Gulls On Film

[peterbirks]

I see that the father of disc jockey Emma B (who I wish was named Edgar Broughton, but apparently isn't) has been given a conditional discharge and £400 costs for battering a seagull to death and then stringing it up (presumably "to encourage the others") because said gull shat on his wife's hair and lunch, in that order.

I was cheering the man to the rafters until I got to paragraph 3 of the story, where it was pointed out that Mr Broughton was a member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and claimed that "he didn't enjoy killing it".

Well, bloody hell, I would have. I hate seagulls with a passion. Whenever I stay on the coast, they drive me mental. All reasonable liberal sensitivity goes out of the window. If there is one species ripe for and deserving of ethnic cleansing in the Birks Book of Birds and Mammals, it isn't the pigeon, it isn't the grey squirrel, and it isn't the fox. It's the fucking seagull.

Fortunately, I live nowhere near the coast, so the paths of seagulls and I rarely cross. You might see the occasional tourist in Trafalgar Square who has flown up the Thames in search of the bright lights, but as a rule, seagulls stick to the coast and I stick to inland. Long may it continue.

Volcano Merapi Update: A total wimp. C'mon, either blow or piss off the pot.

Comments

Seagulls & rights

[miserable-git.livejournal.com]

I forever find myself amazed at the severity of the punishment meted out at times for animal 'cruelty' when compared with that meted out to those who deal in the creation of misery for humankind.
Pete, I'm surprised you don't see more gulls in Lewisham - maybe somebody in the locality is eating them :-)

Gulls

[(Anonymous)]

There has apparantly been something like a 50% drop in Seagull numbers over the past 3 years. It's been blamed on overfishing, but maybe your post opens up another possibility? But gulls have long since left the coasts, I'm 200 miles inland here and we get masses of them. John W

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

I've never been able to see seagulls in quite the same light since watching Finding Nemo ("Mine, mine, mine"). It always fascinated me to know what happened when Pixar dubbed the movie into other languages where the joke would be lost.

[mrwarfrog.livejournal.com]

Who's Emma B?

[edbook.livejournal.com]

a couple years ago I woke early one morning to the screams of a flock of robins that normally habit our llama pasture. They had vacated the pasture for the surrounding trees and were unhappy about something. On top a portion of the fence near the house where the birds usually hang out but was now vacant was something I had to investigate more closely. It was the head of a robin. Evidently, a crow had just killed one in the pasture and had put the head on the fence where the robins hang. This crow I'd seen about the pasture in the past running off other birds was recognizable because one leg was normal length and the other was more than an inch longer and it stuck out to the side... it hopped about on one leg. In the next few days, I started finding pieces of dead mice and birds in the llama's water. I saw the culprit a few times flying in and dropping his refuse in the drinking water and then fly off. The llamas wouldn't drink the tainted water so I had to dump the tubs and refill them a few times each day. I suspect that that crow was either trying to run the llamas off or wanted to poison them so it would have llama for dinner. I tried my slingshot to no avail, I'm a terrible aim and I don't own guns but my aim wouldn't do any better except to scare off my bug eater bird friends. My wife found the solution at a crafts store, a fake crow-but very realistic. We hung the 'dead' crow near the llama water and it was the crow's turn to scream... then leave and didn't bother the llama water again... what was good for the crow was good for the llamas too... unfortunately I can't say that no animals were hurt during the filming of that summer... I gave the murdered robin a burial with the headless uneaten robin body I found in the pasture and the robins eventually returned but they were gone for a couple weeks.


Peace