Shelter Island, where I spent summers growing up, is an osprey refuge, so we were always going out to look at the osprey nests, especially when the species was making its way back from near-extinction. It was a rare and exciting thing to catch a glimpse of an osprey. As an opponent of pesticides in general, I was interested in DDT's role in the osprey's decline, and started delving into that a bit. That led me to discover that the osprey was misnamed and had to do with certain old myths. Then, as a lover of "artifacts" in fiction, I decided to use bits and pieces of the research as "found objects" within the text of the novel in order to get a bunch of that information (and research that was exciting to me in all of its interconnectedness!) into the novel without being overly heavy-handed (or trying not to be overly heavy-handed, at least) --Thisbe

Click on the links below to view some of the pages from osprey books that Thisbe looked at, explore websites that discuss ospreys, and find out how these birds fit into mythology.