Jonathan Livingston...

JONATHAN LIVINGSTON…

You could tell it was midsummer when a series of “killer seagull” stories appeared in the news, because it seems to have happened pretty much every year recently. There is a widespread belief (in British cities) that gulls have recently invaded cities and are becoming much more common here. Every summer there are new reports of people having sandwiches and ice creams snatched from their hands by marauding gulls, and now those are emerging from city centres. Now the contention that gulls are invading our urban areas might be true, though the evidence is not clear, because whatever the RSPB may say, the statistics around bird populations over time are pretty shaky, but I cannot help thinking that there’s something else going on here. If I were to remark that seagulls were swarming into London it might make the connection clear.

The rooftops of Paddington

From Helen’s room on the eighth floor of St.Mary’s Hospital I was intrigued to see what was evidently a gulls’ nest. Two gulls kept returning to the same bit of roof, high up on top of the Cambridge Wing, and after a while I caught sight of their baby; well, I called it a baby, but more properly a juvenile, as its body was nearly as large as its parents, but it lacked a tail (so it looked like those odd birds you see in Egyptian hieroglyphics). Baby would stomp around his little roof and do a frenetic nodding routine when his parents were returning, presumably prompting them to feed him, which they did, regurgitating stuff dutifully. The thought occurred as to what on earth the parents were regurgitating for the baby; when you see them beside the sea, it’s fish, that’s obvious, but in Paddington? The only fish was likely to be the battered variety, with chips.

Scavengers with a social purpose

The thought of regurgitated chicken nuggets was a rather scary one, but of course gulls are scavengers. Herring gulls (which these were) are opportunist feeders, so not true scavengers (like kites or vultures) but liable to eat anything that presents itself. You can well imagine that in the tourist territory of central London there is actually plenty of potential food that presents itself, and see that they may very well be performing a useful social function by consuming rubbish (because if they don’t do it, the chances are that the rats will). So why do we get so agitated about them? Perhaps because we don’t like their manners; they’re noisy and rather pushy, aggressive even, and so they frighten us. But watching the pair of herring gulls and their solitary baby, I found myself sympathizing far more with them. In the abstract I can go along with those who write about invading seagulls, but when I actually saw a herring gull family unit I found my allegiance shifting.

Back in the day

That classic 1970s text “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” was just going out of fashion when I was a student, but you still saw it on people’s shelves, and I fear I heard lots of the soundtrack album, because it was everywhere at one time. The book is a fable, with gulls standing for people, and it’s basically a sort of sub-Sufi self-improvement manual, but with all the faith and discipline removed (so very much of its time). I think our commentators are using gulls in a similar way, but for a very different end, in the contemporary discourse around the “seagull invasion”.

Birds and words

Those interested in birds will be aware that “seagulls” are not actually a species, but a generalising term, a bit like “migrants”. What I watched from that hospital window were not marauding seagulls, but a family group of herring gulls. Just so, when you actually get to meet a “migrant” you will find that they are an individual human being, with an individual story. It’s easy to demonize both birds and people, if you don’t understand their way of life very well, and make them live on rubbish dumps (for what else is “The Jungle” outside Calais?) and keep on regarding them as aggressive aliens. Actually, there have always been herring gulls in British cities, just as we have always had migrants. Yes, absolute numbers may be a problem just now, but do we really have more herring gulls than Germany, or migrants?