Some years ago, I heard a story about\nan employee of a coastal restaurant who beat a one-legged gull to\ndeath with a stick out back of the establishment. Apparently the gull\nserved as the establishment\u2019s mascot, and for whatever reason, if\nsociopathic behavior can be said to have logical reasons, the\nemployee bashed the bird to death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The man who recounted the incident to\nme heard about it from an eyewitness who later called the police. An\ninvestigation ensued, but the perpetrator wasn\u2019t arrested, even\nthough killing a gull constitutes a crime under federal migratory\nbird law, punishable by a maximum fine of $15,000 and a\nmaximum prison sentence of two years, depending on the offense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The tale of the senseless and horrific\nmurder of a gull has never left my mind. I can also never forget\ndriving behind a pick up truck and watching a male driver purposely\nswerve into the shoulder and kill a gull. Who are these people? What\nhappened to their moral development? What books do they read to their\nchildren? If I had had my phone with me that afternoon, I would have\ncalled the police and the local office of the Department of U.S. Fish\nand Wildlife, the federal agency charged with enforcing migratory\nbird law. Most likely nothing would have happened, but I hope the man\nhad to explain to an officer why he committed the murder\u2014with his\nkids listening. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Frankly, I much prefer gulls to most\nhuman beings. They are my close friends on Oregon\u2019s ocean beaches\nand have many advantages over us. For one thing, they can fly and\nride the thermals with an effortless grace I envy. I prefer their\nclucking language to English. They also don\u2019t talk on phones in\nrestaurants. Nor do they use leaf blowers, murder one other over\nreligion, experiment on primates, or snort methamphetamine. Yes, they\ndo eat terrible fast food but that only because some human being came\nto his senses and threw it away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gulls are such a ubiquitous presence on\nthe Oregon Coast, but really, do we know all that much about them?\nShould we?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t know who wrote it, but\nsomewhere I read something to the effect that, \u201cIt behooves us to\nknow the names and interesting details of the sentient creatures we\nsee and interact with every day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gulls fascinate me. I have at least one\ninteraction every day with a gull. I\u2019d like to take this\nopportunity to educate people about them. For that I am indebted to a\ncharming little book called Gulls: A Social History<\/em>, written\nby Frank Graham Jr. with photographs by Christopher Ayers, published\nin 1975. In this long out-of-print book, Graham writes: \u201cWe would\nbe poorer without gulls than they would be without us; these\nbeautiful and fascinating creatures add to the marvelous natural\ndiversity that enriches our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amen to that. Nothing enriches me more\nthan inching up to the Western gulls at dumps and beaches and\nexamining their well-worn faces. What are they thinking? \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n For starters, there is no such creature\nas a seagull. There are 44 different species of gulls and some live\nas long as 20 years. I learned about their interesting mating,\ninterspecies breeding, migratory patterns, and that even the sharpest\nbirders have difficulty telling many of the species apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also learned that not all that long\nago, many local populations of gulls were nearly wiped out across\nNorth America by eggers, milliners, and the government, the latter\nspreading poison to arrest the proliferation of certain species in\nfavor of other birds. It\u2019s a ghastly tale, biologists killing\nwildlife to save certain (politically) preferred species, and still\nplays out today, (think hatchery salmon over euthanized sea lions on\nthe Columbia).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet the gulls survived, by adapting to\nvarious wasteful human trends, like landfills, and as Graham writes,\n\u201cWe are contemporaries in a sense, riding the runaway vehicle that\nis the modern industrial world.\u201d He wrote that two years after the\nArab Oil Embargo and decades before social media. One does sort of\nthink that when human beings wind down their time on Earth, which is\ninevitable, gulls will remain. They\u2019ll adapt and keep on flying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s mascot, and for whatever reason, if sociopathic behavior can be said to have logical reasons, the employee bashed the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5331,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-oregon-beaches","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5330"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5333,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5330\/revisions\/5333"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}