A penny for your thoughts, I’m saying to a Pacific gull. I’m intrigued. I’ve watched this lone gull for months. I can’t make him out. Where he comes from, where he goes? All I know is that every time I go to the Waterworks Reserve, I see him basking in the sun on an embankment overlooking one of the twin reservoirs.
At first, in the early days, I thought the Pacific gull might be sick or injured. But he always looked in great shape, crisp-white plumage which he obviously took great pride in preening. When he wasn’t basking in the sun, eyes half closed, he’d be running his bill though his feathers, plucking out the tattered and torn.
Such self-assurance, such cool. The gull became an obsession. I began to seek him out daily. A day in the life of a gull, I wanted to know his secrets. What does a gull think, does a gull dream, have ambitions to fly to far-off places, a crab-laden heaven? And where does a gull, this gull, find his motivation; there’s more to life than sitting on a grassy embankment all day, even for a gull.
Two species of gull are found at the Waterworks, Pacific and kelp. The kelp gulls are the ones that group in their hundreds, out on the waters of the reservoirs. The Pacifics are less common, only grouping in twos and threes, and usually on the grass banks and not on the water.
The Pacific gull in my sights certainly keeps himself to himself, even keeping his distance from others of the species. Does he have a mate and off-spring? I ask myself, thinking at times he looks lonely and adrift. But lonely he is not, judging by his look of contentment, blinking into the harsh sun before another bout of preening.
Once another Pacific gull came to call. A juvenile in chocolate-brown plumage. A prodigal son arriving to give dad an update, a wayward daughter returning home?
I deduce the gull is male because of his large size, and bigger beak. Females are smaller.
I look at the gull and some days he looks at me, curiously. Is he thinking, as I think of him: who is the creature who turns up at the same time each day to stand and stare? Where does he come from, where does he go? Does he dream, of far-flung places with palm trees and a beach of white sand?
Does this gull feel a connection, as I do on my solitary rambles? Millions of years might separate our evolution but we are still flesh and blood with a brain, both on the remarkable journey we know as life.
The gull blinks as he looks at me and I know what he is thinking: happy flight, may the wind be with you.