On Migration

QnMigration From the Editor Ecotones are the edges of overlapping ecosystems, places that aren't quite one thing or another. But as well as physical ecotones, there are also temporal ones, times of year when everything is becoming something else, when any sense of permanence, never much more than illusory to begin with, is even more fleeting, and when transience is the norm. The most obvious of these temporal ecotones, what the writer Scott Weidensaul calls "the great pivot points of the year," are fall and spring, the times of the mass bird migrations. Then the world is in movement, almost every winged thing heading somewhere else. These are the times of great unsettling, biannual disruptions, and urgency fills the air. Though the fall migration is driven by a quest for food, not an escape from cold, the birds must race the weather south while simultaneously avoiding the great tropical storms. In the spring they are prodded by the pressure to breed, to get back to home nesting grounds so the work of procreation can begin and so the young can earn their wings in time to begin the fall migration all over again. This past September I followed migrating birds, ospreys, from my former home on Cape Cod down the East Coast to my present home in North Carolina, then flew after them to Cuba to watch their dramatic and ancient migration through the mountains of that country. Ospreys are large, nearly eagle-sized raptors with six-foot wingspans, known for their swashbuckling dives for fish, and distinguished by their dark masks and vivid black-and-white wing patterns. In late winter, just as the spring solstice was approaching and the ospreys were beginning to stir, I flew down to their wintering grounds in Venezuela before accompanying them north through Florida, up the East Coast, and back to Cape Cod. The trip was, among other things, a different way to see the year. Not merely as days on the calendar, but as a journey along seasonal edges. Of course for the birds this eight-thousand-mile round trip is no "adventure": eight out of ten young birds will not survive. But the ones who do will follow the same route again and again throughVII Ecotone: reimagining place out their lives. Each will become an annual Ulysses, making these epic journeys with regularity, leaving every year in mid-September and returning in late March. They will cycle through their years. I first got to know ospreys when I lived by their nests on Cape Cod. At the time they seemed the perfect embodiment of my own urge to root, to nest, to find a forever place on earth. Ospreys are fanatically committed to their large, sloppy nests, and though the birds are said to mate for life, most ornithologists believe that it is the commitment to the nest, not the mate, that keeps pairs together. It was this commitment to their homes that first attracted me to the birds as I got to know them during their summer nesting seasons. I believed that I, too, had imprinted my home place and would never leave. In fact, I had written a book about the place, about the ospreys, that ended in precisely that way, with my promising to "commit forever to Cape Cod." What happened next was kind of funny, and consistent, in my experience, with what always happens when you make those types of grand pronouncements . Some professors at a university in the South read the book and liked it, especially the fancy lines about how I would never leave, and so they asked me to come teach at their school. All my high-flown yapping about loving and committing forever had been nice, but we were expecting a child and they were offering a salary and health insurance. In the end it was an easy decision. I moved for the same reason birds migrate South: to feed myself and my family. After my first year in the South I briefly returned to Cape Cod during early July. This time I had no illusions about settling there "forever"—I was now a visitor, a tourist. My first morning I hiked...