So, there I was, minding my own business, when the photographer came barrelling up and said he had a job for me. There's a turkey and cheese sandwich in it for you, too, he said, if you play your cards right.
It's a truth universally understood that Topics was sick the day they taught stranger danger at school, so a free lunch is the quickest way to get us in the back of the van shy of promising candy.
And that's how we ended up in the car and on the road quicker than the boss could say something like "Where's that story you promised me this morning?"
A few minutes later, my trigger-happy shutter shooter pulls into a park at Nobbys Beach and tells me to grab that bag from the back seat.
This was all starting to sound very Fear and Loathing, and I couldn't tell which one of us was Thompson and which was Dr Gonzo, but I'd already slipped the noose of the daily deadline, so I figured in for a penny.
What did you have in mind? I asked my captor.
Don't worry about it, he said. Here's your sandwich. Go and sit down over there.
Famous last words.
No sooner had the sandwich come out than the whole place turned into a scene from a Hitchcock film.
(That's right. BirdWatch 2024 is back, baby, and this time it's with a vengeance.)
They were everywhere. Seagulls so thick they all but blocked out the sky, and within moments, one of the thieving flockers had snatched the sandwich whole out of my very jaws.
Gulls are, of course, known for their bold and brazen thievery, so much so that they're colloquially known as the pirates of the seashore (according to some absolutely work-appropriate bird research that I did online), but it seems that with the spate of cooler and wet weather in the Hunter emptying the beaches, the Beaky Blinders are getting savage in their pursuit of a nibble.
Stories about thieving gulls are prevalent in almost every town on earth that's within stone's throw of the beach, and in recent years stories have raised questions over whether the feathered flocks are getting more aggressive.
The conventional wisdom seems to suggest that the gulls have become the terror of the shoreline in no small part because we have helped make them so. Generations of tossing the innocent and occasional chip the way of the squawking horde has gradually bred an urban ecosystem of birds who rely on high traffic human areas for a meal - and in gull terms, just because you paid for your hot chips doesn't mean they're yours.
In the bird world, it's survival of the fittest - or, in other words, what's mine is mine and what's yours is moine!
But it gets even better. The birds are cunning - and they're learning fast.
In 2023, researchers in the UK showed that seagulls can work out which scraps are worth stealing by watching what the humans were eating. When given a choice of chip packets to scavenge, gulls overwhelmingly went for the same colour bag that an experimenter was eating from as they filmed the encounters from several metres away, the Guardian reported last year.
Over the past few years, stories of mercenary birds carrying off dogs, attacking postal workers, and even causing a death by heart attack in 2022 have fascinated tabloids around the world, but the science seems to point to an already thieving species growing bolder by its increasing proximity to humans and their delicious and free sandwiches.
Perhaps it is that the weather has left the local sky rats desperate for a feed over the last couple of days. After snapping the photo, my shooter friend reckoned that he had never seen the birds so bold, even as they bustled around his boots looking for their next target. But the birds are also known to turn aggressive during the annual nesting season, which runs from roughly July to October, according to the professional-sounding outfit Bird Control Australia and a fact sheet produced by the Frankston City Council (I have a lot of time on my hands to research birds).
Interestingly, Birdlife Australia suggested late last year that reports of seagulls in south-east Queensland have dropped 60 per cent since the 1990s in what one spokesperson told the ABC could be an indicator that "we may have hit 'peak gull'". But such a tidbit is probably small comfort for anyone under siege on Nobbys as they read this (it didn't do me any good).
Still, the general advice seems to be that feeding the gulls is a good way to cause a frenzy and a nuisance.
When in doubt, this writer has learnt that sometimes it's better to find out what the deal is before you jump in the car. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
And that's some ironclad and useful life advice from the folks working hard on BirdWatch 2024. Once again, we are proving that we're a highly valuable asset to this organisation.
Until the next development in the case, stay in school kids.
