Mike

Ball

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October 1, 2007

We All Try Not To Step In the Metaphor Droppings

I recently swapped a trumpet that I haven’t played in nearly 40 years for a used guitar. This guitar is a sturdy, no-frills, great-sounding thumper that will be perfect for taking out on the boat or tossing in the luggage rack of an airplane. The brand, a respected Canadian make that will be familiar to most serious guitarists, is Seagull.

OK, here’s where it gets funny. Sort of. I hate seagulls.

I should point out that I was in college in 1970, and like every other philosophy-addled undergrad of the time, I read Richard Bach’s “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” with slack-jawed fascination. I was so taken by the lone soaring bird as an allegory for life and aspiration that I had a seagull as part of the logo for my company for more than 25 years.

And then I moved to the lake, where I discovered why the very nicest thing lake dwellers ever call seagulls is “rats with wings.”

It turns out that a single 14-ounce seagull can, in a single day, produce something like 43,560.17 square feet of seagull poo. It also turns out that each of these precious little feathered metaphors considers it a personal mission to spread their acre of excrement all over my stuff.

There is something chemically unique about seagull poo. When it’s fresh, it sports a consistency and odor that could nauseate a maggot. It also contains a bonding agent stronger than the NRA’s love of carnage, since you can’t blast the stuff off a canopy with a power washer.

I have to admit that cleaning up after the gulls usually turns out to be a fairly interesting biology experiment. Since seagulls will eat pretty much anything (including Doritos, ice cream cones, stray jewelry and smaller seagulls), they tend to leave behind a fascinating crapalistic record. The occasional wad of pooped-out bones from some unfortunate little seagull brother or sister stands as mute testimony to the struggle for survival between nature and our feathered feces-flingers.

I also have to admit that the things we come up with in our attempts to keep the seagulls away from our stuff have often been pretty entertaining. We’ve tried cutting pie tins into strips and hanging them about like some sort of demented tinsel. We’ve tried fiber-optic geysers sprouting at intervals from canopies. We’ve tried brightly colored pinwheels.

My favorite is the Fake Owl, which actually does work – for about a week. The gulls are a good deal smarter than me on this one, because after two years I still find myself grabbing the binoculars and calling the neighbors to see the owl sitting on my hoist.

So by now I’ve pretty much given up on all of the passive poo-bird repulsion methods. These days, any time I look out and see the dock, boats and hoists covered with a layer or two of seagulls, I just grab two boards and run down the dock, screaming and clapping the boards together. This does make them take off, in a cloud of fowl-smelling feathers and digested Doritos. And they stay away, at least for a few minutes.

I think even rats with wings know enough to keep their distance from a crazy man.

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