After over a month of living in our back garden, “Fluffy” the herring gull chick has moved on.
This afternoon, a woman from the Scottish SPCA and I chased Fluffy around the yard until she could catch him. She gently put him into a travel-kennel, and took him away in her van to a shelter, where I’m told he’ll be put with other chicks to learn how to be a gull, grow flight feathers, and then be released into the wild.
Since we got back from Canada, we’ve been feeding him moistened cat food (the meal-worms were a one-off treat we didn’t want to buy more of). His mother seemed to stop feeding him, and he just wasn’t thriving like the other juvenile gulls around town, who are already flying. Instead, he was just this sad creature walking around the yard, making constant little whistly peeps.
And what sucks we are: Craig got teary this morning when he said goodbye to it from the back door, and I was the same after the bird was gone. I didn’t think I had it in me to be a parent, but given how attached I’ve become to this little dinosaur that’s done nothing but squeak, eat, and shit in my back garden for weeks, maybe there’s hope.
Post script: We visited Fluffy at the shelter. He’d lost his fluff, and was looking a bit vulture-ish. The nice lady there said they’d been feeding him and givinghim a daily bath, and they were going to release him at the beach in another week or so.
Attaboy!
