This bird is an Anhinga. Someone lost this red hair scrunchie. Or they littered. The bird probably thought the hair band was a fish and stabbed at it in the water. Instead of food to satisfy its hunger, it found itself muzzled, and unable to eat.

The bird struggled while I watched, twisting and turning trying to remove the restraint. He rubbed his beak on a nearby tree stump, and even on the back of his wings. Passers-by told me the Anhinga had been like that for days. There was no way to reach him on his perch in the alligator infested waters. Someone eventually tried by boat, but the bird was still able to fly, and declined human assistance.

This is one effect of litter. Even if the wearer of the hair scrunchie did not notice right away when it fell off, how many passers-by thereafter passed it by instead of throwing it away before it got to where this bird found it?

I imagine it rolling like a tumbleweed in a stiff breeze, bouncing gently down a sidewalk or roadside, then one day lifting with the rising waters that meander and then rush toward the drains when it rains. Woosh, it swoops through a series of pipes and gushes out into a roadside canal. There it is, a bright trap waiting for a bird, or it could continue the journey it never should have started and float into Florida's wetlands, which is where I found this sorry sad Anhinga. He should have looked like this:

There are several pages about Anhinga on this site: