The very colors of a murre, or a razor-billed auk, a contrasting black and white like penguins, suggest the black cliffs and rocky headlands where they evolved, the white snow and ice, the cast of deep and icy waters. One June day, when the beach at Race Point was glaring with light, and all the winter leavings, like the twisted dead stalks of dusty miller, were being replaced by a freshness in the shine and scent of things, I saw a dovekie, or little auk, on the beach a few yards away from the water. It is a very small bird, though conspicuous enough with its penguinlike stance, its black and white plumage, and though it was in full view of a number of bathers no one saw it. When I approached, this seasonal anachronism ran rather than flew away from me down the sands into the water where it promptly dove out of sight to bob up out of harm’s way many yards offshore. Since most dovekies return north in late winter, I supposed it was a “nonbreeding straggler.” They migrate south in the fall to more temperate waters not locked in ice like their home feeding grounds. Over a period of years and at unpredictable times, there are “Dovekie wrecks” when these birds are blown inland by gale winds and show up in the most unlikely places: ponds, back yards, side roads, gardens, filling stations or shopping centers. Since they are not able to take off from land with any ease, if at all, they are vulnerable to predators of all kinds, provided they survive exhaustion and starvation. Some years ago I saw a number of them lying dead for several miles along the Cape Cod highway. The dovekies are messengers from the north. The way the gulls use the wind as it is deflected from the waves, or ride into it, hovering, then gliding down, is symptomatic of the sailing skill of other birds that travel far beyond the shore, the aerodynamics of the open sea. They are masters of the art of air as no plane can ever be. I remember watching some fulmars in the wake of a ship one wind-tossed day, the great blue-green waves in rocking fullness shouldered with foam. They glided between the crests and troughs of the waves with effortless deliberation, and then lifted, curved away in a wide arc, and returned. Back and forth, they seemed to tip the waters surface with their wings and clip the waves, gliding and curving with them, expending no excess energy at all. I felt them rise on the upward air in my lungs, my admiration.