Quality | 2009.08.24
To kill a squawking bird | Ariane Sherine
Seagulls are immune from official noise pollution procedures. I\'ll just have to get a gun
For the past three weeks, I have been woken up every day at 5am by seagulls . As I live in central London, this is a bit like being nuzzled awake by polar bears when you live in the Gobi desert. There is no reason whatsoever for the seagulls to be here, unless they\'re the stupidest, most short-sighted seagulls ever and have mistaken the Regent\'s Canal for the sea. And if they\'re that daft, why could they not accidentally brain themselves on some windows, instead of disrupting my sleep at precisely the same time each morning, like some kind of insane RSPB-sponsored speaking clock?
"Aark aark aark!" This is not the dulcet, mellifluous tweet of your everyday garden bird. It is the sharp, deathly battle cry of a desperate breed, which roughly translates as, "Where the hell is the sea?" It slices through windows, through blinds and through hugely attractive yellow foam earplugs; I have begun to have nightmares about being trapped in the final scenes of a Daphne du Maurier novel. After nearly a month of their pleas for directions, I am prepared to surrender my dazed, sleep-deprived body to the birds, on the sole condition that they peck out my eardrums first.
There is no alternative. I can\'t call the council: "Yeah, hi, I\'m calling to report some noise pollution."
"What exactly seems to be the problem?"
"There are birds screeching."
"Which flat do these women live in?"
"No, they\'re seagulls. They just live in the air, I think."
"So we can\'t send them a noise pollution letter?"
"Not unless you use a carrier pigeon."
You can\'t contact a seagull\'s landlord, threaten to withhold its tenancy deposit or issue it with a court summons. Seagulls are, somewhat unfairly, immune from the whole noise pollution procedure. Worse, the council might think I\'m imagining them, like my friend who, when I revealed the whole ornithological nightmare to him, laughed and promised, "There are no seagulls in London! Maybe you dreamt them."
He kept up this line of explanation until a seagull began to shriek, "Aark" in the background of the phone call, at which point he accused me of having bought a seagull noise generator to back up my lie.
Human beings are not proving helpful allies, and it\'s not as though you can reason with a seagull: "Look, Mr or Ms Gull, I\'m sure we can come to some kind of deal. If you stop emitting that wretched cacophony, I\'ll furnish you with literature and arts featuring the most eminent members of your species. For instance, here\'s your colleague Jonathan Livingston, here\'s Gull-iver\'s Travels (I admit that I\'m scraping the barrel a bit with that one), and here\'s a nice Chekhov play. No? OK, if you\'d prefer something more mainstream, what about an action movie starring Steven Seagul?"
How on earth can a bird get lost? Shouldn\'t its inbuilt evolutionary radar systems stop disorientation? If I thought the gulls were clever enough to read it, I would be prepared to soil the front of my home with a large map of Britain, featuring an arrow and the words "To the coast".
Food is doubtless what they\'re after, and they\'ve flown inland to scavenge from rubbish tips, preferring to feast on dead Marks & Spencer fish heads than dip into the sea for a tasty live snack. Let\'s get this straight: they would rather fly hundreds of miles to forage in wheelie bins full of swine flu-laden tissues, hoping to pick up scraps, than take a more natural and leisurely stroll for lunch. Frankly, they are perverts.
They are seagulls, not land gulls, and must be guided back to their natural environment. To encourage them to return, the next time I am noisily roused I shall play them a mixed tape featuring Suede\'s By The Sea, Duran Duran\'s To The Shore, or anything by Everything but the Gull.
Maybe I\'ll also provide an inspirational voiceover: "You can do it, birdbrain. ET went home, and he had a lot further to travel. R Kelly believed he could fly, and he was making an even worse noise than you at the time."
No, there\'s only one thing for it: I\'ll have to invest in a gun. It remains to be seen which one of us it\'ll take out first.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]s-birds-london-noise-pollution
