feather and shell

At lunch I walk out on the the mud flats and look at stuff,
the tide, the birds, the wild cats, the mud. Thursday I discovered
that Canada geese, when alarmed, drool. The feather above was
lost by one of them, no clue as to his mental state. I found the
clam shell about 10 feet above the waterline. There are more
oyster shells around than these clams, so I started picking them
up, noticed a tiny hole drilled into one of them, not entirely through.
There's nothing normal about a hole like that, it has to be evidence
of some predator or disease, so this got me looking for holes in other
shells. I thought that if I was a real scientist I'd keep track of how
many of these I found, try to establish a frequency within the
whole collection of shells in the vicinity, try to figure out what
sort of creature the hole maker is.