Wednesday 4 June 2008
Gulls - What Would Hudson Say?
Two score years ago this day, our fathers launched a war that could never be won - the war against seagulls, initiated by the bold burghers of Dover. Forty years on, it is painfully clear their efforts were all in vain. The gulls have bidden farewell to the clifftops and the foam-flecked seas, and spend their entire lives shouting at each other in squalid rooftop shanties and hanging around municipal rubbish tips, when not harassing the human and avian population. And of course they're 'protected' (all but the urban herring gull). What, I wonder, would that great bird man W.H. Hudson make of it? He was strangely fond of the London gulls (there's a picture of him consorting with them in Birds Of London) - but surely he wouldn't care to live with the mobs of shrieking shitehawks that now menace every town in the land. Perhaps they could be enticed away with promises of a better life elsewhere? They are, after all, very (hem hem) gullible.
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Remember Bodega Bay and tremble, mind you, they were in cahoots with the crows.
ReplyDeleteNige, sitting in the car one afternoon with Tippi Hedren and this happened, they, of course dodged the parking charges.
ReplyDeleteAha so you're blogging, Malty! Lovely pix, seems a bit short on words...
ReplyDelete(Larry David's twin sounds fine by me - positively aspirational).