This beautifully told story of a season with birds of prey makes for engrossing reading as we learn about osprey life from a master essayist.

David Gessner's witnessing of an osprey's dive--a wing-folded plunge of 50 feet or more, talons extended at the last moment to spear a fish and carry it to the surface and then aloft--is the obvious high point of his season observing ospreys in Brewster and Dennis and the nearby waters of Cape Cod. But it is the mark of how fine a nature writer Gessner is that his description of the more prosaic activity of nest-building is as perfectly realized as the accounts of the thrilling dives. Return of the Osprey can, on those grounds alone, claim a place among the classics of American nature writing....A reader could put Return of the Osprey aside at this point and feel the satisfaction that comes at the end of a memorable book. But Gessner has only been waiting for his chance for him, and the ospreys, to dazzle. And when it comes, Gessner puts you right there.

It was Gessner's good fortune to become obsessively interested in ospreys, and it is ours that he writes about them with such clarity, elegance, and passion that this book becomes an instant classic of natural history. It is also a work of great spiritual power... This is a book to read, reread, and remember for a long time.

A year well spent and carefully recorded: heedful, respectful, and filled with the romance of being out of doors.

A naturalist's jewel... Gessner provides insights into the history of this great sea bird of prey that will delight both the committed birder and the general reader.

Gessner's Return of the Osprey soars with detail and a sense of wonder. By the end of the book, you feel as if you've been out there with Gessner much of the time, shivering in the woods, mucking through the marsh, kayaking upriver to an isolated nest site. It's strangely satisfying, imparting a sense of the profound. And you don't even have to venture outdoors to experience it.