Almost any day that I visit the shore I find a victim. Out on the sand flats at low tide is a female eider duck, crouched down in such a way as to make me mistake her at first for a dark brown chunk of driftwood. When I walk up she stays there without moving, but her eyes are alive, out of an unknown depth of helplessness and misery. The bird is dying. Her feathers, which in the female eider, are a handsome reddish brown, are not naturally glossy any more, but they shine, sickeningly, with a heavy coating of oil. Some black and white males, whose necks are beautifully tinted, or washed with green, as though they had taken it from some of the northern sunsets from which they came, are swimming out over the water. I see others, both male and female, scattered along the shore. They have come on land, pathetically enough, to get warmer, in the sunny but freezing winter air. Birds affected by oil pollution have their feathers so matted together that they no longer serve as insulation, and the cold strikes directly to their skins. Even a spot of oil no bigger than a fifty-cent piece may expose them and cause pneumonia. So the doomed sea birds huddle up against a sandbank, out of the wind, or they waddle into the water when I approach, or stand on rocks just offshore, vainly trying to preen dark smudges out of their feathers. Another effect of oil on plumage is to make the birds lose their buoyancy in the water, so that they swim half submerged, and when alarmed they are unable to take off but beat their wings and splash ahead with no result but further exhaustion. If the oil invades their digestive system, as they feed or preen, they are poisoned by it. This winter the dying birds have been so conspicuous that many local residents have become aware of a situation which might otherwise escape their notice, although when it becomes really acute we may only recognize it by deduction, because some species of birds will be gone. It is reported that oil pollution has killed some 250,000 birds off Newfoundland this winter. The razor-billed auk is now thought to be virtually wiped out as a breeding bird in that area. Some families in this area have tried to rescue a duck or an auk, having good feelings and a sense of responsibility. Success is none too frequent, since it depends on experience and great care in handling. It may take weeks to bring a bird back to normal vigor after it has been oiled. But the fact that a few individuals care enough to try is worth a thousand ships. “Whoever deals you this death,” I think, looking at some shivering eider on the sands or finding its soiled remains, “cannot get by with saying: ‘This is just a bird.’” The bird retains that wild distance which always seems just beyond our grasp, and it is intrinsically wise. Nothing we do to it can alter its original kinship with nature. It is in harmonious balance with a complexity of which we are greatly in envy and to which our carelessness only makes us strangers.