For the Birds

There's a lot of weird wildlife going on in my town: from swarms of moths to massive murders of crows. This one's for Emily as it's about the birds...or maybe it's about Emily and it's for the birds.

Near the Furubira harbour, the ravens and the seagulls square off like rival gangs.

The seagulls lay claim to the sea and the port area, where the fishing vessels dock. Every day, what fishermen are left in this dwindling town set out onto the sea of Japan from west Furubira in their artfully weathered vessels. And they go with an aerial escort. Long wings of seagulls follow the boats out and perform winged wargames overhead as they compete for the right to the unwanted leftovers of the fishermen.

The ravens haunt the land-bound stretches of Furubira town, seeming to use the town graveyard as their capital. The image is so appropriate as to almost be cliché: the dark silhouettes of the ravens darting between the monolith stones of the haka, picking apart the offerings left for departed ancestors as if embittered about being denied the actual corpses.

However, beyond the town limits and up the flat valley that extends away from the sea, neither species dares to go. Here, wild, trilling cries decree the farmers’ fields to be property of the eagles.

Still, where land meets water—in that narrow strip of flat between the sloping, treed hills and the rolling swell of the sea—the gulls and the ravens overlap and vie for the marine scraps of this fishing village.

And they do well, the birds. Both the ravens and the seagulls in Furubira are someof the largest I’ve ever seen. PREHISTORIC big, they are, and there have been a fair few times that they’ve given me the heebie jeebies.

I can’t wait until this simmering avian cold war erupts. I’m expecting some all-out, bird-gang warfare: a birdy Battle of Britain in the skies over Furubira.