FEED THE BIRDS

In retrospect, we should never have played “Feed the birds.”

I was at the beach with my daughters, sharing a big bag of Cheez-Its. I brought loads of other snacks; Oreos in a bag, a little bags of Frito, some potato chips. The girls said no one likes Fritos, but Fritos are my personal favorite. They may dislike them for the same reason I like them: you can most directly taste the oil soaking in each bite.

(We were in Asbury Park: the heralded Stone Pony was right across the street! Yes, I told the girls endless Legends of Springsteen stories.)

We went down to swim, and saw a mussel. Well, there were tens of thousands of mussels scattered, but we picked one up to look at its barnacles. We threw it to a seagull, who dropped it a few times, as if a two-inch fall into sand would split it open. Then another seagull stole it.

But that, I think had been a mistake.

We watched one guy feed one seagull one pretzel. Within a minute a dozen seagulls from at least three different species were around him. Most people don’t give the rats with wings food. This guy did, and all the seagulls noticed. He became a mark. I think he did it to get them close: he started taking loads of close-up pictures with his phone.

That guy had fed the birds.

And by giving one of 10,000 mussels on the beach to one seagull, we’d fed the birds, too.

Three different seagull species. The smallest of them have beautiful driftwood-brown coloring. then there are the trash-eating standard seagulls, disturbingly big. And then there’s Big Billy Feathers. He was a herring gull, twice the size of the regular seagulls, and there was only one of him. I’ve got no idea if he was technically a Pteranodon.

Big Billy Feathers was the king of the beach: he walked right up to towels while people were on them, uncowed by people trying to chase him off. To be that big and have a bird metabolism means he probably ate a seals’ worth of fish every day.

Holly played a song for Sylvia, a bad version of “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins. it was song well — “the riffs are clean,” Holly said — but vocal melisma is not normally added a song about a lonely old woman feeding birds. This isn’t the national anthem.

Anyway, that was two strikes against us: we’d both fed the birds and PLAYED THE SONG “Feed the Birds.”

While the girls were swimming, Big Billy Feathers came by, unafraid, and pecked at our towel.

All our food was by me, not the towel, and he didn’t make a move for it.

But he remembered.

An hour later, we went to the boardwalk to get ice cream. They had both Superman and Batman ice cream: I’d have Superman before (three fruit flavors, in a red/blue/yellow swirl) not never seen Batman before. Batman is chocolate with chocolate chips and fudge pieces. Well, they say Gotham City is in New Jersey.

As we walked back — hard to walk in sand, harder to run — I saw that our chairs seemed to be…lively.

I took off running, best I could in the sand. Chased away the dozen seagulls who’d been pecking into one of the bags of potato chips. They moved, but only ten feet away. Then watched with pride.

Sandy potato chips were everywhere, and the bag had narrow poked slits in them.

Big Billy Feathers and his gang had robbed us.

“We tried to chase them away, but they wouldn’t go,” our neighbors said. “They got everything.”

Everything? I only saw the small bag of chips ripped into, an acceptable loss.

Then I looked for the Oreos.

Found a shredded bag with just crumbs inside.

Looked for the 24-ounce bag of Cheez-Its.

Gone.

Wait, weren’t there two potato chip bags. The other was demolished.

The only thing left untouched? The Fritos.

“Even the seagulls don’t like them,” my daughters said.

From 15 feet away, Big Billy Feathers roosted, like the T-Rex at the end of Jurassic Park.

Seagulls, stop it now!

SPIDER-MAN OF THE WEEK
Imperfect replicas week!

Spooder-Man!

PRINCESS LEIA OF THE WEEK

An action figures nicknamed Monkey Leia

MICKEY MOUSE OF THE WEEK

An image from the 1930s Laural and Hardy film Babes in Toyland. They made the first live-action Mickey Mouse by dressing a monkey in a Mickey costume. You don’t want to see this thing move, trust me.

SUPER MARIO OF THE WEEK

This is what Mario looked like from the brief Donkey Kong segments of the 1980s Saturday Supercade cartoon. Mario looks like he could be a Willy Wonka deliveryman.