It’s been a good week for … birdlife
There you are, sunning yourself on the beach, tartan blanket tightly wrapped around your goosepimpled shoulders and braced against the Scottish wind. It is summer after all. You reach for the Thermos flask and a limp egg sandwich garnished with sand … and down he swoops, shrieking terrifyingly. It’s that bloody gull again.
You surrender your sandwich.
But don’t be angry with your feathered enemy. Gulls aren’t bad. They’re just misunderstood.
So says Rebecca Lakin, a seabird researcher and conservationist from St Andrews University.
She is studying the impact of urban environments on young gulls and will compare the diet of "healthy" gulls on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth with the urban diet of birds in Aberdeen.
Unsurprisingly, it’s all our fault that gulls behave badly. Lakin believes that the human junk food they feast on makes them aggressive. The PhD student now aims to find out if living in the city is changing their behaviour.
Lakin explained: "I'm asking, does diet and the fact gulls feed off anthropogenic food sources, and high-fat, high-carb food like fish, bread and ice cream have an effect on the physiology and behaviour of gull chicks as they develop?"
"I do love gulls. I think they are a bit misunderstood. Yes, they like to steal our food and they can be quite aggressive. But the fact they are able to take advantage of every opportunity they can get is really interesting.”
Or some might say that gulls are just fly.
It’s been a bad week for … streetlife
Travellers in Oxford: do not adjust your satnavs. Confusion gripping the city is the result of a prankster who’s been flooding the streets with fake signs.
In the name of art, social media-inspired signage has been installed by a mystery man who wants to highlight the public’s obsession with online networking.
Signs like Facebook Row and Snapchat End have popped up, the handiwork of an artist who evidently has too much time on his hands.
He said: "There's a lot said about what is real and what's not on social media, and so these signs of mine kind of reflect that climate."
A council spokesman said they made the city "harder to navigate, particularly for those who do not have a smartphone". Such irony.
The artist has gone to great lengths to remain anonymous. Let’s just call him Pranksy.
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