The winter beach can be an unforgiving landscape, scraped by the wind and beaten by the waves. There are almost always dead sea birds to be found washed ashore.
This red-breasted merganser was on its way to being thoroughly recycled. Note the serrated jaws here, a characteristic of the species notably lacking in the loons. You can often see red-breasted mergansers in the East River this time of year; look for loons off of Brooklyn’s south coast and the Rockaway Peninsula.
Heraclitus said you could not step in the same river twice, for the flowing water was always changing, a rushing metaphor for the currents of life. If he’d been familiar with the beaches of the Atlantic Coastal Plain instead of the rocky Ionian shores, he would have said the same thing about beaches.
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Earlier this month, the internet, as fine a medium for spreading hysteria as we have, was all a-twitter about a rash of dead birds. That news cycle has come and gone into the media-void, but the real story, of the hundreds of millions — some estimations reach the billions — of birds killed each year by domestic cats (keep them inside; it’s healthier for them, too), glass-faced high-rise buildings, and other obstructions, was barely touched upon.
Backyard and Beyond 
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