It is my first day at work. A sealion has just given birth to a wet, wrinkled, squirming, black bundle. The pool she is lying next to is red with blood. In the middle there is a bubbly, membraneous mass of placenta, umbilica, fallopia - all the sundries of carrying a child for some eleven point four months. For a long time she cleans her child in the pool. She takes it with her teeth by its scruff, shakes it in the pool, brings it out, places it on the edge. There the pup clings with disproportionately large flippers, afraid to use them for inexperience, and slowly slips, while the mother scratches her ear with her own not-quite-so-silly looking flipper, thinking really only about falling asleep again. The pup loses its grip, slips into the pool with a little wail, is picked up by the mother, placed on the edge and so on.
A seagull is standing near by, stepping back and forth, preening itself, occasionally giving it's whole body a shudder. It cannot hide it's impatience.
Finally, the mother has placed her baby into a not-too-precarious suckling position and fallen asleep even while rolling over on her side. Wasting no time, the gull hops into the pool and pulls a long succulent sheet of fresh warm flesh out of the pool.
A second seagull, who has been examining his fellow for a while from behind a neighboring plateau, has suddenly at the pool appeared and snapped its beak around the sheet. Not, I should note, any of the rest of great mass of stuff in the pool, but at the very end piece seagull One has been tugging at. Number One drops his end, squawks, beats his wings. Two drops his bit of One's bit and defends his honor with a squawk and a chest fluff and a wing show. Even as One and Two work out their differences, Number Three has dropped onto the other end of the pool and is busily tugging the entire flesh mass out the other end, along with the now suddenly materialized Four and Five. Our original protagonists have now noticed that the very object of their desire has dissappeared back into the pool of afterbirth, and have turned to negotiate with the culprits, whose own brief flirtation with cooperation has dissolved as quickly as it began.
Meanwhile, Number Six is creeping up behind the pup who is the very inconsequential courier of the bounty and is picking at the torn cord that is still hanging from the pups rear belly end. The pup, who is still making sense of light and dark and wet and hunger and motherness and what are these enormous floppy black flippers for anyway, senses somehow that the immediate purpose of being in this bright, cold, noisy world is not to feed seagulls with still-attached flesh. He lets out a wail like a crying lamb. The large, wide, warm motherlode of pups and afterbirth herself, whose only interest is in returning to sleep, turns her long, sinuous neck towards the commotionand lets out a bark that sends wings a-flapping and bloody beaks a-squawking.
For all of somewhat less than two seconds, the pool is gull-free. But then the seagulls regroup, and are all over the pool, and now I no longer know One and Two and Six from Seven, Eight and Nine, who have also joined the picnic.
And I cannot honestly tell whether their purpose in flocking is to feast, to keep their flock-mates from feasting, or to keep their flockmates from keeping them from feasting.
That is the way seagulls are.
I always figured that the seagulls you and I are familiar with are the way they are because their character was corrupted by civilization. Out in the open ocean, I was sure, there are graceful, gliding gulls, scooping out six-foot salmon whole from the water with the eye and the instinct of an eagle. I believed this much as I still like to imagine the fleet-footed ur-cow, and goodness prevailing on Earth.
In fact, seagulls are opportunistic, scavenging thugs. Unlike the cormorants and puffins and kittiwakes and guillemots and murres, yea, even the gloopishes, you will be hard pressed to see a seagull pull so much as a plankton out of the water.
There are the sixty or so gulls that parasite the sealion placentae and still-attached pup-umbilicae. A seagull picked at the mostly hollow shell of the gloopish I killed out on the water, until it was chased away by another seagull. There is a young dappled seagull who lives near our home who has torn up most of our bread we set out to dry when our snow-pile icebox finally caved in. He would have eaten all of it if the older seagull couple next door, quite possibly his very parents, didn't harrass him consisently, scattering crumbs all about our rocky beach to be cleaned up by the wagtails. I have seen seagulls try to pick at the corpses of the occasional dead pup on the rookery, while simultaneously defending themselves from other seagulls intruding and intruding on other seagulls. Perhaps most grotesquely, I have seen two seagulls fight over the carcass of a seagull in the water.
Ultimately, the gloopish and the sealion pups and the seagull carcass were dealt with by nature's more methodical decomposers far more effectively that these would-be scavengers, for no seagull completes a meal in peace. The purpose of a seagull, aside from finding extremely labor-intensive ways to avoid obtaining food, is to deprive their fellow seagulls of food.
How this self-defeating selfishness has become what is known in the jargon of evolutionary ecology as an "evolutionarily stable strategy" is beyond me. Personally, I have decided not to think about it too much. I am afraid the lesson nature is providing in the case of the seagull is not particularly uplifting, especially when one considers that it is the seagull after all that has cozied itself into our own, human, cities, and not the cormorant or puffin or kittiwake or guillemot or murre ...