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The pair of seagulls had for several years built their nest on top of the school's administration building, a barrack with a flat roof. Students, teachers, staff, everyone who passed by was marked with splashes and dives. Some percieved them as a jarring discomfort.
People were annoyed by the seagulls but the couple certainly had reason to be protective. Several years in a row, they had failed to nest, the eggs had been destroyed and the young were killed by cats, crows and uncomprehending pupils.
One day the administration barracks were removed, leaving only a concrete rectangle on the ground. Would there be any nesting this year? Indeed, they were back with a nest on the ground, right under the old spot on the roof. Against all odds, the chicks hatched and began to grow.
The adult birds guarded the nest with furious attacks against anyone who dared to step too close.
Now there were only a couple of days left until the speech day and students, parents and teachers would fill the yard. People could step on the nest. The young seagulls had already started tumbling around, but could they do it among all people ... If the pair of seagulls had made it this far, they shouldn't have to lose this brood too.
Down in the storage room we found a box and with a ladder we got it up on the roof of a small side building nearby. Some dry grass made a bed for the young. Meanwhile, the pair of seagulls flew around and dived and screeched if we got too close to the chicks.
Our box nest was ready, secured to the ceiling and a bed made. Now we had to move the kids up from ground. What follows is the reason why I tell this. The sky went silent, the seagulls showed no signs of attack, they just floated calmly about in circles while I took the chicks, carried them to the ladder, climbed up and put them in the box.
Of course we felt happy and proud that the seagulls showed us the trust to take care of the young, it felt a bit like being chosen. But how could they know what we were going to do with the kids? Their experience with people was not the best. Could they really have figured out that the box on the roof would be a nest for the cubs?
There is a lot to think about. Why did the seagulls build their nest in the same place year after year even though they failed every time? And why did they build the nest right under the place where the nest was as long as the administration barracks remained? Admittedly, seagulls often build their nests on the ground—an islet in the archipelago is one thing, but in a schoolyard?
In any case, the solution was successful. The end of school went without a problem and the following weeks the kids trotted around on the roof with the box and one day they had moved down to the ground. A week or so later I found them on an adjacent roof, two fledgling young gulls. Here they are in a picture taken with a stone age mobile.
What if I have misunderstood the reason for the behaviour of the seagull pair. The fact that they accepted me grabbing the cubs was actually because they had resigned, become apathetic, realized that another litter would be wasted? Either a couple of seagulls who understood our intentions or a couple of seagulls who had given up and saw that also this year's offspring was wasted.
There is also a third approach: to keep the question open. Can not say, do not know. Why always try to explain? Why not just be content with an experience as it is without taking it further.
All those ‘why's’ comes as a stream from the intellectual thinking that has the bad habit of question experiences like a jealous troll. I wanted to tell the story without explanations, just tell what happened. That's all. But at the same time the heart says that the seagulls knew we were helping them. Where intellect and the doubt it creates shapes distance, benevolent interpretation creates nearness and relations.
Can falsehood be that which alienates and divides; truth that which brings closer and unites given that both truth and lie is relative concepts.
By the way, how can we ever know what is behind a behaviour at all? We daily let our feelings react and interpret those we meet. Among friends we can speculate about others, what they do and why. Why shouldn't we be as free-spirited when it comes to animals?
Konrad Lorenz, Nobel laureate and one of the founders of the science of animal behavior (ethology), tells in The Year of the Graylag Goose about the courtship of the male Greylag goose:
When Lorenz wrote The Year of the Graylag Goose, it was at the end of the seventies and science had just begun to catch up with what many animal-interested amateurs had known for a long time. Animals, just like humans, have an individual soul, can grieve, rejoice, long, remember, show affection, take distance, and understand things that we can't comprehend.
Darwin had already said roughly the same in 1874. He saw evolution as smooth transitions, where characteristics fade in and out without abrupt leaps: “Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind” 2
How do you measure a consciousness? Where do you find a measure of what is contained in consciousness – emotions, fear, love – how do you measure the experience of a poem? At the beginning of the twentieth century, the representatives of psychology stood knocking at the gate of natural science, but without numbers, tables and statistical significances, they were not welcome in. They wanted recognition, at any price and sold their soul.
By regarding the psychic processes as if they took place in a ’black box’ they could be ignored but yet be observed by the actions they created. Actions could be measured and thus the door to the world of statistics opened. No need for dealing with what could be in that black box. Input/output, stimulus and response, gestures, bodily poses, sounds—definable, measurable, treatable in statistical analyses.
The spirit that prevailed during a large part of the twentieth century made it difficult even to breathe about animals having consciousness, at least for the researcher who intended to bet on an academic career. The dividing line between man and animal was solid. Therefore, it was unthinkable to use one's experiences as a human to understand animals. Emotions can be measured biochemically and described with numbers, but feelings are subjective and cannot be used in research. Therefore, it was not allowed to speak of an animal mourning or showing joy. Starting from human experiences to understand animals is called anthropomorphism and was a big no-no.
When Jane Goodall (one of the few, if not the only human ever accepted as a member of a chimpanzee herd) in the sixties began studying wild chimpanzees by living with them and told about the chimpanzees' individual personalities, she was met with great suspicion. Chimpanzees, monkeys, personality? The fact that she also gave the chimpanzees names instead of numbers did not make it any easier for the established science to accept her nor did the fact that she was a woman. Her observations, however, were so convincing and well documented that in the end she is reckoned worldwide as a well-respected authority.
Jane Goodall is one of the pioneers when it came to tearing down the artificial walls between the human animal and other animals. After all, man, along with gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans, is one of the great apes.
Unexpectedly, a weasel came into the workshop, I asked it to sit still and it did, long enough for me to fumble for the camera and take a picture.
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