The first sign of trouble was when we came home one afternoon and, as we approached the house, got dive-bombed by an angry adult seagull. Safely indoors, we heard what sounded like a mobile phone beeping in the garden. And when I went outside, I found a baby seagull wandering fretfully around the lawn, clearly having survived falling from a nest on the neighbour’s chimney stack.
The chick was comical and pathetic, but impossible to help. At any approach, it would scuttle off into the bushes—and Mother would come screaming out of the heavens. After about a week the situation was becoming increasingly tiresome. A Google search indicated that it could be a month or more before Junior achieved lift-off. Meanwhile, the garden was inaccessible—and fast disappearing beneath a layer of guano.
So we were hugely relieved when the fledgeling found its way out into the street, where it continued to wander around, meeping pathetically until, eventually, it pissed off another neighbour so thoroughly that he cornered it, shoved it in a box and took it off to a local bird sanctuary.
One down.
All this time, a second fledgling had been lurking in the nest on the chimney stack. I’m not one hundred percent certain, but presumably it was this one that turned up dead in our garden about a week later. I have no idea how it died—was it bird flu, a spectacularly unfortunate fall, a misjudged attempt at flight that ended in a collision with the wall…? Nor am I entirely convinced that the corpse wasn’t thrown over the fence. Anyway it was dead. I put on a pair of gloves, stuffed it into a plastic sack and—slightly guiltily—dumped it in the rubbish.
Two down.
Just when everything seemed to have settled down, baby seagull three appeared, wandering confusedly up and down the street. There was a parent in attendance who didn’t seem to feel the need to dive-bomb innocent passers-by. Sadly, the chick couldn’t resist the lure of the A28 main road, at the end of the street, and wound up spattered across the tarmac.
Three down.
Our next non-paying guest was a collared dove that showed up on the garden trellis, still fluffy about the chest. It shuffled around up there for almost a week, getting occasional visits from a parent. It would flutter its wings from time to time, but seemed not so much unable as unwilling to fly. Finally, we forced the issue. We would walk up close, scaring the chick into fluttering a few yards onto the roof of a neighbour’s garden shed—only to return to the trellis an hour or so later. We repeated this ritual for a day or so… and eventually the chick vanished. Maybe a local cat got it. Hopefully it decided that it could fly and went off to be a proper dove, like generations of doves before it.
Four down.
And finally, about a week ago, another young seagull, perched on the edge of a roof across the street with a ‘Goodbye, cruel world’ look on its face. Sure enough, the following day it was down on the ground, weaving its way around and under the parked cars (see image at top). We haven’t seen it for several days. But there’s no smear of feathers out on the main road, so hopefully it made it…
And the moral of this story? None that I’m aware of, except that it’s tough being a baby bird.
Donald Hounam 