~~~
I love watching the seagulls nesting on the roofs. I even love their shouts of “Kiai! Kiai! Kiai!” as they stretch their necks up and down at 5 am. Usually some seagulls are walking on the roofs, some flying on the updrafts between the streets, some pecking hopefully at seagull-friendly fragile rubbish bags.
But yesterday all the seagulls were flying around and about the steep hill near my house, making softer continuous “Kaw-kaw, kaw-kaw” sounds. More seagulls were coming from further roofs and more, so that the sky seemed full of them.
I wondered why the numbers, why the constant restless swooping and rising. Then as I went down the hill on my usual morning walk, I saw a newly-killed adult seagull, squashed wings still flapping in the breeze, beak open, flies busily laying eggs in the snowy down and silvergrey flight feathers. He had obviously been crushed by something large and heavy, maybe a truck or a bus.
Then I realised that the pivot of the wheeling birds in the sky was the sad corpse. The gulls looked down at it, circled a few times and then flew away, making the soft “kaw-kaws”, with more birds coming in from further roofs.
I carried on walking down the hill and round the corner where I could see the boats on the water.
More and more wheeling gulls came and went.
I walked on and found the road blocked to traffic, big signs up near the hotel. Further along the coast road was a huge yellow truck-azoid with flashing lights and a round thing on top, making the customary roaring noise as it cleared some drains.
A smaller group of gulls were attacking the massive sewage lorry with loud shouts and screams, pecking the round thing on top and the flashing lights, kicking the machine, rising and falling in a swirl of angry feathers. Nobody noticed except me.
I walked on, looking up at the white birds still orbiting the body of the gull in the street.
It was clear what had killed their flock member. And I suspect that if the sewage lorry dares to come back, the gulls will remember and mob it again and again.
~~~
To me it seemed that the gulls flying around where the dead gull lay were communicating that there had been a death and who it was and their dance in the sky was also a kind of send-off and farewell to the dead gull. By the afternoon every gull in the flock had been notified and the flying and whirling faded away.
Sad to read this, poor gulls. Animals understand more than we mostly reckon. I love gulls, they are so resilient & they are especially beautiful flying at night. An English man I met said they were much reviled & called 'shitehawks'. After a particularly dire year of his experience, he decided or adopted the 'shitehawk' as his 'spirit animal', as regardless of what had been heaped upon him, he had endured. That man is Damh the bard, he's likely written a song about it.