That's what I thought too. I did indeed attempt vertice merging, but it didn't help. I ended up deleting that section and redoing it a different way, but it would be interesting to find out what occurred, so:

I had a beak with no openings originally. I selected the bottom faces and detached them. Then I reattached the back edges to the empty hole. I selected that ring of edges, the one at the base of the beak, and created a face in there to serve as the inside of the mouth. Then, I selected the border (if viewed from the top) around the beak, and extruded that until I had created a surface to cover the hole.... wow. There is almost no way anyone can understand what I just said, right?

Anyway, I do have a working version now.