Image: Gary Hershorn / Getty Images
Apparently, whilst the number of coastal birds continues to decline, the number of seagulls making a home in our towns and cities is booming and this makes me happy.
For whilst gulls can certainly be noisy and messy - and may even steal your chips - they are also beautiful and intelligent birds which, I like to believe, act as messengers of the ancient sea goddess Leukothéa; she upon whom all men look with misty eyes, such is her loveliness.
Despite this, there are people who react to urban gulls with the same irrational hatred that they do to other creatures that have made their home amongst us, such as foxes and grey squirrels. Personally, I'd like to see those who call openly for extermination or speak euphemistically of pest control subject to a reduction in numbers.
For to paraphrase Lawrence writing of a mountain lion [1]:
I think in this lonely city there is room for me and a seagull.
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white-surf face of that long-legged bird!
Notes
[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Mountain Lion', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 351-52.
To read another defence of seagulls, see Stephen Moss's article in The Guardian (19 Aug 2009): click here.
