I don’t like birds. Never have, never will. I think there’s a special place in hell for people who feed them, at least when they do it in public. I mean, if someone wants to take it up on their own property—fine. But they shouldn’t be tossing around seeds and stale bread at public parks or near the bus station. That’s just asking for it—it being airborne infectious diseases.
The pigeons, rampant as they are in Venice, at least have some manners. They wait for someone to mess up before they swarm their feet, pecking at that single potato chip that was dropped from the apertivi tray. They look pathetic too, with their gnarled toes and thinning feathers. I almost feel sorry for them—until one of them hops up on the table and tries to take a sip of my $6 cocktail. Then I remember what I’m dealing with: A flying rat. I cannot empathize with that no matter how disabled it may be.
The seagulls, on the other hand, they’re hard to make excuses for. They have no dignity whatsoever, always squawking and honking at one another, like Meghan McCain and Joy Behar on The View. They know what they’re doing too. The fly straight at you like a torpedo, flapping their wings and hoping you drop whatever it is you’re holding, preferably an entire pizza or a small child.
Once upon a time, in my twenties, a seagull tried to steal a vegan ice cream cone from my boyfriend and he straight-up punched that bird in the head. No lie, the seagull flew around in a small loop and then came back for more, beak-first at max speed. He seemed to be aiming for the eyes.
“Hold this,” my boyfriend said, handing me his ice cream cone and assuming a fighting position. “I’m not dealing with this shit today.”
That’s how bad seagull are: They make vegans want to fight them.
Seagulls aren’t just aggressive, they’re also smart. In Helsinki, they have figured out how to minimize the confrontation with people, by which I mean that have learned that if they poop on someone’s food while they are eating it, that person will immediately stop eating it. Now they don’t even have to fight for that meal. They just circle the table a few times and let loose with stunning accuracy. Never mind drones, someone should just figure out how to train a seagull. The world would be a better place.
Johann is the type of person who is almost always minding his own business. He’s a live and let live—or, perhaps more accurately, a sit and let live—kind of person. But let a stranger pull out a single cracker or a stale bread crust around a flock of birds and it is on, Finnish style.
“These people,” he says in his trademark Nordic whisper. “They should not be feeding the birds!”
He shakes his head once, twice, then goes back to whatever he was doing before, which is usually nothing. A few seconds later, when the strangers begin tossing uneaten sandwiches at the birds, he sighs. Loudly.
“Maybe we should move,” he says, glaring at a father of two who is now throwing handfuls of pretzel sticks like confetti at a parade.
I know Johann well enough to recognize that his motivation is two-fold: he wants to get away from the birds, but he also thinks that he has caused a scene. To be clear, he has not. What he has done barely passes as making an observation. But to him, it’s a full-on public tantrum and so we go, all our best lines unspoken.
Last week, while on an island-hopping tour in Croatia, Johann and I were about to settle down for an hour or two on a pair of sea-facing boulders when he spotted a seagull standing watch about ten yards away. Just behind her was a baby, though I use that term loosely, since the second bird was already about the size of small Thanksgiving turkey.
“Let’s just go,” Johann said. “The mothers get aggressive.”
As if on cue, the mama bird flapped her wings and whipped her head around to face us. She stared us down like it was our first day in prison.
“She’s all the way over there!” I protested, pointing at the bird in case he forgot where it was. “And go where?” I asked, motioning to the rocks around us. “If we need to give every bird a ten-yard radius, we’d never be able to sit down.”
“What’s a yard?” he asked, then shook his head. “Never mind. She has her baby!” he insisted, stepping back to the rock behind us.
“Fine,” I said, following him. He jumped to a second rock, then a third, his eye on the bird the whole time, waiting to see if she pulled out a weapon.
“Let’s just go somewhere else,” he repeated.
I sighed. “Fine. I don’t want to get attacked by a seagull.”
He turned to walk away and I followed him, then stopped.
“No,” I said, stomping my foot. “This is ridiculous! I will not be bossed around by a bird.”
I took out my beach towel and flapped it in the wind, maintaining eye contact with the gull the entire time. I was sitting where I wanted to sit and she and her baby could do the same. There’s no reason why we can’t coexist.
Reluctantly, Johann followed suit, opening his towel and gingerly sitting down. Once we were settled, the bird sat down herself. Then, while still looking in our direction, slowly closed her eyes. It seemed she did it not out of trust, but cockiness. Even she knew that the two of us weren’t going to hurt her baby. She also knew that we would probably leave before she did. And, quite possibly, she knew that I wasn’t the type of person with whom to start a fight.
Of course, to me, the seagull wasn’t just a seagull. Telling this bird that I was going to sit where I pleased and ate what I bought and whip her in the face with a flip flop if need be wasn’t really about her. It was a metaphor. Dealing with a bitchy seagull was just the final straw after a long week, which was part of a long month, chock full of loudmouths coming at me from all directions. Requests turned to demands, which turned to orders, which ended in threats. These people wrote the terms, then changed them just for kicks, all the while pretending that I was uninformed and unreasonable. Just like the seagulls, these people thought they could get away with it because that’s the dynamic they’ve created. They’ve done it for so long with so many other people that they forget there’s any other way.
Maybe the reason why I don’t like seagulls is because they’re an awful lot like people: They take and they take from the people who don’t know any better and then they still want more. If you don’t give up easily enough (because let’s face it, we all know that we can outmuscle a seagull) then they change tactics. They can’t get at you with strength or logic, so they will win by disgust—letting out a stream of hot shit over something that you want or cared about or worked for. They do it because they want it for themselves, but also just to scare you. Creating fear is the only way they can keep the upper hand. This is a new game and the rules are arbitrary. There’s no winning, not even for the person who started the fight. This what it’s like to deal with a bully, personally or professionally—it’s like negotiating with a nesting pigeon, on a remote island in Croatia—one that has developed a taste for gelato.
And I’m all done with that. I’m all done getting bossed around by the loudest being at the beach—or in the room. Heads up, towels down, MFs. This gelato is mine.
A note on pictures for e-mail subscribers: Several people have pointed out that the images no longer come through in the e-mail. I’m working on a solution. In the meantime, you can see the pictures by clicking through to the site: www.adviceineeded.com
Huzzah! More great writing! I will never look at seagulls, or Finns for that matter, the same again.
Thank you! I cannot with the seagulls, I really can’t. At least the Finns are easy on the eyes :)