Book: Soaring with Fidel by David Gessner

An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond.

A delightful book, about birds and the love the author especially has for ospreys. He writes of his adventures as he follows their migration route pretty much down the eastern coast, through Florida, across Cuba from west to east and over to Venezuela. The writing is lively, never boring or dull or pedantic and David is able to deliver, not only information about ospreys, but he also about the people he meets, almost always making them engaging, real and dedicated to birding science. He hasn't much money and so he makes the trip in stages, mostly by car, but is often given lodging and beer, etc.

On his way south from Cape Cod, he stops by Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania and Cape May in New Jersey, and every page has interesting anecdotes. He is irreverent and passionate and willing to learn what he can from the ornithologists he meets, the citizen scientists, or just the folks he meets who help him and who become interested in ospreys because of his enthusiasm.

"When thing were going well on the hawk-watch platform, it had the feel of a successful cocktail party, with strangers interacting  and calling across the deck to each other...."

At Cape May, he runs into a tour group led by Richard Crossley. (RC is a big name in bird guides and the world of birding.)  Someone had spotted a "Baird's sandpiper on the tidal felt. This was big news...but when I took my turn at the scope, all I could see was one drab wet bird amid a dozen other drab wet birds. I wasn't even sure I was seeing the right bird, but of course I nodded enthusiastically and pretended to be impressed."

Soaring a also travel story with a loosely planned itinerary, especially David's visit to Cuba, where he spends days on top of La Gran Piedra (the big rock - the "third largest freestanding rock in the the world"), accessible by walking through a bar, paying a dollar to the bartender and then climbing 452 steps. "The view was boundless."

"David said the stars promised that the next day would be a good osprey day. And it was, dear reader, it was. I know that it will strain credibility if I say that I saw a 'push' on my last day on the rock, But...I must tell you that I did, I did....For almost an hour the ospreys came: ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, twenty-nine."

He had a bit of trouble leaving Cuba:

They queried: "Why did you go into the mountains?"

David explains in his "mutilated Spanish...[his] love affair with ospreys and the books [he] had written, and would write, about them. What could be more winning? Who wouldn't love the story of a simple guy who loved birds--innocent little birds?" But, finally, after sweating and panicking and knowing he wouldn't do well with torture, he is finally allowed to leave.

"Birding is an eight-billion-dollar industry...bigger than hunting and fishing combined."

"The flyways that migrating birds follow cross state and national lines...so as Venezuela goes, as Cuba goes, as Cape Cod goes, as Carolina goes, so go the birds...Migration is the real worldwide web, the closest thing that nature had to connecting the entire planet."

DDT can be banned in the US but not in another country; the US have a protected status for certain species but another country may allow them to be hunted.

Think on that when you next see birds perching, flying, swimming, diving, eating, building nests....seducing humans....