and old, from New England to Florida, Cuba to Venezuela – that are all connected by their passion for the birds. Aguilas Pescadoras or eagle fishermen as they are known in Cuba.

I have become fascinated with these Cape Cod birds that migrate 8,000 miles on journeys fraught with peril to their winter homes in South America and back to their nesting places on the Cape in the spring. I’ll be looking for them in the coastal areas of Virginia and Chesapeake Bay area as they make their trek back north this spring.

This past fall as night fell, I listened…listened to the sound of life preparing for migration, more in tune with the rhythm of movement than I had been in past years. I, too, wanted to be on the move. And I’m somewhat envious of the Ospreys' freedom, their ability to travel over national borders and the restrictiveness of political systems that are hostile to one another.

More so than ever, I find the truth in a quote by the Scottish-born American naturalist John Muir that opens Soaring with Fidel.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”