On the wet, mud-matted-green of the bank: a mallard, a swan and two
pointy, monochrome things I always forget to look up. Their feet are fun
though: enormous, pallid leaves protruding from grey spindles. They’re
often kept submerged, so no-one gets too acquainted with their
strangeness. Following a flurry of quick penetrating chirps – one of the
nameless things announces a small terror, and like a tiny storm-cloud
flutters to the water below. It dives momentarily to escape the other –
who, following a curt pause, rushes after with unnerving, male certainty.
Together on the water they bob above and below, like two dark buoys.
Here at the bank the mallard’s eyes remain closed, set peacefully in
emerald and loosely feigning indifference. I imagine it humming a jaunty
tune to drown out the surrounding theatre. The swan though, sets herself
upright and bellows her wings, dusting off the remnants of the moment and
suddenly — I recall that girl who was expelled from university for killing
and eating a seagull. Did she trap, pluck and disembowel it I wonder? Or
take to all fours with glassy, feral eyes and stalk her prey? Were her
white teeth in white feathers sketched out by a bloody line?
Without a word of thought, my phone was in my hand, a rectangle of grey
sky reflected, I pass through a momentary fugue state, a blip, before
waking on the Wildlife and Countryside Act webpage. I had to know why this
act was so awful by the university’s assessment. If anything, was she not
resourceful? Frugal, even? Certainly this was a more human, maybe even
“humane” act than the realities of where any other students got their
meat. The truth was more tangled of course - seagulls, “in spite of their
reputation as pests” have experienced rapidly declining numbers. It is
illegal to harm and yes — kill them. Fuelled by some subconscious thesis,
I continue browsing. Each of my eyebrows encroaching upon the another, as
I discovered that 94% of all bird biomass on earth is made up of farmed
poultry.