I can hear the chick whistling from the garden behind ours. My own breath is a steady plead that nothing happens to it. Not now, just when it’s on the edge of flight.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. In this case, the child is a lesser black-backed gull, and the village is two rows of urban redbrick semis with rear gardens abutting. For weeks now we’ve lived with the parents erupting as we hang out our washing or empty the bins. Pulling back the curtains has drawn a hard yellow stare to remind me that I shouldn’t be at the window. Outside, our violations have been punished by swoops and dives – sometimes accompanied by a dreaded “shitover”, or being eyeballed as the shrieking gull blustered to tread air, right in front of your face.
The pair are less hyper now. When I left their offspring a bowl of water (my neighbour being away), a parent monitored me from our chimney, and casually turned to preen. A fledgling, ignoring the bowl, staggered to its webbed grey feet, blinking at me with an expression I can only describe as innocent curiosity. Then it shuffled across the patio to hide in a flowerbed. With its handsome plumage of scalloped browns and fawns, it bears little resemblance to the scrap of fuzz that hatched between the pots of my neighbour’s chimney. It was first to leave the nest, slithering on to a rear-facing lower flat roof, where later a bigger sibling joined it. The third chick called it wrong by sliding down the street side, which, unfortunately, lacks a flat roof.
The surviving “twins” were smoky fluff on muscular legs on which they raced after a parent touching down. The adult’s crop was full enough to be protruding from between its shoulders like a dowager’s hump. It opened wide and ejected its offering of regurgitated chips, chicken pieces, boiled potatoes – and, once, the entire carcass of a rat. The chicks gobbled everything.
Then, too soon, the elder chick parachuted on to the patio one day and vanished. For a fortnight, the parents attended to the remaining fledging on its bitumen runway, while it practised calisthenic stretches of leg and wing, in between jumping and flapping.
Now it too has landed on the patio. All we can do is wait.
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