Walking with a Gull - Sort Of

The gull pair that lived near my garden

     I don’t usually have meaningful encounters with gulls, mainly because I’m too smart for that. Unlike many around me, I love them: they’re keenly intelligent, strikingly-patterned, personality-rich products of evolution occupying their niche firmly and with gusto. That said, the enthusiasm with which they’ll seize any opportunity to obtain food, and wring that opportunity for every last shred of possibility, makes it unwise to involve ourselves closely with them as I have the jackdaws and sparrows, and to lesser success the crows. I only understand a few of their communications; one that is particularly interesting to me is their call to indicate that a hawk is in the area: I hope to someday get a decent photograph of a hawk, and being able to hear from my living room that one is near enough to try is handy.

     Given half a chance, a gull will learn every nuance of a household’s outdoor setup and commit acts of great vandalism to get to things it feels like eating, which is in general pretty much everything. A woman a few blocks over used to feed them in her yard and they started taking everything, harassing her pets over their own food and ultimately getting it, even dive-bombing her grocery bags if she set them down to open her front door or ripping her trash bags open even as she carried them to the bin. They started pulling neighbors’ plants out of the planters, knocking down songbird nest-houses for the eggs and babies inside, standing on cars and startling passing children into dropping snacks… You really don’t want to encourage urban gulls, they WILL take advantage, they have spectacular memories and problem-solving abilities, and they live a long time. This woman passed away in her very old age sometime before we moved into the area, I am told, and still that particular block is a gauntlet of gull activity to be run with caution if you’re carrying food.

The gull pair who lived near my garden.

     We had a pair of Lesser Black-Backed Gulls here who were already adult and well-established in their territory when we moved in 13 years ago, and they learned not to come into my garden upon penalty of me running at them waving an object, but they would stand around on the roof and watch me and I like to think we had a rapport. Sadly, that is a long time for gulls to live, especially in top form, and this year there is every evidence that they are gone and their territory and coveted perching spot on my neighbors’ household exhaust vent being disputed. At the moment this is overshadowed by Weaning Season: so many young gulls are tumbling ineptly through the air being taught to be on their own, to flock, all that good stuff as their parents and the other adults fly and stand around screaming out warnings and challenges. Like the swifts, so much of their lives takes place out of my viewpoint that I really don’t know most of what is going on. But I do know that I’ll probably have to train a new dominant pair that my garden is off-limits.

A crow and one of the local gulls on my roof.

     We used to have tons of Black-Headed Gulls, the kind Kehaar is in Watership Down, all over the roofs but they disappeared rather abruptly a few years ago – the same year I started regularly seeing the buzzards. Those are pretty, deceptively delicate-looking, nervous-seeming gulls with mincing steps, who stand in rows on the rooftops facing into the wind, or land and vie for ground-food with the jackdaws.
     Once, I learned about the sheer size of another kind we get here, the Greater Black-Backed Gulls, when I cycled to work in the wee small hours of the morning and one decided I was too close to the industrial building atop which it was nesting. It’s an absolute miracle I didn’t crash my bike when an animal with a wingspan literally as wide as I am tall appeared from behind me barely a meter above my head while simultaneously emitting a shriek fit to summon demons and then frighten them off again. That was really something.

A Black-Headed Gull

     Gulls do have a niche in the city that I value: they clean up a lot of “edible” trash. People love to complain that they shit on cars and tear open trash bags, but hey, sorry about your car OK, but maybe don’t LEAVE trash bags out on the street and they won’t invoke their basic natural instincts to go for them. I can say with certainty that where I live, without the gulls and WITH the human preponderance to just drop whatever they were eating wherever they feel like it, we’d be ankle deep by now in rotting chicken bones, half-eaten fries, fish carcasses, ice cream cones, and the like. Humans are very messy animals and we shouldn’t blame wildlife for stepping in and taking advantage, in this case also doing some badly-needed cleanup which would otherwise be being accomplished by hordes of roaches, rodents, bacteria, and flies.

When this fellow took this wrapper to his One True Love, it was still half-full
of warm, hand-cut, gourmet fries which some human had seen fit to simply
drop on the ground before getting on the bus.

     Yesterday I did have what I can only describe as a communicative encounter with a gull, but what exactly was communicated is honestly beyond me. I was on my way back from some errands and talking to the ubiquitous jackdaws (who know I’m always holding peanuts or cat food) when I started hearing a gull doing that characteristic nasal “hup-hup-hup” sound from a roof. As they do. Walking closer, I became aware that every time it did that, a magpie in a tree would emit the long “kkkkkkk” that they use to signal each other at a distance. Like with the gulls, I don’t understand much magpie, but I know a few things and I know that one. It wasn’t a warning, it was an answer to the gull: “here I am, here I am”. And the gull would say “hup-hup-hup” again. I looked up, and the gull, I think a herring gull, was on a red-tiled rooftop looking down at me. “Hup-hup-hup”, it said, and the magpie responded, “kkkkkk”. I looked back at the lower realm where I live and continued walking. “Hup-hup-hup”, “hup-hup-hup”… then suddenly a gentle, not-particularly-loud “skreeee, skreeee”, like neither the shrill warning they do nor the reedy uncertain tones of a very young gull just starting to make its way in the world, which made me glance up again at the gull, which was peering at me intently. “Hup-hup-hup” it told me, and I walked on. This repeated - “Hup-hup-hup”, “hup-hup-hup”… “skreeee, skreeee”, and I looked up again. We stared at each other. I walked on. The magpie had fallen silent. “Hup-hup-hup”, “hup-hup-hup”… “skreeee, skreeee”, and another long stare at each other.

A gull on a similar roof in the area.

     Again, I don’t really “speak” gull. I don’t know what it wanted, but I do know it wasn’t asking for food or warning others about me or telling me to get gone… it just seemed really INTERESTED in me. I resumed walking. “Hup-hup-hup”, “hup-hup-hup”… “skreeee, skreeee”. It was very clear by now that the skreeee part was specifically intended to get my attention. If I stopped, the bird would stare at me, with interest, and do nothing. If I walked on it would start it all up again, walking, itself, along the roof ridges to follow me. Maybe it wanted me to produce the human equivalent of “hup-hup-hup” or “kkkkkkk”; maybe it was a game. I d wish now I’d had the sense to try something like that – maybe “hi there!” - but alas.

A gull finding food in an open-style dumpster.

     It all changed when I got to the crossroads; I turned back one last time at the “skreeee” summons, and finally spread my hands out and said, “What?!?” At this the gull immediately wandered away along the roofs and I shrugged and crossed the street. As I made my way further home, I heard again, receding into the distance, “Hup-hup-hup”, “kkkkkk”, “hup-hup-hup”, “kkkkkk”. Now that I was gone, the magpie wanted back in on things.

     I will always wonder what that bird was saying to me and whether I fulfilled its desires.