Ode to Seagulls

I love seagulls. I went to Flatholme island courtesy of my husband. It's a conservation island given mainly over to seagulls. They're actually an endangered species. It seems strange to think so, when you can't seem to move for seagulls nowadays, and gone are the times when you'd only see them on beaches, but they traditionally migrate for several years until they're adults, and the recent growth of litter in the cities means that they'd much rather hang about and eat junk food than do all that wing-work. So they hang around, and eat lots of nasties, and get botulism. Seagulls eat a lot of nasties, including each other. I can't decribe to you the feeling of horror you get when you're walking along, and the grass gets a little, crunchy, and you find that you just trod on a bird skull. With bits of flesh still on it.

Anyway, I digress. The main reason I love seagulls is because they look so angry all the time. They have this expression of pure annoyance, like the little old lady who's just come out to yell at the children for trampling all over her begonias. And you can see it all building up til it gets too much for them, and they just throw their heads back, open up their throats, and let out this long, gutteral screech. They put their whole heart into that screech. And then they fly off to bully some pigeons.

The best characterisation of a seagull has be Kehaar from Watership Down, a book that far too few people have read. Here's an extract.

The creature in the hollow was a bird - a big bird, nearly a foot long...The white part of its back, which they had glimpsed through the grass, was in fact only the shoulders and the neck. The lower back was light grey and so were the wings, which tapered to long, black-tipped primaries folded together over the tail. The head was very dark brown - almost black - in such sharp contrast to the white neck that the bird looked as though it were wearing a kind of hood. The one dark-red leg that they could see ended in a webbed foot and three powerful, taloned toes. The beak, hooked lightly downwards at the end, was strong and sharp. As they stared it opened, disclosing a red mouth and throat. The bird hissed savagely and tried to strike, but still did not move.
As they squatted, looking at the bird...it suddenly burst into loud, raucous cries - 'Yark! Yark! Yark' - a tremendous sound at close quarters - that split the morning and carried far across the down...

"You hurt? You no fly?"
The answer was a harsh gabbling which they all felt immediately to be exotic. Wherever the bird came from, it was somewhere far away. The accent was strange and gutteral, the speech distorted. They could only catch a word here and there.
"Come keel - kah! kah! - you come keel - yark! - t'ink me finish - me no finish - 'urt you dam' plenty."

"You hurt?" said Hazel.
The bird looked crafty. "No hurt. Plenty fight. Stay small time, den go."
"You stay there you finish, " said hazel. "Bad place. Come homba, come kestrel."
"Dam de lot. Fight plenty."
"I bet it would, too," said Bigwig, looking with admiration at the two-inch beak and thick neck.
"We no want you finish," said Hazel. "You stay here you finish. We help you maybe."
"Piss off."