S/V Spindrift

Four summers of hot dogs, and I still don’t know what this is

Editor’s note: I promised myself a break from writing this summer. But I had to drop this one in. Sarah and I spent the spring in France wondering the same thing we wonder every year: would Ben still be there when we got back? He was. He’s always there. And somewhere in the last four years we started calling that a relationship without ever checking if the word actually fits. So here’s what I’m asking you, reading this: is it a relationship? Or are we just being taken for a ride by a bird?

He’s back — sitting on the railing of our back deck, exactly where we left him, four summers running now, eyeing us like we were family. Four years, and I still can’t tell you what he thinks of us. I keep buying him hot dogs anyway, and feeding him every morning and evening.

His name is Ben. Named after a friend of mine — I’m not saying why, he might read this. Ben is a laughing gull: black head, sweet attentive eyes that are entirely fraudulent, and the personality of a NYC parking attendant.

The morning. He’s on the rail before we’re properly awake, watching Sarah with the coffee pot like he’s part of the routine. Then he’s gone — Sarah’s theory is a nesting spot somewhere on the island — and back again by evening, same rail, same spot, like clockwork. Is that loyalty, or just a bird with a good memory for a schedule? In a person, it’s usually the second one, and nobody holds it against him. Ben’s never had to explain which it is.

The pool. He ignores the bay and swims laps in our pool instead, then climbs out and does yoga on the coping — one wing and leg extended, then the other, then twenty minutes on one foot with his eyes shut. Swimming, stretching, lunch delivered. At some point you stop pretending this is a house and admit you’re running a spa. None of this tells me anything about how he feels about us. It might just mean the pool’s heated, filled with sweet water, and he’s noticed.

We found him four summers ago under the paddle board with a sprained wing, not broken. We fed him all summer out of nothing more complicated than not wanting to watch a bird die on our dock. He was very grateful. He also displayed considerable appetite. Four years later I still haven’t sorted out how much of one was actually the other. He’s been back every June since, identifiable at ten yards by the droopy wing and a deformed foot — the only gull on this island with a limp.

The mussel. Last summer Ben showed up with a live mussel clamped to his foot, and came straight up onto the rail with it — closer than he usually bothers to get — like he was telling us he needed help. I have no theory for the mussel itself; forty-one years at Marsh & McLennan and I still can’t construct the sequence of events that ends with a mussel winning a fight against a bird. When it finally let go, he was limping worse than before, so I checked the internet, went through the medicine cabinet, estimated his body weight by looking at him from across the yard, shaved a fraction off an old meloxicam pill with a kitchen knife, and put it in a hot dog. Turns out meloxicam is the one anti-inflammatory that’s actually safe for birds — it’s what conservationists switched to after diclofenac wiped out the vultures in South Asia, which is at least what the internet told me before I fed it to a wild animal. I had a hot dog and a hunch, both slightly better informed than usual. Hannah, who is training to do this properly, yelled at me for a very long time anyway. She was right. Maybe next time I call a rehabber. He comes that close every single day for a hot dog, mussel or no mussel — I’ve just never had a mussel to check it against before.

The kids. In July Ben turned up with two chicks. The are enormous, mottled, and screaming continuously add that to Ben’s sunrise scream and wow. The only thing that shuts them up is a hot dog each, same as it used to work on Hannah and Samantha, which is a parenting lesson I’m not going to chase down. Laughing gulls breed at three, two chicks a year. Yes, I had to I run the numbers, and by 2033 there are fifty-plus gulls on this dock, all descended from one bird who couldn’t fly, all eating hot dogs I buy. Sarah checked my arithmetic. She thinks seventy-five. She’s also started asking why it’s always Ben out there with the two chicks and never anyone else. Where’s Mom? I don’t have an answer. I can say there is no doubt we have the right pronoun for Ben since we have seen him in action and maybe saw Mrs. Ben that one time.

Sarah lit up that first morning, the way she gets when one of the girls brings her friends over. I noticed it and didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t sure what to do with it. A bird doesn’t introduce you to his kids. A bird that’s found a reliable calorie source brings the kids to the calorie source, because that’s where the food is. Both of those are the same event, seen from the dock. Which one we actually watched depends on who’s telling it.

Hannah’s friend Jordan watched ten minutes of the operation this summer, babies whining, Ben screaming, me back in the kitchen fetching hot dogs at the demand of a bird and said, not unkindly, “Maybe if you stopped feeding them they’d stop coming by.” She’s completely right. Yeah. Nobody is going to do that.

I’ve started to think every one of these could mean three different things, and I can’t tell which. Something, in human terms; loyalty, gratitude, whatever we’d call it if a person did it. Something else entirely, if you think like a gull instead of translating him into one of us. Or nothing, just a bird doing what benefits a bird, and me supplying the rest of the meaning because the alternative is admitting I’ve spent four years and a small fortune in hot dogs on a creature that’s never once had to care whether I existed.

Jordan’s probably closest to right. Stop feeding him, he stops coming. That’s the whole relationship once you strip out the story I’ve been telling about it. It isn’t nothing, reliability counts for something even when it only runs one direction but it isn’t what I’ve been calling it, either.

Except there’s Sarah’s face the morning he brought the kids, which I still don’t have anywhere to put. And there’s a bird who came right up onto the rail with an injured foot instead of keeping his distance, like he wanted something done about it. Maybe that’s the closest thing to asking for help a gull has. Maybe he just wanted the hot dog, same as any other day, and the foot was incidental. Either way, he came to us instead of riding it out somewhere else on the island, and that’s the part I keep turning over.

He was on the rail again this morning, same wait. Sarah made the coffee. I stood at the window and watched him watch her. Whatever this is, all three of us are still doing it.

There’s a version of this experiment we could run on ourselves. Stop feeding Hannah and Samantha and every friend of theirs who’s ever turned up around lunch or dinnertime and see who still comes by. But we’ve never run that test, not once in twenty years, because it never occurred to us to doubt them. We’ve never doubted the girls, and we’ve never doubted their friends either. So why does Ben have to earn it?

The question I started with — what is this — I still can’t answer. Loyalty, habit, a very patient con: maybe it’s some of each, depending on the day you ask me. But he keeps coming back, and so do we. I’d rather be kind, and I am going to stop doubting Ben.

PS. Many thanks to a local LBI artist, Kathryn Colao, for a wonderful painting of Ben. Thanks, Kathryn! Painting below.