Snowbirds

 (Picture not included at this time because of technical difficulties in the blogger's brain.)
The random animal is on a business/pleasure trip to Florida, where wise birds spend the winter. Sandpipers work the shoreline, like the poetical one described with skewed precision by Elizabeth Bishop:
The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
.........
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed. . . .

Certainly a number of birds seem intent on what turns over in tide and sand, but some like the human counterparts who inhabit a January beach seem lazy. A group of sanderlings huddle together, all balanced on one leg, with tiny head under tiny wing. Like dogs reluctant to surrender the couch, they all hop one-legged as people approach, hoping no one will come close enough to force them to really work at moving.

This is also the shore of boat rides, along the intercoastal maze of netted waterways, or out on the breezy Gulf of Mexico, here seemingly free of the ghosts of oil spills past. Everyone cheers at seeing dolphins surface, even as the boats crowd them. Like the sanderlings, we don't want to change our comfortable position to make way for others.