Vicarious revenge!

click photo to enlarge

Just as big fish eat little fish and muscle-bound bullies kick sand in the face of the ten stone weakling, it's always the little guy that seems to come off worse. You're about to drive your tiny Fiat 500 on to a roundabout when a 4X4 the size of a truck, all shiny chrome bull-bars, bristling with external lights and plastered with decals announcing its name - Rampage, Pillager, Half-Wits 'R' Us, or somesuch - barges in front of you, its boorish action the very epitome of the "might is right" doctrine. It's the same at the seaside. You throw the crusts from your sandwiches to the black-headed gulls and they delicately flutter down to hesitatingly snatch a morsel. But before the first one alights in come the herring gulls, slicing heedlessly through the smaller birds like fighter bombers, not landing at all, but sweeping up the food, swallowing it in one gulp, and wheeling round for a second pass. What is a little gull to do? Well, there's no point taking on the big bullies because they'll just flatten you. But if, as is the case at Southport, Lancashire, there's a big bronze statue on the promenade of a proud and haughty herring gull, you can go and crap on its head and get safe, vicarious revenge!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E500
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mm (300mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f11
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: N/A