Pelicans, low
Eleven pelicans came up the coast this morning in a line so low I thought at first they were part of the water.
They came out of the haze to the south, one behind the other, each one a little to the side of the one ahead, the way geese do it but flatter and slower. None of them flapped. They held their wings out stiff and slightly bent, like someone carrying a long board, and they rode about an arm's length above the swell.
I watched the lead bird closely, because something was wrong with how little it was working. A wave came in under it, a long one, building from the left. The pelican didn't climb over it. It rose with it. As the face lifted, the bird lifted, staying the same height above the water the whole way, and when the wave peaked and pitched forward, the bird tipped forward too and slid down the other side of nothing. Then the next bird did exactly the same thing on the same wave, a second later, a little further along. Then the next.
I followed the whole line down the beach. Eleven birds, one wave, one motion passed back along them like a word passed down a row of people.
Later I worked out what they were doing, or I think I did. A wave pushes air up in front of it as it rises. Not much, but enough. A bird that keeps itself right in that thin push gets lifted for free, as long as it stays close, closer than seems safe. Fly any higher and the push is gone and you have to flap. So they don't fly higher. They fly where the work has already been done by something else, inches from the thing that could knock them down.
What I keep seeing is the second bird. The first one has to find the wave. The second only has to follow the first one's height and trust it. By the eleventh bird the line is so even it looks drawn.
The tide was nearly at its highest by the time they reached the point. The waves were coming in tall and close together, and the line rose and fell over each one without breaking, getting smaller, until the last bird was a dark mark sliding along a gray face of water, and then the face broke white, and the mark was on the next one.
I went down to the edge and stood where the swash ran out, and I held my arms out stiff, like a board, and waited for a wave to come in under them.