I raised my head slightly from my beach towel, where I lay sunning my back. I came nose-to-beak with a stunning seagull. The seagull seemed to be sizing me up; I wasn't quite sure for what.
I casually said, "Hello".
His eye remained fixed on me as he raised one leg and stretched it back while spreading out his wing on the same side. In yoga-ese, it was a half a Superman pose (though a bird hardly needed to pretend to be Superman).
"Jonathan, is that you?" I playfully asked.
He cocked his head, as if he was trying to figure something out. (Like maybe who this Jonathan was; I just assumed that “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” was famous amongst his kind).
I marveled at my own bravado, as closeness with birds is not something I have ever been comfortable with. But this feathery and gentle seeker was different; his eyes endeared me to him. They were black as coal, but perfectly rimmed with red, as if someone had carefully painted on eyeliner pencil. His head was white like cotton fluff and his long, pointed beak was a fiery orange dipped at the tip in black paint. His feathers, three tones of grey leading from white to black, were long and soft and perfectly appointed. I slowly reached for my camera, but even this careful movement disrupted our harmonious moment, and Jonathan flew off.
A short while later, as I spread out my picnic lunch of falafel, hummus and cut up veggies, he returned. With the lure of food, he risked coming ever closer. He circled and danced sideways, approaching and retreating - waiting, waiting. I watched with a fascination that I had never before experienced in the presence of birds (hard to be fascinated when one falls face down at the swoop of a feathered-fiend). Though he had gained my adoration, I could not part with even a morsel of my lunch. It wasn't just that I knew it would be wrong, creating an imbalance in native ecology, as the signs in the area warned, I was deeply afraid. Afraid as an infantryman might be at the sound of an air raid gun. The call of this seagull, had I chosen to feed him, would have brought the whole flock upon me, as though I were their target.
This time, as I pulled out my camera, my handsome seagull posed. And then, realizing that there was nothing else for us to share, he flew off again and blended in with the other scavengers on the beach, as if the moment had never happened.
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