Tits And Gulls

[poliphilo]

 We had a blue tit in the garden the other day. Back on the farm the blue tits were constantly at the feeders, but this was the first I've seen down here. When we moved to Eastbourne the garden was mostly lawn, but we've considerably increased the bushiness- and that attracts the smaller birds. 

I'm reading a book about gulls. The author- Marianne Taylor- grew up in Hastings, just up the coast from here- and she loves gulls even more than I do. It's a pleasant, easy-going book with lots of facts squeezed in among the anecdotes. When she was a kid she compared the brain of a gull to that of a crow by pouring millet seed into a couple of empty skulls- and found the crow had room for a lot more grey matter. This surprised her- as it surprises me- because if gulls are thick they don't show it. There are six varieties of gull that breed in the UK. The ones that soar and strut over our little patch are all herring gulls...

Comments

[steepholm]

The other day my daughter and her boyfriend strolled over from his house - about an 8-minute walk through one of the less salubrious parts of Bristol - and reported that on the way they had seen a seagull swallow a rat.

[poliphilo]

Good grief!

But, yes, there's not much they won't eat. Taylor writes about a gull who hangs out in Regents Park, stalks pigeons, drags them into the pond, drowns them and then tears them to bits.

[cmcmck]

We have crazy numbers of the tit family locally!

Less gulls obviously, although they do sometimes turn up- black headed are the ones we see most of.

[heleninwales]

I'm sorry, but gulls are thugs. One mugged me once and snatched a bit of my sandwich as I was walking down some steps. (I don't normally eat and walk but I was in a hurry to get to a meeting.) Its feet left black oily marks on my arm and of course I had to throw the rest of the sandwich away, but I did hang on, so it didn't get all of it.

[poliphilo]

We had all kinds of tits show up at the farm. Here there's a shortage of small birds. We have sparrows, the odd robin- and now this single solitary blue tit.

Black headed gulls can be seen down on the beach, but they don't choose to come inland.

[poliphilo]

I was once dive bombed by gulls on a shingle beach they thought they owned.

I rather admire them for their feistiness.