Live Free: Hangry Birds

Mike loses a cheeseburger to a seagull, and watches in horror as a beachgoer has her chicken sandwich stolen by another winged thief

I try not to hold grudges, but I can think of one that I just can’t seem to shake. 

It’s not good to harbor resentment for long stretches of time. At some point, you need to forgive, if not forget, for your own sake. Recognize those feelings, sit with them for a bit, and then let them go.

I thought I had made peace with a long ago trespass, the theft of something precious, something that at the time seemed more dear to me than anything I had ever possessed.

Half of a Burger King cheeseburger.

And it was mine, mine, mine!

I don’t remember what the thief looked like. Was it all white or were its wings spotted with black, as if it had just escaped an oil slick. 

After all, it happened so fast. One moment I was enjoying a skimpy charbroiled burger, and the next I was cursing all of God’s crea-tion, at least the scavengers.

When the giant bird swooped into my personal space, invading my little world of quilted beach blankets and Tommy Bahama chairs, I felt an emotion I had never experienced before.

“You must have been hangry!”

That’s it!

I had been retelling my tale of fast-food deprivation to a fellow beachgoer at Jenness State Beach in Rye as a show of solidarity. She had just experienced a similar episode, except her loss wasn’t some crappy bargain-menu item. It was a homemade chicken sandwich, well at least half of one.

She had made the same mistake as me: Creating too much distance between her mouth and her outstretched hand, a rookie move on a crowded beach where seagulls on the surface screech signals to their comrades in the air, directing them to the easy pickings.

After a few minutes of telling her about what had happened to me some 30 years ago 1,500 miles away in South Florida, I realized I was stealing her seagull spotlight and making it too much about mine. 

As I retreated to our umbrella, I could hear her doing a play-by-play for her friends, assembling the pieces of the story she would be cursed to recount for the rest of her days to anyone willing to listen.

“Some guy next to us said one of them once stole his cheeseburger!” she’ll tell her grandchildren someday, exaggerating my theft by half.

Later, while walking along the shore with my wife, we watched dozens of gulls gathered along the shore, doing what nature programmed them to do until humans disrupted their evolution by tempting them with junk food. They pecked away for crabs, shellfish and whatever else they could scrounge up as air bubbles popped up along the hard-packed sand.

I wondered if they would have been hap-pier tearing into a bag of Doritos.

I guess I’m not hangry anymore.