The tide recedes before us, as we sit on steps by the bay in Margate.
My family is eating a traditional supper of fish and chips, but we are not alone.
Large, malevolent seagulls congregate in clusters across the steps in front of us. Perhaps we haven’t strayed quite far enough from the chip shop.
We’re Londoners: we are well versed in dealing with scavenging wildlife. There are ways to enforce the Darwinian hierarchy. One knows when to let things slide, and when to let a pigeon know who is boss.
Yet, when confronted with a seagull, it is easy for city folk to forget that there are levels of predatory ruthlessness beyond that of mere pigeonry.
As soon as you realise you’re substantially outnumbered by these large and unforgiving creatures, you feel the balance of power starting to shift.
Close encounter of the bird kind
Seagulls seem considerably more cocky than other urban wildlife, and where there is no fear there can be no etiquette.
Our first close encounter sees a gull swooping down close to my wife’s head.
It’s a gross violation of airspace, but we write it off as an honest mistake: something akin to an amateur pilot accidentally flying his Cessna too close to a government building.
In retrospect, it was more like a lone MiG testing our radar vulnerability.
A gull the size of a terrier lands, shrieking, in my wife’s lap
Below us, we watch a woman complete some form of sun salutation in the water, as if Margate Main Sands were Thanet’s answer to the Ganges. With her ablutions done, she sits down on the steps and cracks open a can of rum and cola.
I take a moment to ponder whether I really desire another forkful of lukewarm mushy peas, or whether I’m chasing a high that has already dissipated.
And then, it happens.
A gull – a brindled specimen roughly the size of a terrier – swoops down and lands, shrieking, in my wife’s lap. More specifically, he alights on her cardboard tray of cod and chips.
The bird’s momentum scatters the whole serving off her knees and over the stone steps below, inviting the attention of the rest of the nearby gulls. A swarm descends to feast on these ill-gotten gains.
Stripping the carcass
I should be clear here that, based on my limited observations, food poverty is not a pressing issue for these gulls. My impression is that they have been driven to this action by nothing other than cold-eyed opportunism.
Apparently, gulls are more bolshy during the summer breeding season, but I would have assumed this aggression was along the more chivalric lines of ‘don’t threaten my offspring’.
Speaking of which: my daughter, previously agnostic on the subject of her chip-shop dinner, is in tears over having her food ‘stolen’. At least they didn’t snatch the food directly from her mouth.
The gulls work as a mob. They act less like a flock of vultures than a shoal of horror-movie piranhas – in seconds they set to work stripping the carcass down to a cardboard skeleton.
My wife wades in to try to deny the gulls a total victory, scooping up the tray and some remaining scraps and shoving it into the nearest litter bin.
The minor trauma we’ve just experienced is called kleptoparasitism – theft of one animal’s food by another.
Accusations and breakdowns
As we come to terms with the partial loss of our dinner, I realise that our avian rumpus has attracted the attention of a woman sitting several flights of steps below us.
It’s the sun worshipper from earlier, breaking off from her spiritual and medicinal pursuits to berate me and my family at length for “feedin’ the birds!”.
TS Eliot came to Margate to recover from a nervous breakdown, rather than incite one
After fruitlessly shooing the gulls away from our remaining food, I stop to remonstrate with her. It’s only thanks to the intervention of a nearby eyewitness that I’m able to exonerate myself.
The woman mumbles a grudging apology while also reiterating that people feeding the birds is a problem. On this topic, we can find common ground.
We head to the pub to recover. I should have known better than to expect a placid evening by the seaside. The beach is always ready to disappoint me.
Although others have made it work well enough. A century ago, TS Eliot came to Margate to recover from a nervous breakdown, rather than incite one.
Famously, he selected the Nayland Rock Shelter to observe the bay, ensuring its Grade II Listed status many decades later.
In light of this evening’s events, I realise that he did not select that hardy Victorian structure at random.
There, one could safely hammer out key sections of a foundational modernist text, and also consume a fish-and-chip supper in peace, while completely protected from aerial attacks.
