Gloopish

Gloopishes are grey and everywhere. They are shaped like small seagulls. I don't know how seabird counters count seabirds, but I would estimate that there are around a bazillion of them here. Everywhere.

Gloopish (глупыш) in Russian loosely means goofy or silly or dumbo. At first I did not understand why such a supremely neutral bird is given such a deprecating name. According to Artyukhin and Burkanov, the English name is Northern Fulmar. Though this word "fulmar" is perhaps more appropriately neutral and nonevocative, I am so accustomed to registering these perpetual grey flickers in my periphery as gloopishes, that, with the reader's indulgence, gloopishes they will remain. With time, I trust the appropriateness of the name will become evident.

Gloopishes nest in shallow indentations dug into the loose dirt on the hummocky grassy cliff walls. Because they are terrible walkers, they must nest high and steep so that they can take immediately to the air. A gloopish taking to the air begins with a plunge downward and forward, with hopefully enough momentum not to hit a lower hummock, though if they do hit a lower hummock, or a person, which is often, they simply bounce off and keep fly-falling until they can raise their nose and are airborne. They are neither particularly good nor particularly bad fliers. They flap their wings in a halfhearted twitchy way about half the time and glide about half the time: flap-flap-flap-gliiiiiide, fla-fla-flap-flap-flaap-gliiiiiiiide, fla-flap-flap-flap-gliii-flap-flap, etc. If there is the least bit of wind, when they glide, they look like they are just learning to fly, adjusting their angles of approach jerkily like a novice learning to bicycle.

After circling out above the water for an unknown amount of times and for unclear reasons, perhaps landing in the water (watering?) and swimming in a very average way, they home back to their nests on the grassy cliffs. If, as they approach, they find they miscalculated their swoop, they do have a rather interesting ability to give quick, rotating, hovering flaps with their wings, suspend in the air momentarily, turn around and swoop down again. The curve is like that of a skateboard in an halfpipe. It is a very skilled manoeuvre and, as far as I've seem, their most distinctive characteristic. It is a bit of a shame that it is applied to compensate for a general inability to calculate an approach correctly in the first place.

Gloopishes perpetually make a feeble noise. It is a weak "khe-khe-khe", like the sound of an imperfect mechanism in a cheap wind-up toy that has walked up against a wall. Somewhere on the inside, a plastic gear has worn out and is slipping, but still the toy insists on pushing, pushing, pushing.

For a bird that is everywhere, gloopishes are incredibly difficult to photograph. They blend in almost well with most backgrounds. When you do look at a decent photograph of a gloopish, it is so uniformly grey, your eye slips right off of it. You think: this would be a nice picture of a rock, or of grass, or of the sky, or of water, if only this greyness in the middle were not there.

On the other hand, no remotely wide angle photograph on this island is possible without a gloopish getting into it.

Everywhere and grey. There is a gloopish for every small and colorless and forgettable thought that fill our minds and lives. There go is-it-6:00-already, i-put-too-much-sugar-in-my-coffee and my-wrist-feels-funny tumbling off the cliff. That-is-a-plaid-dress and coins-and-countries-both-called-guinea are wheeling above our little house while there-is-some-dirt-in-my-thumbnail is clacking beaks with sunglasses-can-be-useful on the hummock up the way. A whole swarm of cmon-light-turn-green's is floating on the mirror smooth blue-gray water out my window, and for every dashboard-finger-tap and almost-impatient-nose-scratch there is a little fish for the gloopish to feed upon.

A gloopish is the first warm-blooded animal whose death I am solely and deliberately responsible for.

(Note - all the awkward qualifiers here are necessary: "warm-blooded" because of the crabs and mussels and fish I have slaughtered in my day, to say nothing of mosquitoes; "deliberately" because of my very participation (usually) in an industrial society; "solely" because of a certain affair with a city park, a loaf of bread, a noose and a goose. Of the six hands that wrapped themselves aroung that particular bird's neck, I bear responsibility for no more than two.)