November 27th

a stack of gulls climb

shoot through grey rain ready skies

puncturing the clouds

November 20th

the bickering gulls

driven inland by cold coasts 

scream at each other

There are more gulls around this time of year, Bedfordshire is far from the coast, they come inland, more food, more fields, more pickings. I’m not sure if it’s more temperate, but perhaps it’s less blustery and bearable for them. They do make noise when they’re excited!

It’s mostly black headed gulls (who actually have white heads this time of year as it’s outside of breeding season), but you get the occasional herring gull too, slightly bigger, with the red spot on the beak which their young use as a target to peck at to get some more delicious regurgitated food.

Black headed gull (top) and Herring Gull illustrations from RSPB website.

June 9th

The marshland echoes

with the screams of the gull mob

a heron’s fish lost

We took an evening stroll along the beach, inland, behind the beach, over the high shingle slope, between Aldeburgh and Thorpeness is a wetland. We saw a heron, it had what looked like a fish in its beak. The gulls mustered and harried the hunter in mid air.

March 5th

Delightful furrows,

Buried treasures churned, unearthed,

Worms for leaping gulls.

 

Went for another run today, I’m so unfit it was exciting to get under 10m per mile pace! Still, I did run 3.5miles, but plenty of room for improvement. One of the fields adjoining the moor had recently been ploughed. Birds were congregated, getting a good feed of all the turned over detritus. Mostly it was crows and gulls, probably the most bullish of the avians, keeping the smaller birds at bay.

The photo below isn’t actually of that particular field, but it is one in the locale, Pegsdon Hills, I took it a couple of weeks ago, I like the way the plough marks the soil, especially on corners.

I’m working on a longer poem on this theme, which will appear on my other blog at some point in the near future.