Thumbs down to thieving seagulls

Eating on the hoof can often land you in trouble.
This is what happened to Molly who works for our accountants, Censis. As she began tucking into a juicy chicken wrap that she had just bought for her lunch break, she had the fright of her life.

She was walking down the ramp in the town centre, when a voracious seagull swiftly swooped down on her tasty treat. The cheeky bird grabbed the sandwich from Molly’s hand, catching her thumb with its sharp beak and slapping her in the face with its outstretched wings before flying away to enjoy its stolen lunch. 

Molly returned to the office in Church Street, hungry, shocked, and bleeding. 

We have all heard or read incredible stories of seagull attacks but it is only when it happens to you that they really hit home.

During my student days, I worked on a ship during my summer holidays. The Greek rusty nail I had joined in Piraeus, was sailing down the Indian Ocean towards Madagascar when an exhausted seagull landed on deck. Michali, the jovial cook felt sorry for the bird and led it to the galley for a restorative feast of bread and water. I picked a lump of bread and presented it to the hungry bird. It grabbed the bread and some of my fingers in its vice-like beak. Thoroughly shocked, I quickly withdrew my hand, checked it for cuts and was relieved that the bird must have been too tired to take a good bite out of me. Since then, I have been very wary of this flying menace. 

A couple of days after Molly had told me of her terrifying encounter, I was walking along Seaton Carew promenade and noticed the new bins, warning day-trippers not to feed seagulls. The message is lost on some, as they keep throwing their unfinished fish and chips at the rapacious birds.

This episode reminds me of a daft Saturday night in the nineties. At the end of a very sweaty service in my Seaton Carew Krimo’s kitchen on one of the warmest days of the year, I, along with the young chefs headed down the beach for a cool dip in the sea. As we splashed, paddled and laughed in all our chefs’ whites, a seagull dived on Andrew, one of our trainee chefs, having mistaken him for a struggling fish. He was not injured but the incident has remained in Krimo’s chronicles ever since.