a flock of seagulls

...just flew over the treeline. We're miles away from a significant body of water. Are they like the rat of the avian world?

I saw one swing over the house and thought, weirdo. Then a whole bunch of them followed. Why? In Erie they're as common as litter, but that only makes sense. Maybe South Bend just attracts the scavengers of the natural world.

I've always harbored a secret fondness for seagulls. They're noisy and vicious and they eat garbage, but they're so wild and suspicious and rude that I like them. One summer in high school I was wandering one of the small rocky beaches near my house and saw a bunch of teenage jerks throw a big wedge of shale at a seagull and break its wing. Of course they ran off laughing. (Dante would probably relegate them to a level of hell where they work constantly in dangerous factory conditions with impaired arms.) The gull lifted its wings and tried to take off, but the wing wouldn't work and the wind kept knocking it over. Throwing all health cautions to the wind, I bent over and approached it slowly and talked to it, and it watched me with one wary eye but let me pick it up. (A friend of mine raised chickens so I knew how to handle a larger bird.) I carried it to the water and let it down and it waded in and swam off, probably to its death. From close up those birds are pretty cool.

Laura and I were tanning at Presque Isle this past summer and watching a gang of seagulls fight over a dead fish. One gull would pick up the fish in its beak and try to fly off with it, but the fish was a little too big for a gull beak and the bird would drop it; its neighbor would then try the exact same thing. One bird in particular was persistent enough to keep attacking everyone else who stole the fish. Watching it, Laura laughed and said in a squawky voice, "It's mine, g-damn it!" And sure enough, the gull grabbed the fish and got away.

I don't know. Gulls are a huge farce of everything you can caricature about human nature. They're unloveable gutter dwellers but that's what makes them funny. I'd rather watch a bunch of seagulls being themselves than read the newspaper; at least you can get a laugh out of it.