I’ve lived in Brighton and Hove since 1981. I’ve been surrounded by seagulls for most of my life, but somehow I’ve never really got used to them. There’s something unsettlingly prehistoric about those gnarled beaks and oversized, reptilian feet. While the feet can occasionally lend them a pleasingly comic aspect, the sheer size of the seagull makes its feelings impossible to take lightly. Their cries, so evocative from a safe distance, sound incredibly ugly at close quarters; I once lived near a nest, and it was like being trapped in an early Yoko Ono album.
Granted, the place wouldn’t be the same without them – Brighton’s seagulls are its oldest and most recognisable natives. But they brought shame on their home last month when a survey revealed that they are also the most remorselessly violent seagulls in the whole country.
Any visible food can make you a target
It’s mainly about chips – they really do love their chips – but any visible food can make you a target. A few years ago I was visiting the Palace Pier with family when an ill-advised hot dog purchase caught the eye of a gull lurking on the roof of the Cup ’n’ Saucer. In retrospect I should have realised something was off when the person handing me the food just laughed for seemingly no reason, but I was too hungry to take much notice.
I turned around, walked three steps and lifted the hot dog up to my mouth… then thump. It was as if someone had swung a pillowcase full of antique teddy bears – the needlessly heavy, Victorian kind – at the back of my head. I was aware of a sudden confusion of white around my face as my head was knocked forward, and when I looked up there were three spiny seagull toes raking through my painstakingly engineered ketchup river.
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He couldn’t quite grab hold of it, the clown, but he did manage to knock off and break my glasses, so I was half-blind for the rest of the day. And although my snack was still in my possession, his foot had gone literally the entire length of it – as if, having realised he couldn’t steal, he’d maliciously opted to spoil. As I binned it and the man at the hot dog stand laughed some more, the seagull, back at his original spot, looked on: cold, implacable. He was clearly blaming me for the fact that neither of us would now be eating, and this seemed so unfair that it was as much as I could do not to shake my fist at him in the classic style: Happy now?
The official advice if a seagull attacks you is just to ‘move out of the gull’s way’, which, to me, sounds an awful lot like appeasement, and the more general advice is to never, ever, feed them, because that’s what got them so interested in chips in the first place. But isn’t that a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted? Not just bolted but fully escaped, crossed three counties, made friends with a bunch of other animals and had a series of heartwarming adventures?
It is inconceivable that the gulls will simply forget about how nice chips are if we stop feeding them – I’ve not had a McDonald’s for years now but I think about them almost every day. A far more likely outcome will be that they grow ever more envious of chips, ever more resentful of us for not surrendering them and yes, ever more aggressive in their attempts to liberate them.
Of course it would be great if the gulls just went back to fishing instead of obsessing over fatty finger food, but then I suppose you could say the same thing about us. All of our fates were sealed from the moment we learned that food can be something you actually enjoy instead of just live on. That first chip, once tossed, can never be untossed.
So don’t feel too bad if you end up giving a gull a scrap the next time you’re at the beach – you’ll just be helping out a brother. An angry, smelly brother with terrifying personality problems.
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