Many thousands of eider ducks winter in Cape Cod waters. During October and November especially they can be seen shuttling back and forth across the sea beyond the Outer Beach. Some feed, principally on mussels, in the bay region or off Chatham and along other shallow shores and inlets, but the majority--an estimated 500,000--spend the winter over the shoals between Monomoy and Nantucket. Seen close to, as they fly low over the water, they are as sturdy, clean shaped, and of good design--the red-brown females, and males patterned in black and white--as a coastal vessel, a dory, or a skiff. From the beach you can see them fly over water in single lines, sometimes as much as a half a mile or more in length, with a steady, throbbing flight, like a suspended string of beads, alternately white and brown. By contrast brant fly in longer, thicker lines, and sometimes show up like shivering black specks high over the sea. Well into December the gannets pass by over the sea surfaces too, flying singly for the most part, their broad white backs and long black-tipped wings reflecting the sunlight as they turn, to dive in their grand manner down, from fifty feet or more in the air, hard and bold into the water, sending up jets of spray. Clutching at any aspect of nature is to seize a drop of water in your hand. Ebb and flow passes the great beach, the eternally wide ebb and flow of day and night passes the cliff tops, all earth’s shadows wave across its seas, and yet this is the precise route of the birds, their direction and their home. They know its guidelines inwardly. For us, who put so much emphasis on outward instruments, this can be almost impossible to understand. Still, we can exaggerate the division between us. We are all at home together, however we use the stars and seasons in our separate ways. Men are as subject to mortality as birds, even though the latter can’t dwell upon it. They in turn are vulnerable to chance, to disease, to going astray and meeting with mishaps when confronted by the freakishness and violence of the weather. Many a duck or sea bird, caught on a lee shore or in a marshy inlet during a great storm may be unable to rise into the wind and is exhausted or swept away and seriously injured while trying. Life and death, joy and disaster, go wing to wing. Birds have less capacity to deceive themselves than we, being unable to avoid the perils of nature and at the same time its protective power.