Seagulls

Spindrift is one of those things that sounds a great deal more romantic than it is. I can always tell when it's spindrift weather by watching the seagulls. There's a point of wind velocity when a sensible gull figures it's pure foolishness to go aloft; another notch higher on the anemometer and he won’t even try to stand up. When you can see hundreds of gulls but no gull feet, it's spindrift time. The air will be full of little blobs of dirty suds scudding past and skittering along the shore, rafting up in trembling yellowish clots. The gulls hunker down in feathered stoicism, beaks dead into the wind, blinking and flicking their wings as the occasional bits of foam bounce off them.

Now, a hunkered-down gull is nothing but pure appetite tacked to a rock. The longer the blow goes on, the hungrier the gull gets. It's a good thing the coast is littered with gull goodies after a gale; by the time the storm ends, the seagulls are running on empty, and heaven help the creature that gets between them and the beach buffet.

On the New England coast, you're more likely to be bedeviled by gulls than by ants when you picnic. Of course, the gulls have a vast natural advantage, hanging up there on the high breezes, taking inventory of your menu with that preternaturally acute vision of theirs; then, mewing approval, they'll plummet abruptly to a landing just out of reach, where they strut and preen and yammer and nag until someone finally tosses a tidbit into the crowd - then all hell breaks loose. Flipping a single pickle chip into a dozen-gull flock is about the same as dropping a meatball into a school of feeding sharks. The winner and all the sore losers will then scream hideous slanders about the morals of your immediate ancestors, until bribed by more goodies. In no time at all, you'll find your feast stripped of all its trimmings, while you gnaw guiltily at the last chicken leg under the gimlet gaze of your feathered luncheon guests, who are, of course, waiting for the bone.

Gulls are such dedicated omnivores. I once shared a sunny half-hour on a dock with a gull that was dead-set on ingesting a smallish, extremely dead yellowtail flounder that had evidently been sun-baked to the hardness of cold-rolled steel. If it had been, say, a skinny little smelt or such, maybe he could have choked it down; but that broad, flat flounder oval was more than he could get his beak around. Not that he didn’t try to whittle it down to size, worrying away at the edges with that scissor-edged beak, but to no avail. He was still gnawing when I left.

The sheer capacity of the individual gull is staggering, as illustrated by the case of the deep-dish apple-rhubarb pie. There had been more than half of it left after the three of us Maine campers had had a piece, but then Sam the dog took an unauthorized sample, and the third of a pie that was left lost its appeal for the rest of us. But we figured Oscar would appreciate it.

The cabin was perched precariously on a rocky hillside that pitched steeply down to the frigid waters of Prettymarsh Harbor; seven or eight camps are tucked away, all but invisible, in the pines that ring the cobbled shore. You can hear a screen door slam on the far side of the water, or a fish break the surface half a mile away. Oscar easily picked up our cocktail-hour chitchat and cruised in from the spiraling thermal where he’d been hang-gliding.

Oscar was a standard-model herring gull with a brassy self-assurance that brought him daily to our porch railing for hors d'oeuvres and idle gossip. Deep-dish apple-rhubarb pie being a rarity in those parts, we figured it would get him even more excited than his usual handouts of popcorn and crackers. Wanting a ringside view of the action, we carefully laid out a tempting trail of pie bits, starting at his usual landing spot at the far end of the rail, and ending at the pie plate, which was stage center on the rail in front of our chairs. Sure enough, Oscar ate his way down the rail, morsel by morsel, watching us with yellow-eyed suspicion as he inched closer - three more bites, two, then only one - Oscar stalled momentarily, but gluttony beat out caution and he pounced on the pie with a croak of glee. Carefully pinning down his prize by planting one webbed foot firmly on the edge of the foil plate, he scissored out one hunk of pie after another and gulped it down until there wasn't a crumb left. Then, as if to show us he still wasn't full, he gave the plate a couple of good chomps before tossing it disdainfully at our feet. His takeoff was a bit sluggish, but a deep-dish pie is serious ballast, after all. Fortunately, he cleared the porch before he blew the ballast tanks.

The beggarly nature of seagulls makes them easy marks for the likes of the TOWN & COUNTRY photographer who was doing a high-fashion shoot on the Newport gold coast. The scenario called for a Christmas picnic by the sea, so the boulders at Price's Neck were artfully sprinkled with flaked Styrofoam to simulate drifting snow. Out of camera range, a truckload of ice-cubes lay heaped on the beach, chilling a case of champagne and a couple of dozen baskets of strawberries. More ice cubes were tucked into a hollow in the rocks, cradling two bottles of champagne and a pretty bowl of berries; right next to it crackled a healthy bonfire. Draped over the rocks by the fire and ice was the sleek daughter of an old and wealthy Newport family, tastefully arrayed in a fisherman's sweater, faded jeans, and an ankle-length lynx coat. It was August.

Various artistic types clambered over the rocks, adjusting lights and grooming the lounging heiress. Just across the little cove waited the extras, a couple of dozen gulls milling around peevishly and squabbling amongst themselves. They’d been primed for action with a handout of day-old bread tossed by two flunkies standing on the sidelines of the shot. Every time the photographer had a shot framed and lit to his satisfaction, he’d call "Gulls!", the flunkies would heave hunks of bird bait into the air, and the sky behind the shot would immediately fill with flashing black-and-white wings. Turned out the ratio of bread to film had been sorely miscalculated, though; the bread ran out early, as did a couple of bags of potato chips. In the end, economy was flung to the winds and the strawberries were flung to the seagulls, basket after succulent basket.

Marie Antoinette would have appreciated the solution.