Where have all the seagulls gone?
The lockdown has only been going for just over a week but every last one of them has decamped from the river wall at Tower Bridge. Maybe they’ve followed the refuse barges down the river to the recycling plants at the Isle of Dogs or Greenwich.
They normally outnumber even the tourists at London’s third most photographed sight. Their trick is to have one seagull perch on the wall and pose for a tourist’s selfie while the others swoop down to nick the snapper’s sandwich or chips.
Seagulls, as the name implies, used to live at sea or by the coast. Now they’ve become the city’s principal feral menace, particularly since ex-mayor Ken Livingstone declared war on its pigeons in 2003.
At dawn, they are sometimes loud enough to wake you up as they scrap outside the window like a mob of Millwall fans. That’s our local, rough-and-tumble football team. Its fans are best known for fighting among themselves if they can’t get near the opposition, and for their slogan: “No one likes us, we don’t care!”
I once told the football-mad former Israeli foreign minister Silvan Shalom that it would be a great slogan for his country. He agreed. But that’s another story.
Meanwhile, back in feral London, the foxes also seem to have made themselves scarce. That said, I usually bump into them late at night on the way back from a drink with my wrinklie posse but currently the pubs are shut.
The fox will stand in the middle of the road or on the pavement and fix you with a “who do you think you’re looking at?” stare before then adopting a bored expression and wandering off.
The rats are presumably still around although you rarely see them. According to the urban myth, you are never more than six feet from a rat. Rodent expert Professor Rob Smith from Huddersfield University said it might derive from an old public heath announcement from the Ministry of Agriculture. A government department, promoting myths! Shocking!
Curiously, six feet is the recommended gap for social-distancing when you’re out for a walk these days. So, if you don’t know what six feet looks like, presumably you just imagine you’re looking for the nearest rat.
Give it time and other species might move in to replace London’s absent seagulls.
Over in Llandudno in north Wales, a herd of goats has moved in and is roaming the now deserted streets.
Abroad, gangs of wild turkeys have been spotted on the streets of Oakland, California and a puma broke the curfew in Santiago, Chile, to take to the streets.
Sadly, the story about drunken elephants staggering around in China, where the pandemic started, turns out to be a fake.
In London, Livingstone’s despised pigeons appear to be thriving. No one’s feeding them breadcrumbs these days, so they’ve taken to swarming along the river to forage away from the usual beaten track.
There’s a increasingly bold blackbird nesting on the rooftop opposite us but he hasn’t quite summoned up the courage yet to venture on to the kitchen balcony for scraps.
Idle Thoughts on London Walks 