Bird Hooligans!
As birds that don’t officially exist, seagulls are definitely yobs!
There is no such thing as a seagull. This information came as quite a surprise to me, especially as I’ve spent a lifetime being attacked by them. Well, maybe not directly “attacked”…except for twice on Brighton Pier when I was most definitely directly attacked… but certainly hounded. For example, only yesterday, I put a full bin bag outside my front door, meaning to put it in our wheelie bin a few minutes later. As I shut the door and put my shoes on, there was a sound like a pack of wailing banshees outside.
The scene of devastation when I opened the door was astounding. In two minutes flat, five seagulls (that don’t exist) had ripped the bag to shreds, spread cartons and wrappers all over the drive, dropped the remains of a Chinese takeaway on my car, and were now involved in an all-in punch-up for any scraps of food they could find. As most of that food was now on my car, that had become the main battlefield, and shooing them away a priority. To their credit, unlike Brighton seagulls, they legged it (or winged it?) without attacking me and the mayhem ended.
Seagulls truly are the hooligans of the avian world. A friend of mine told me that she put a bird-table out for sparrows and within minutes three seagulls not only stole all the food but broke the table. Another friend attached a plastic bird-feeder with suction cups to his window. All went well until a seagull landed on it and sent it sliding to the ground, riding it all the way down like an elevator.
Yes, seagulls are yobs. So how on earth don’t they exist? Apparently, according to an information board I read on a beach recently, there are no such thing as seagulls, only gulls of many different shapes and sizes and names. The type of gull that tried to destroy my car, the great big ice-cream stealers with curved beaks are actually herring gulls. So that’s all right then, as long as it wasn’t “seagulls” who scratched my paintwork and chow-meined my windscreen.
Interestingly, another type of gull abundant around Britain, previously known to me only as “smaller seagulls” is the black-headed gull, which has a white head. The plot thickens, doesn’t it? On the surface of things, this would seem to have been a major naming error, but apparently, their heads are black in the summer, but turn predominantly white from autumn to early spring. I have no idea why black-headed gulls mess us about like this, and I recently had the great pleasure of witnessing them confuse a group of ramblers with this anomaly.
The very same beach noticeboard that notifies people seagulls aren’t real, also says that its own particular beach is populated by gulls of the black-headed variety. The aforementioned ramblers read the noticeboard out loud, looked all around the beach for black-headed gulls, decided there weren’t any, and left. A line of around 20 blackheaded gulls with white heads watched them go…
Five seagulls were now involved in an all-out scrap