Long Beach, Washington

Near the end of our west coast adventures this fall we happened to look through one of our guidebooks about horseback riding spots about 30 minutes before the turnoff to Long Beach in Washington.
We had not originally intended to stop there but Kathryn had been wanting some horseback riding for ages and the town boasted a Cranberry Museum to sweeten the deal, so we made an overnight detour.
Through a bit of last-minute panicking we were able to arrange seaside rides the following day and ended up having a 2 hour private ride along the beach.
We were also set upon on all sides by these young birds, which I will call Common Murres until my father corrects me. Its either harder to be a Murre than you think or they were not very good at it because the beach was littered with dozens and dozens of them that morning and perhaps a third of them had died.
Oddly enough over the course of our ride most of them set out into the water and by the end there were hardly any on the beach, even the dead ones having been carried out by the tide.
There were no oil slicks to have contaminated them and no offshore rocks nearby where they would have roosted, so any theories on what the hell they were doing and dying there about are welcome. (Turns out there is an algae bloom in effect on the West Coast currently. The algea strips the weather proofing like an oil slick and kills them. This phenomenon is very recent possible exacerabated by Climate Change- ed.)
Long Beach is essentially alive because of the tourist trade and is any child's dream. Aside from several kite shops, candy stores, toy shops and the like, there is a Curio Shop (read: kitsch souvenirs and stuffed animal heads) which seem to be more common in Washington than you'd expect.
One of their star attractions is Jake the Alligator Man (shown below) which is some sort of weird mummy from back when they had more dead kids and alligators around than copies of Photoshop.