Sea Gull Perch flickr photo by fran.trudeau shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
My wife and I, and a friend, spent the first day of the long weekend at Crane Beach in eastern Massachusetts. It was a lovely day of mostly sunshine, and the beach is beautiful — long, white sand, and full of trails traversing the dunes.
The problem? The seagulls. Talk about brazen.
At one point, when I was reading my novel and my wife was resting, a seagull stealthily came along and grabbed a small plastic bag of crackers and refused to drop it.
Thus began a slow-motion chase scene as my wife tried to get the bag back — she didn’t care so much about the crackers but she did not want the plastic bag to be part of the environment. The bird never flew. My wife never ran. Instead, the gull kept hopping, with the bag in its beak, as my wife calmly followed it, sometimes clapping her hands and giving out the order to “drop it” like it was our dog.
Finally, the bird gave up, released the bag and flew off.
I had noticed a young woman, a few blankets down, filming the whole encounter on her phone, and as my wife returned, I told her: You’re going to be trending on Tik-Tok or Instagram later today.
She laughed.
Peace (and the chase),
Kevin