The water around this key has a red-brown tinge. A bloom of poisonous plankton has left a line of dead crabs and fish on this stretch of Florida beach. Among the dead animals are redfish, lookdown fish, barracuda, and dozens of little sardines. Several large groupers have also washed up dead, as have dozens of small eels, now brittle and curled up in the wrackline.
A male from the first clutch of cormorants from Gates Island, Connecticut, staggers on the sand. It is blazing hot. There is no wind. He is dehydrated and trying to walk toward the shade, but to his confusion he is unable to walk along the unevenness of the beach. He recently ate a few pinfish that themselves had consumed many of the toxic dinoflagellates. The toxins have since accumulated in this cormorant’s intestines. He drags his wings on the sand.
The bird eventually makes it up under a copse of scrub oak, but remains disoriented. He stumbles over a few sun-faded cans, then gets his feet tangled up in a ball of plastic fishing line. The cormorant sits down in all this and opens his mouth, fluttering his orange gular pouch.
Two turkey vultures that are tearing at a grouper on the beach now look over at the cormorant.