This is day number four of one of those three-day blows and I don’t like to complain much about the weather but I was wearing long pants and wool socks on the beach this morning and I was kind of wondering if I ought to go to Walmart and see if they had any of those little knit gloves in stock yet. It’s the kind of day I can remember when I was a kid and whoever’s mom agreed to watch us swim would sit on the beach in a winter jacket. Not very warm.

There is a lot of interesting flotsam on the beach today, including quite a few dead birds as Ernie there will tell you. Dead birds wash up frequently and sometimes other aminals too. Once when I was a kid, a dog carcass lay down there for half the summer. Frankly, I’d rather find dead birds than sick or wounded ones. One time, there was a wounded bird down by Doelle’s that would startle the living daylights out of me every time I walked by it by trying to fly away. After a few days, it couldn’t fly any more and just lay there making this raspy breathing noise. It was awful. There wasn’t a darn thing I could do for it. I don’t shoot and there wasn’t anyone around who did. That was one time I wished I did know how to shoot. Finally my brother came up for the weekend and the first thing I did was ask him to walk down there with me and put that bird out of its misery. But by the time we got there, it was too late. Rest in peace, little birdie.

Once when I posted a picture of some dead mice found in the walls of the old Houghton Lake cabin, my brother wrote me an email that said something like, “now that you have crossed the line and posted dead aminals on the blog, here is the dead sturgeon that the octos have been all clanked up about.” He wasn’t quite right. The mice were not exactly the first dead aminals I had ever posted about, there was an early post about some seagull wings with no body down at Doelle’s. That was back in 2003. Much kibbitzing among the octos (and some younger folk) about who done it.

So, some flotsam, birds and other things. This post is for my brother and, if you do not want to see dead birds, DO NOT CLICK the dead bird links!!!

• A nice fresh cormorant head.
• This one is safe to click. Ernie and The Lord Valdemort found this loverly iron work that “floated” in. Or whatever. I thought maybe it could be used to cover the holes in the floorboards of The Indefatigable until I saw that it was also full of holes.
• A dead seagull with a bad case of conjunctivitis. Or do seagulls naturally have orangey-red eyes?
• I don’t know *what* this is. Was it alive? Is it organic? I actually think it’s a piece of wood or something with all kinds of “stuff” attached to it.
• This dead loon has been here a while and is pretty well decomposed. Do NOT let it bite you.
• Cormorant parts.
• I’m not sure what this is but it’s a dead bird of some sort.
• This one’s okay to look at, no dead stuff. Alfred and Lord Valdemort pronounce this a paddle to the sea! It seems to have a flag and a float and an anchor. Not sure where the *boat* is.

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