The Mast-Head: Taking Flight

The osprey are not the first birds to wake up and start carrying on. Near Gardiner’s Bay in Amagansett in the minutes before dawn, when there is only a scattering of light in the east, birds I cannot name by their voices alone twitter from the scrub oak.

It is not until there is sufficient light to peer into the water for prey that the osprey launch from their nests and begin to soar. But from the sound of their keening and because they call from so high above the bay, I assume there is more to the morning for them than hunger. 

Birds are, ornithologists tell us, not interested in aesthetics, which seems reasonable. Yet osprey tuck all sorts of shiny and colorful things into their nests. I remember when, as a child, my father pointed out a green plastic child’s Army jeep toy among the sticks in a nest on Gardiner’s Island. Just down the road from my house in a nest at the old fish factory this summer, you can see ribbon and bits of Mylar balloons.

Watching the fish hawks, as we called them growing up, spiral slowly in the sky, it is hard to escape the notion that they are doing so for pleasure. They are at too great a height even with their extraordinary eyesight to hunt; their cries sound more like conversation than warning.

I had also been flying over the house a couple of weeks ago. My oldest friend, Michael Light, had brought his small plane east from California for the summer, and he took me up for a look early in the day on the Fourth of July.

I don’t recall if it was Michael’s observation or my own, but one of the main things we talked about over the aircraft’s headsets was that everything below seems softened from 700 feet. This is especially so for me, since, at the newspaper, our stock in trade as much as anything else are points of conflict, many of which have to do with who wants to put a house where or which road is at high risk for car crashes. All that fades away from the air. Osprey have the right idea.