Some years ago, I heard a story about
an employee of a coastal restaurant who beat a one-legged gull to
death with a stick out back of the establishment. Apparently the gull
served as the establishment’s mascot, and for whatever reason, if
sociopathic behavior can be said to have logical reasons, the
employee bashed the bird to death.
The man who recounted the incident to
me heard about it from an eyewitness who later called the police. An
investigation ensued, but the perpetrator wasn’t arrested, even
though killing a gull constitutes a crime under federal migratory
bird law, punishable by a maximum fine of $15,000 and a
maximum prison sentence of two years, depending on the offense.
The tale of the senseless and horrific
murder of a gull has never left my mind. I can also never forget
driving behind a pick up truck and watching a male driver purposely
swerve into the shoulder and kill a gull. Who are these people? What
happened to their moral development? What books do they read to their
children? If I had had my phone with me that afternoon, I would have
called the police and the local office of the Department of U.S. Fish
and Wildlife, the federal agency charged with enforcing migratory
bird law. Most likely nothing would have happened, but I hope the man
had to explain to an officer why he committed the murder—with his
kids listening.
Frankly, I much prefer gulls to most
human beings. They are my close friends on Oregon’s ocean beaches
and have many advantages over us. For one thing, they can fly and
ride the thermals with an effortless grace I envy. I prefer their
clucking language to English. They also don’t talk on phones in
restaurants. Nor do they use leaf blowers, murder one other over
religion, experiment on primates, or snort methamphetamine. Yes, they
do eat terrible fast food but that only because some human being came
to his senses and threw it away.
Gulls are such a ubiquitous presence on
the Oregon Coast, but really, do we know all that much about them?
Should we?
I don’t know who wrote it, but
somewhere I read something to the effect that, “It behooves us to
know the names and interesting details of the sentient creatures we
see and interact with every day.”
Gulls fascinate me. I have at least one
interaction every day with a gull. I’d like to take this
opportunity to educate people about them. For that I am indebted to a
charming little book called Gulls: A Social History, written
by Frank Graham Jr. with photographs by Christopher Ayers, published
in 1975. In this long out-of-print book, Graham writes: “We would
be poorer without gulls than they would be without us; these
beautiful and fascinating creatures add to the marvelous natural
diversity that enriches our lives.”
Amen to that. Nothing enriches me more
than inching up to the Western gulls at dumps and beaches and
examining their well-worn faces. What are they thinking?
For starters, there is no such creature
as a seagull. There are 44 different species of gulls and some live
as long as 20 years. I learned about their interesting mating,
interspecies breeding, migratory patterns, and that even the sharpest
birders have difficulty telling many of the species apart.
I also learned that not all that long
ago, many local populations of gulls were nearly wiped out across
North America by eggers, milliners, and the government, the latter
spreading poison to arrest the proliferation of certain species in
favor of other birds. It’s a ghastly tale, biologists killing
wildlife to save certain (politically) preferred species, and still
plays out today, (think hatchery salmon over euthanized sea lions on
the Columbia).
Yet the gulls survived, by adapting to
various wasteful human trends, like landfills, and as Graham writes,
“We are contemporaries in a sense, riding the runaway vehicle that
is the modern industrial world.” He wrote that two years after the
Arab Oil Embargo and decades before social media. One does sort of
think that when human beings wind down their time on Earth, which is
inevitable, gulls will remain. They’ll adapt and keep on flying.
