Return of the Osprey

A memoir, tribute to a once-endangered species, and natural history, Return of the Osprey recounts the many discoveries David Gessner made when he immersed himself for an entire nesting season in the lives of the ospreys that had returned to his seagirt corner of Cape Cod.

The osprey, hailed by Roger Tory Peterson as the symbol of the New England coast, all but vanished during the 1950s and '60s because of the ravages of DDT. In the next few decades, however, the birds returned, slowly at first and then in a rush. Writing with passion, humor, and a reverence for the natural world, Gessner interweaves the stories of the nesting osprey pairs he observed with his own readjustment to life on the windblown, beautiful, and increasingly developed landscape he had known as a child.

With a new preface from Gessner and foreword by Helen Macdonald, Return of the Osprey celebrates one of nature's most remarkable creatures, as well as our own limitless capacity for wonder.

David Gessner is the Kenan Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the author of fourteen books, including the New York Times bestseller All the Wild That Remains.

Gessner's Return of the Osprey soars with detail and a sense of wonder. By the end of the book, you feel as if you've been out there with Gessner much of the time, shivering in the woods, mucking through the marsh, kayaking upriver to an isolated nest site. It's strangely satisfying, imparting a sense of the profound. And you don't even have to venture outdoors to experience it.

A naturalist's jewel... Gessner provides insights into the history of this great sea bird of prey that will delight both the committed birder and the general reader.

A year well spent and carefully recorded: heedful, respectful, and filled with the romance of being out of doors.

Gessner's Return of the Osprey soars with detail and a sense of wonder.

It was Gessner's good fortune to become obsessively interested in ospreys, and it is ours that he writes about them with such clarity, elegance, and passion that this book becomes an instant classic of natural history. It is also a work of great spiritual power... This is a book to read, reread, and remember for a long time.

This beautifully told story of a season with birds of prey makes for engrossing reading as we learn about osprey life from a master essayist.

David Gessner's witnessing of an osprey's dive—a wing-folded plunge of 50 feet or more, talons extended at the last moment to spear a fish and carry it to the surface and then aloft—is the obvious high point of his season observing ospreys in Brewster and Dennis and the nearby waters of Cape Cod. But it is the mark of how fine a nature writer Gessner is that his description of the more prosaic activity of nest-building is as perfectly realized as the accounts of the thrilling dives. Return of the Osprey can, on those grounds alone, claim a place among the classics of American nature writing....A reader could put Return of the Osprey aside at this point and feel the satisfaction that comes at the end of a memorable book. But Gessner has only been waiting for his chance for him, and the ospreys, to dazzle. And when it comes, Gessner puts you right there.