Jackdaw, Learning to Stay: Fight or Flight

Yesterday, I fought a gull for a slice of pizza.

Personally, I think this is an important piece of information about me. It says a lot about my personality and life choices.

I had bought the pizza on an extremely hot day (which is to say, about 25°C but really sunny and near the beach), from a street vendor I had been eyeing up for a while. I hadn't eaten that day; even when approaching sunstroke, nothing in that moment looked better than a rustic home-made pepper, rocket, and olive pizza made fresh before my eyes in a genuine wood oven.
Before me in the queue was a hippie with a rucksack covered with VOTE LABOUR badges, and while this isn't strictly relevant to the gull story, it's something of a small story within itself so it felt important.

It was a damn good pizza. I was with a friend, and we sat on the steps around the fountains in the city centre to eat our respective lunches; there were quite a few people around eating, and there were also a great number of gulls and jackdaws. I regularly go to the park behind the campus to feed the various animals (again, a whole other story for another time) and I have a soft spot for corvids, but with the gulls around this was clearly not the time.

All around, as they will do, gulls were swooping on unsuspecting innocents to snatch food from their hands and scream in their faces. And everyone they dived at screamed and tossed their food away, in some cases going so far as to run shrieking in the opposite direction, leaving their remaining lunches to be devoured.
Here's the thing about gulls: they aren't smart, and they aren't evil. But they do have the same ability to learn a behaviour if it's repeatedly reinforced as most other animals, and they do have an innate lack of fear of humans. So, over generations, we have trained the gulls of Britain (and probably the world) to attack us for our food, because when by chance gulls happen to swoop down on people and snatch at their food, 19/20 times the person screams and throws the food. The gull learns that the swoop and shriek gets food, so it keeps doing it.

I will clarify now, I wasn't sat there thinking about that at the time. We were discussing exams or something. But a gull was walking behind us, eyeing up - I assumed, in my hubris - my friend's chips. We kept an eye on it, and kept talking and eating, when suddenly from the corner of my eye I saw the gull extend its wings and duck its head to attack.

I swung my pizza and opened my mouth to warn my friend - too late. The gull's goal had not been her chips: it had been my slice of pizza.

With an inglorious screech, the gull scrabbled over my friend's head and dived for the pizza.

My reaction was not, exactly, fear. Rather, it was that precursor to fear, that instinctual explosion of awareness that occurs in the "reptile brain" when something big and sharp comes directly for one's face.

And, as anyone who knows enough psychology to have already recognised positive reinforcement will understand, what happens when you get faced with that kind of sudden explosion of threat is an instantaneous, utterly instinctive decision: fight or flight.

And what my instincts said to do was to punch the gull.

One second I was sat watching a gull while talking to a friend, the next it was a screaming mess of feathers and beak in my face, and even before I had time to be afraid of it, my fist was coming out.

What this resulted in was the gull landing a quite significant bite on my thumb, and also managing to snatch the slice of pizza as it scrambled out of the way of my defence - but oh, I was not done.

I had been looking forward to that pizza. I had paid for that pizza. I'm doing an exam on Animal Behaviour in five days, and I understand positive reinforcement. So fuck you, bird, if you think that you are going to get away with my pizza.

I went for that bird. I went hard. I must apologise in retrospect to my friend; she had gone from talking to me, to being left to guard our food while I was on my feet, sprinting after a gull, bellowing for its blood. I should probably apologise to the nearby children as well, as while I can't remember precisely - it's all a red-filled blur of action and instinct, no logical decision-making involved - I'm pretty sure I shouted "BASTARD" at it at least once.

In a fight-or-flight battle in my instinctual brain, when faced with the loss of my pizza to a gull, my instincts chose to fight.

So the upshot of it was, a gull tried to snatch a slice of pizza from a student's hand, and rather than getting free pizza and a scream, it instead received an almost-punch, several attempted kicks, multiple expletives, and a chase around the fountains before, finally, it chose flight.

With another pitiful squawk, the gull dropped my pizza and took off.

Just to be stubborn, I grabbed the pizza and put it back in the box. "I'm not going to eat it," I clarified to the stunned public. "Just didn't want that bastard thinking he can have it."

Then, quite satisfied with my work defending my pizza from errant charadiiformes, I sat back down and continued, happily, to eat my remaining pizza.

It was only the next day that when I told this story, someone pointed out that fighting a gull for a slice of pizza was probably not... The most normal reaction for a person to have.

But that's what I do. My fight response is surprisingly prolific for someone who's 5'4" and has severe anxiety. I'm jumpy as hell, but my reaction is generally to punch the thing or person behind me; I have a distinct memory of being about six years old and told that if I wanted to sit shotgun, I would have to fight my brother (ten years my senior) for the honour, which resulted in six-ish me attempting to actually beat up sixteen-ish him.

So if you wanted to know one odd yet surprisingly revealing fact about me, it would probably be that when faced with letting a slice of pizza go and ducking to protect my face, or attempting to punch the offending bird and then chasing after it kicking and swearing...

Yep. I chose to fight for that pizza.

This is probably why it's not the best idea to attempt to jump-scare me.