Anthropomorphism; “the attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to nonhuman organisms or inanimate objects;” comes close but still doesn’t quite capture the feeling I have when watching the young osprey that have grown up near our home.
I’ve tried to describe in the past the feeling I have when watching one about to take that first leap off his nest into the great beyond. There is that crazy mixture of desire and fear as he seeks to break loose from the confines of a little 2 by 2 square nest into the world that lies beyond. And as I watch I too can imagine the incredible difference between the solid feel beneath my toes and that sensation of floating in air. It’s not just that I am attributing human feelings to a bird, for just a moment I too become that bird and I feel (and almost taste) his highest hopes and greatest fears.
Yesterday I watched two young osprey who had only recently left their nest and were now learning how to catch fish for themselves for the very first time in their lives. After weeks of simply hopping up and down on a nest while begging for food, now they were on their own, flapping wings furiously 100 feet in the air and all the while trying to spot some small glimmer in the water below that might be their prize. Then came the dive: Not just some aimless cannonball like the ones off the high board in my childhood – but a precision arrow shot from the sky, only to land in the water – in the right place but at the wrong time – for his quarry had moved on just mili-seconds before.
Again and again they practiced – the soaring, the sighting of the target, and finally the dive. And time after time, after the splash, they came up empty. Until at last, I watched as first one young osprey and then the other proudly flew his victory lap with his very first fish grasped between his toes. And then, as I watched, the young osprey still in victory flight (almost like a young football player about to make his first touchdown before the cheering crowd), apparently as he sought to re-adjust the squirming fish into proper head-first position, our young hero fumbled…. and although he frantically flew back and forth and futilely dove after it there was no recovery of that fumble.
So help me, I felt the osprey’s pain! It was not just the hunger and exhaustion of flying and diving for hours with nothing to show for it. It was the shame of dropping that fish in plain view of everyone and with no one else to blame.
Write a Letter to the Editor on this Article
We encourage readers to offer their point of view on this article by submitting the following form. Editing is sometimes necessary and is done at the discretion of the editorial staff.