The Gulls' Child

Like all gulls, herring gulls are beautiful birds, and as masters of flight they're a pleasure to watch particularly when a strong wind is blowing. However, they're the most unpleasant of birds when....

....rearing their chicks. These little monsters are ugly, noisy and horribly demanding of their parents. They're not so bad when they're being reared on the beach, mostly out of people's way, but many are parked by their parents in very public places.

For example, this one seems to live in the middle of the village's playing fields just across the road from us. Despite its atrocious manners, the parents are extremely protective of their young so, when Mrs MW walked across the rugby pitch the other day, she was dive-bombed by one of the parents, the 'bomb' being liquid and smelly.

To find some peace and quiet the parents of this little horror have taken up residence on the flat roof above our bedroom, where they can keep an eye on their brat, which would have been fine if they didn't start dancing around and screaming at about four in the morning. We've done what we can to deter them....

....including covering our chimney stack in spikes and shoo-ing them away at every opportunity, but it looks as if we're stuck with them until they either abandon their horrible child or move it elsewhere.

That gulls are one of the birds that can catch H5N1 bird flu makes them even less nice to be near.

Like all wild birds, gulls are protected and getting a licence to remove them from a premise is difficult. However, we count ourselves relatively lucky: people we know had a pair nesting on their roof, and were attacked every time they tried to enter or leave their house.