Perhaps winter and death are complimentary, but the other seasons kill too, in their degrees of need and fulfillment. General association with death is so constant in nature that we could almost deny the validity of the word. Death, if it is essential to the consumption of energy, is at the least fuel for the fire of life and more likely an inseparable part of the fire itself. In the natural year it is all-pervasive and yet discreet and nearly invisible to us. We hardly pause on its behalf unless its presence becomes spectacular. To see a dead animal on the highway, whether or not it was killed by human agency, is not something most human beings care about, one way or another. This is not necessarily due to wanton disregard of life, or inhumane feelings, but because we retain an unconscious acceptance of death, as well as a natural ferocity--it is what is left of the animal predator in us that beats the stranded fish with a stick, or shoots at a bird simply because it is new to us. And yet, that death, which is so constant a part of the natural rhythm that we disregard it when we pass its evidence, may also become an obtrusive, isolated, and even obscene element when caused by human agency. Our technology does not represent such a mastery over nature that it is able to replace or assume nature’s ascendant ordering of things. We employ the methods of disaster with a heavier hand. Grace and accuracy of invention, abundance of means, are accompanied by an inordinate amount of plunder and pollution. In our power we are weak. I think of the hundreds of water birds that I have seen this winter dying, starving, poisoned, or freezing to death, as a result of having their plumage soaked by waste oil from ships. Tankers, merchant vessels of all kinds, cause drifting oil slicks on the surface of the ocean waters when their bilges are dumped at sea, or when their tanks are washed out when approaching port. Oil wastes seem to have made serious inroads on some forms of marine life in some areas, not to mention their soiling of beaches and shore waters. The sea birds drift into oil slicks at night when sleeping, or may even seek them out, mistaking them for plankton slicks. Eiders, old squaws, scoters, loons, brant, auks, all birds of our winter waters, come by immemorial habit to these feeding grounds for fish, plankton, or water plants. And because of the enormous and growing human traffic in ships and machines they have become endangered by something for which nothing in evolution has ever prepared them. Their feathers are tarred by an enormous brush, wielded at random. [Illustration]