Boy Meets Gull
A few months ago, every time I looked out the window at work, seagulls were having sex on the roof across the street. Seagull lovemaking is not pretty. I may not be a good lover, but I AM more suave than a male seagull.
From my office I can see Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains behind it, but our building is seven blocks up a city hill from the water, so I also see the parking garage roof and the adjacent apartment building roof across the street, where the seagull nasty went down. I guess waterfront rent has forced the seagulls uptown.
Soon after all the awkward sex, two gull couples started setting up nests - one on the parking garage roof (three stories up) and one on the apartment building roof (four stories up). I think the dad for both couples was the same guy - it’s hard to tell seagulls apart.
I can’t really see the apartment building nest because it’s behind a wall outside my direct view, but I know it’s there - apartment mom popped up from behind the wall every so often and looked around the city rooftops, like me when I should be working. I had a full view of garage mom as she set up shop, though. Garage mom and dad pulled moss from the corners of the roof and piled it against one part of the roof ledge wall. They’d come back from flying and dump something from their beaks onto the developing nest and push their chests on it to flatten it into shape. And after a while garage mom would park herself in the middle of the nest for long stretches.
It wasn’t a nice spot (it must have got damn hot in the sun, and the cars coming and going beneath must not have been comforting) but she made it hers. Every now and then she’d get up from her nest and limp around the roof while dad (or some other midwife gull?) sat on the eggs for her. They were doing what they were made to do, albeit in an unnatural setting.
One day I came back to my desk from lunch and saw a man on the garage roof with a shovel dumping the nest and its contents into a big trash bin that he’d dragged up there. Garage mom was flying in endless circles above him, watching him helplessly. I guess they clean the roof every now and then, and this was the time.
My first instinct was to slam on my window like Dustin Hoffman in the church at the end of The Graduate, but I didn’t do that because that would be crazy. I thought about running across the street and up through the garage to tell him - what? Instead I watched him shovel the last of the mossy nest into his bin and bring the bin down the roof door, down the stairs to the floor below, with garage mom still flying in a circle above, looking down at him until he closed the door and was gone.
Later that day, garage mom walked over to where her nest had been, cocking her head this way and that, as though the nest might appear if only she had the right angle. She walked around the space, looking here and there, here and there. I kept waiting for her to throw herself to the ground, wings spread in despair, sobbing uncontrollably, but that never happened. It doesn’t sound like anything when gulls cry, because gulls don’t cry.
The next day when I came in to work I looked out at the roof and garage mom was sitting right where the eggs had been, right there on the roof with no nest and no eggs. It was raining a little. I stared at her for a while, but something moving on the apartment building roof caught my eye. It was hard to see, because the apartment building roof is dark gray, but there were two small gray birds walking around the roof, and I saw that apartment mom was sitting on a ledge watching them. These were hers - baby gulls are dark gray. They walked awkwardly, hesitantly, and after a while they skittered back to where their nest must have been, outside of my direct view. I looked back at garage mom, still sitting in her spot, not moving.
The next day garage mom was gone. There are no new nests that I can see, so she has moved on. I still see a lot of gulls flying around the area, maybe one is her. Apartment mom’s babies are growing, becoming more confident, bigger and less gray. Yesterday they were both hopping around the roof flapping their wings, trying to learn how to fly.
