A Novel's Misplaced Birds

I'm reading E.L. Doctorow's new novel, Andrew's Brain, and I've found myself distracted by the author's  ignorance of where birds are when and how they behave. In the section I'm reading, Andrew is in Maine, in the winter. He sees, "through the fog, a green heron, out there on the piling."  Later that day, he is down on the beach as "the osprey hovers pulsingly over the sea, and the sanderlings tiptoe along the ocean's foamy edge while the shadowing bluefish waits for the tide to flip them into its razored maw." At the start of the chapter he has a gull smashing into a window, sliding down, leaving a bloody streak.

Hoo boy. Where to start? Gull striking a window hard enough to leave blood? I don't think so. A Green Heron in Maine in winter? No and certainly not hunched over on a piling. They're more secretive than that. Nor would an Osprey be flying around during a Maine winter; it would freeze to death after its first plunge. Sanderlings are all right and it is a good description, but I don't think they have much to fear from bluefish.

Quibbles, but it makes me want to say, "Ed, please, write what you know."

A little later in the book...Okay, now it's getting ridiculous. Andrew relates a story from his childhood in which a Red-tailed Hawk carries off his dachsund (!) to a tree in Washington Square Park and pecks out its eyes. As if.