In her Pulitzer Prize winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, author Annie Dillard recalls this chilling remembrance:

"I see tonight the picture of a friendly member of the forest service in Wisconsin, who is freeing a duck frozen onto the ice, by chopping out its feet with a hand axe. It calls to mind the spare, cruel story Thomas McGonigle told me about herring gulls frozen on ice off Long Island. When his father was young, he used to walk out on Great South Bay, which had frozen over, and frozen the gulls to it. Some of the gulls were already dead. He would take a hunk of driftwood and brain the living gulls; then, with a steel knife, he hacked them free below the body and rammed them into a burlap sack. The family ate herring gull all winter, close around a lighted table in a steamy ro…