Author Returns To Celebrate Anniversary Of Landmark Osprey Book

BREWSTER – David Gessner never thought he was launching a career as a nature writer (he still says he’s not one) when he moved back to Cape Cod from Colorado in the late 1990s.

But he was.

 “The Return of the Osprey: A Season of Flight and Wonder” celebrated its 25th anniversary with a new edition published last October by the Cornell University Press. Gessner has written 14 books, nearly all of them about nature in one form or another, even though he penned “Sick of Nature” in 2004 after finishing the osprey book. He soon returned to the topic with “The Prophet of Dry Hill,” published in 2005, a book about Naturalist John Hay of Brewster.

 “That was a fun book. I took walks and talked with him,” Gessner recalled. 

Like the osprey, Gessner will return to Brewster Sunday, June 7, at 1 p.m. to speak at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History to celebrate the anniversary of “Return of the Osprey.” 

 “I’ll be talking about the year that was so huge and transformative in my life,” Gessner said. “I dove into osprey lives. I started as a beginner. I couldn’t tell an osprey from a gull. And I got deeper and deeper and deeper into it.”

A Worcester native, Gessner spent time on the Cape as a youngster then moved to Colorado for a writing program. 

 “I spent a lot of time here as a kid and had never seen [an osprey], then I went away and moved back with my wife in the ‘90s. All of a sudden there were ospreys on the jetties. I watched them soar over the water,” he recalled. “When I wrote ‘Return of the Osprey,’ a large part of the book was about committing to a place. At the time I didn’t know what the future held, and for a variety of reasons I ended up moving down here to East Dennis.”

His editor had requested he write a bird book, so he chose the osprey as a subject, one that was now close at hand.

 “One reason we like them is it’s not a shy bird,” Gessner said. “They’re gregarious, upfront and obvious and they are athletic, and watching them dive is a thrill. When they catch a fish they put it in a ‘torpedo bay’ and will reverse it with their talons so it’s aerodynamic.”

He bought a telescope and watched four ospreys nest out on a marsh from March through October, when they left to fly to South America. He kept a journal of observations. At night he read all he could on ospreys, as he was far from a bird expert. But he knew someone who was: Alan Poole, author of “Ospreys: A Natural and Unnatural History.” He lived in Westport and invited Gessner to visit. Slow down and live on osprey time, Poole advised him. 

He did and he wrote his book, blending the story of the ospreys, history and life on Cape Cod.

 “The osprey story is a story of hope,” Gessner said. “On the Cape there was about one nest around the ‘60s to the ‘70s. Now there is somewhere north of 500 there, so it’s always been a hopeful story.”

Not when DDT was the prime mosquito control. Through biomagnification, DDT migrated from bugs to fish to birds up the food chain. The number of osprey nests in Massachusetts was around 10 in the late 1960s.

 “It really started in 1972 when the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) banned DDT. The comeback grew out of that because DDT decimated the east coast population. It was horrible the way it was killing the birds. It made the eggshells thin and the mother would sit on the eggs to incubate them and it would crush the birds,” Gessner said.

They recovered well, with some human help. It seems every Cape salt marsh has at least one nesting platform. 

 “Platforms are ideal for nesting,” Gessner said. “Their dream house used to be the top of a dead tree so they could look all around. Now we put up platforms. In the old days there were a lot of dead trees, but the Cape is not such a great habitat because a lot of trees have been cut down. I saw one osprey recently nesting on top of a boat. The owner had not taken the boat out in two years. I also just saw a ground nest.”

Cape Cod Baseball League fans remember when ospreys nested atop the light tower at the Hyannis Mets park. The team played all their home games during the day because they worried the lights would disturb the birds. When the Mets had to drop the name because of trademark infringement, the team was renamed the Harbor Hawks after the ospreys. Today ospreys nest on the light tower in Orleans and don’t mind the night games. They must be Firebird fans.

 “I’ll also talk about the osprey crisis in Chesapeake Bay where the overfishing of menhaden led to a crisis — industrial fishing has led to starvation among the young because they rely on menhaden. That has rippled out to New Jersey. So that is a new worry,” Gessner said. 

That, in fact, is partially the subject of a new book Gessner is working on, updating the state of the osprey in 2026.

 “It hasn’t impacted Cape Cod yet but it is creeping up the coast,” he said. “There’s no question the Cape population has boomed. One reason they’re not having the problem with menhaden yet is freshwater ponds are another source for their diet as well as the ocean.”

This will be Gessner’s third osprey book. He also wrote “Soaring With Fidel.” 

 “That followed their migration from Cape Cod to Cuba and Venezuela,” Gessner said. “They use Cuba as a shortcut to South America. The Amazon is a popular spot. I saw a couple hundred osprey on a lake in Venezuela in the winter. When they’re young rather than flying back they’ll spend a year and a half in South America and then fly back. The older birds migrate every year.”

About half the ospreys don’t make it all the way back. It’s a perilous trip. So they need to keep reproducing.

Gessner’s most recent book is “The Book of Flaco: The World’s Most Famous Bird,” published in 2025. Flaco was a Eurasian eagle owl who escaped a zoo in Central Park and lived in New York City for almost a year. There was concern it wouldn’t know how to hunt, but it caught plenty of rats. Then people worried it would ingest rodenticides the rats had eaten. But after nine months Flaco died when he crashed into a building. 

 “I’ve got up to 14 books,” Gessner said. “I’ve written about the West a lot because I moved there. I have a travel book about Teddy Roosevelt and a memoir about a year playing ultimate frisbee. I kind of backed into nature writing. I try to do different things. I’m still looking to publish my first novel about Cape Cod, ‘The House on the Bluff.’ And I’m a professor at North Carolina at Wilmington.”

Gessner will also speak at the Sturgis Library in Hyannis on June 9.