I knew the ospreys had a message... it just took me a while to figure out what it was.
Long before he knew I existed, Dwayne Mattinson put up a tall pole on the far side of his property and nailed a large wheel across the top of it. The pole overlooked the river, and he hoped it would attract a pair of eagles to nest. But the wheel remained vacant and ignored. When we met, in summer 2006, Dwayne’s house and rural property beside River Philip, in Northwestern Nova Scotia, were starting to show signs of neglect; his marriage had ended several years earlier and he spent as much time as he could away from the emptiness of home.
I fell in love with him, but I also loved his house and property, seeing their potential.
After we married, Dwayne and I painted walls and installed new windows, built decks and dug gardens. We planted flowers and vegetables. We built a chicken coop and filled it with a dozen hens—fulfilling a dream of mine to have fresh eggs, and a manageable farming experience. The property blossomed.
“I’ve never seen the lilacs come out so full,” Dwayne said during the first spring after our wedding.
“They must sense that someone really cares now,” I said. “Our love is a new energy for this property.” I laughed as I said this—it sounded foolish to think that two humans could influence the natural world like that.
“Look!” he exclaimed. “Look what’s flying around the pole.”
Two ospreys landed on the wheel. They spent most of the morning there, circling and landing, flying off and returning, as if checking out a future home. And they continued to return, often with sticks clutched in talons, over the following weeks. Slowly, a little bit every day, the two raptors began laying the foundation for a nest. It was an ideal location for them—they are also known as fish hawks, since their diet consists of fish. They had claimed prime real estate alongside a river full of sea trout, gaspereau and striped bass.
“It’s a sign,” I told Dwayne. It was a sign I desperately needed.
It’s one thing to marry for love, to leave family and friends behind to join your soulmate in a life that is completely different from what you’ve known, the kind of rural, East Coast life of which you’d dreamed while living in Southern Ontario.
It’s another thing to discover a purpose to that life once you are committed to it.
The ospreys arrived at this long-vacant platform just as I was starting to feel adrift. Happily married and enjoying our work with the gardens and the chickens, becoming part of a wonderful new family and circle of friends, I had plenty to do each day. But beyond home, I didn’t feel as if I was contributing to the world in any meaningful way. Selling several dozen eggs every Friday was not the fulfilling work I sought, yet steady work in my areas of expertise—writing and teaching—was hard to find.
Although I’d told Dwayne that the arrival of these birds at this time was a sign, I couldn’t tell him of what. It was a strong feeling, however, so I sought an answer in a book I’d bought at a yard sale a few months earlier: Ted Andrews’ Animal Speak: The Spiritual and Magical Power of Creatures Great & Small, about the meanings of birds and animals. According to Andrews, ospreys, a member of the hawk family, are a symbol of vision and guardianship.
“Hawks are the messengers, the protectors, the visionaries of the air,” Andrews wrote. “This bird can awaken power and lead you to your life’s purpose. It is the messenger bird, and wherever it shows up, pay attention. There is a message coming.”
Being human means needing to know what the future holds, wanting to make long-term plans and exert control, yet we are surrounded by daily reminders that life is uncertain. Too much rain keeps bees from pollinating. A cowbird lays an egg in a song sparrow’s nest, crowding out her smaller eggs. A young osprey who leaves the nest in fall may not survive its first year as it battles the hazards of migration, and its inexperience in catching food.
One night as we watered our gardens, Dwayne commented that the ospreys hadn’t been here in a couple of days. We looked up at the wheel, covered in a scatter of branches.
“Maybe they came long enough to deliver the message,” I replied. “I wonder what it was.”
I believed that good energy from this property attracted this pair.
Most of all, it was a couple, and they were building a home together, just like Dwayne and me. I watched my husband of just over a year walking around the yard in his bare feet carrying two watering cans. Perhaps their message was as simple as, “This is it. Enjoy it. Stop worrying about the future.”
As the snow melted the following April, we began to glance up at the wheel, hoping one day to see a familiar shape on top of that thin foundation of a nest. Mid-month, an osprey appeared at sunset and within a week, there were two. In early July we saw the first, and what would be the only, small head pop up above the edge of the nest. Our ospreys, for that is what we considered them, had hatched one baby.
Last summer became our “Summer of the Ospreys.” Another mid-April return, a few weeks of rebuilding the nest after the wild winds of winter, then the long sit on the eggs. In early June, Dwayne had surgery on his right foot and would be home all summer. For a man used to being on his feet working all the time, it was not easy for him to simply sit and watch the world go by. Until the ospreys took notice.
“I swear it’s looking right at me when it flies over,” Dwayne said one evening. Indeed, as the bird swooped low over our roof, we had a clear look into the bright orange eyes gazing at us from mere metres above. It often flew over the house on its way back to the nest after catching a fish to feed the brooding female.
