Seagull Thursday
We saw lots of seagulls flying around the Frumpy House yesterday. A sure sign of bad weather out at sea — or at least, that’s what we used to think. But think about it a bit more and you’ll realise how absurd the idea is. It’s like seeing ducks waddling down the street and assuming they’ve come onto dry land because the river’s a bit too wet for them. No, seagulls are, as their name suggests, creatures of the sea. Our coast is their natural environment.
Our seagulls, however, have probably never even seen the sea. Wouldn’t recognize a fish if you threw it at them. Our seagulls are, most likely, related to the gulls that hang around the river near Lincoln’s Waterside shopping centre. Our seagulls live on discarded chips. They follow, not international trawlers but city dustcarts, hoping to scavenge tasty morsels that the trucks leave behind. (There is, apparently, a bloke who walks round Boston market place on Sunday afternoons doing more or less the same kind of thing, but that’s another story. They’re all a bit odd in Boston, y’know.)
Keen birdwatchers might like to know that we were not content just to call these birds seagulls. A quick check in our Hamlyn’s guide revealed that they were Common gulls. Not herring gulls, as we might have assumed. There is a difference: the bill of the adult herring gull is yellow; whereas the bill of the adult common gull is red, i.e., the same colour as the ones we saw yesterday.
But why have all these gulls turned up now, if it has nothing to do with coastal weather? Well, we reckon they’ve been forced out of the town centre by the aggressive tactics of Lincoln’s pigeons.
There could be another explanation though. Maybe there’s a new chippy opening on the High Street.
Cod ‘n’ chips twice please…