An endless stream of Starlings sparsely peppered with Waxwings flew west as we walked the tideline on our tour earlier this week. We were looking for Snow Buntings or maybe a Shorelark. We found neither as our attention was attracted by corpse after corpse washed up on the beach; Blackbirds, Redwings, Song Thrushes and the like.
These frail half decayed little bodies are the distasteful side of a ‘fall of birds’. They are the remains of individuals that couldn’t make it to land on their migration south.
I have heard it called a disaster, so many dead birds on the recent high tides. Rubbish!
This is nature’s way of thinning out the weak. This is how Natural Selection works. This is how over millennia the survival of the fittest rule. Evolution has designed the intricacies of migration to filter out the weaker genes in the population. Death is very much part of life.
This dead Common Seal perhaps summed up the atmosphere of the long and wide sands we walked.
Letter From Norfolk 