The Flying Rats

Think of seagulls and an elysian vision of a graceful white dart set against a seaside blue sky surely springs to mind. Or you may hear their distant cry as a soundtrack to an imaginary desert island with undisturbed perfect golden sand.

Snap out of it. Wake up and smell the guano, because no amount of misty-eyed shoreline romance will help when gulls move in. One minute they’re wheeling through the sky, sunlight through their wings, next thing you know, they’re squabbling on your kitchen roof with their repertoire of noise and avian antagonism. That’s when you find out that living cheek-by-beak with gulls is like living in a colony of sociopathic pterodactyls.

Pushed a long way from idyllic, barefoot beach fantasy by their prehistoric mewling, animal aggression and the more or less constant aura of rotting fish, it becomes a battle of nerves to recapture the kitchen roof.

Forced into territorial dispute with them every time they catch sight of you in your own home, it won’t be long until you are imbued with prehistoric mewling and animal aggression yourself. You turn into your enemy, you become the foe. Just try not to take it too far and avoid regurgitating raw fish down the throat of your youngest child.

Graceful, poised sky-based shit machine.

It’s the brain skewering noise that’s worst. Gulls sound great from a distance, the perfect embodiment of seaside lazy days spent sundrenched and woozy on a golden beach. At anything nearer than ten yards all that changes. At close quarters, it’s like having an ambulance siren fitted to your nasal cavity. The head tossing clarion cry isn’t the only noise they make. There’s a collection of self-satisfied asthmatic cackles and some conversational broody whines. The young issue infrasonic nose-whistles until you threaten to bury them under a plate of cold wet mash, after which they hide under one of their parents and continue.

For further evidence for The Attack, look no further than their alleged grace and beauty. Nothing that shits that much is either graceful or beautiful, but that’s not their only aesthetic problem. Grace can be further ruled out on account of the extraordinarily ungainly act of gull love.

It’s an ugly, brutal-looking affair and not exactly romantic but, then again, when did your partner last get home from work with a throat full of partially digested fish to share? It’s not like either of them have any redeeming features to call upon. So, no romance, but what they lack in quality is made up for by the sheer quantity of fluids being exchanged. There’s enough rooftop avian fornication about to make a strong case that we live in a renaissance painting of the End Times.

The final piece of evidence concerns the outcome of the rooftop sex: rooftop chicks. While fluffy and endearing at first, they eventually turn into the cold-eyed, hook-beaked airborne vermin that they must.

It takes three years for the nose-whistling, gawky cuddleplump with the enormous feet to achieve the full dubious promise of its genetic code, but it makes a swift start. Within weeks it’s first wary attempt at flight will end in your garden where it will stay for several days, unable to leave and whining for food like an abandoned teenager. Any attempt to rescue, feed or encourage it to fly by chasing it around the garden with a stick will result in a blitzreig of unparalleled ferocity and guano.

It will leave eventually and earn its wings. You can expect to see it until winter where it will squeak at every passing adult hoping to score a tasty spot of fishsick. Ultimately, it will graduate into a graceful white dart calling plaintively in a beautiful blue sky. And then it will come to live on your kitchen roof, where it will fuck like a dinosaur while the contents of its bowels corrode your gutters.

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