Dwayne would see a large fish clutched in its talons, hold his hands up, and shout, “Drop it here.”
For a man who had grown up along this river and still spoke of his favourite fishing hole, he had an affinity with the fish hawk.
On July 5th, Dwayne hobbled into the house as fast as he could. “There’s a baby in the nest,” he said. It was the first sighting of the year’s offspring, and within days, we would see that there were three hatchlings. Dwayne, his foot bandaged, often throbbing and painful, spent the rest of the summer sitting on the back deck, watching the pair of ospreys raise their babies. He witnessed them stretching their expanding wings, and their hops from one side of the nest to the other. Dwayne was watching the day the largest hatchling, likely the first-born, took its first leap from the nest.
“This is so amazing,” he said several times a day. These birds were more than neighbours; they had become part of our lives. Every time we stepped out the back door, every time we pulled into our driveway, our eyes automatically looked at the nest to see an osprey silhouette against the sky.
By the middle of September, it seemed that the birds were migrating to warmer climes for winter; yet one bird, the last to hatch out, remained.
“It won’t survive the winter here,” Dwayne fretted. We left for a week’s vacation, thinking that when we returned we’d call a wildlife expert to see what to do, but by then the nest was empty. All five ospreys had left the nest. A week later, Dwayne returned to work.
The Summer of the Ospreys was over.
Did the ospreys bring a message? What about their role as a symbol of vision and guardianship? To marry Dwayne and live in Nova Scotia, I made the choice to end my time in Ontario as a caregiver for my father, who was by then living in a nursing home, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. When I found his wedding ring, abandoned decades earlier in favour of a signet ring, and it fit Dwayne’s finger perfectly, I took that as a sign.
If there was one thing my father’s illness, diagnosed when he was only 62, had taught me, it was to enjoy life in the present, because you can’t know what will happen in the future. My father cherished his annual vacations in Nova Scotia, and had considered retiring here, until dementia stole those years from him. He also loved eagles and ospreys. After he died, in 2009, my mother said, “I’d like to bury your father’s ashes on your property.” We all knew the perfect spot: close to the osprey nest.
“What IS it about the ospreys?” I asked Dwayne.
He didn’t have to think about his answer. “Peace and contentment,” he told me. “They find us peaceful enough to roost so close, to fly low overhead. They aren’t afraid of us. And you and I are content so they are content, as well.”
The ospreys returned again his year, and had three babies. We built a stone bench in front of the tree under which my father is interred, a mere 50 metres from the nest, and when I sat there, missing him and wishing he could enjoy all this with us, my tears were observed by the three young birds, sitting on the edge of the nest, staring down at me. This is when I realized that my purpose in life is THIS life, to be here. The circle of Dad’s ring, the circle of the wheel, and the circle of life are all reflected in the round orange eyes of our ospreys.
All about ospreys
Ospreys are birds that people love to watch—especially when they’re fishing, says Tracey Dean, the director of education at the Huntsman Marine Science Centre in St. Andrews, NB, located in Passamaquoddy Bay.
“The heights they’ll drop from to catch fish are really quite amazing,” Dean says. “And how they actually spot them. I watch them from my office window on a really stormy day when the water’s all churned up. They can still spot the fish and catch them in really muddy water.”
An osprey can hunt fish from up to 30 metres (100 feet) above the water.
They are large raptors, weighing up to two kilograms (4.4 pounds) with a wing span of 1.8 metres (5 to 6 feet). Since fish make up 99 per cent of their diet, they nest along rivers, lakes and coastlines.
They leave their summer habitat, which ranges as far north as Labrador, in early fall and fly as far south as the Caribbean. One of the most widespread birds of prey, ospreys can be found on every continent except Antarctica.
And they return to the same nesting area every year.
“We call it site-fidelity,” Dean explains. “Once they know an area, they come back to it.”
Over the years, a nest can reach two metres (6.5 feet) in size.
After typically laying two to three eggs, which are about the size of chicken eggs, the female osprey does most of the sitting, and the eggs begin to hatch after a month. At seven weeks, the strongest chick will make its first attempts to fly.
Ospreys can be long-lived birds. “The big raptors tend to live for 20 to 25 years,” says Dean. That is, if they survive the first year.
“It’s trial and error to be able to catch fish, to learn the different angles. It takes them awhile to learn how to do it, where to go. Some of them never catch on. Most of them don’t survive the first year.”
Nature TV: There might still be time this fall to watch activity in an osprey nest live via webcam online, a joint project by Nova Scotia Power and the Museum of Natural History. Go to museum.gov.ns.ca/osprey/.