A wee bit about birdwatching

I'm not sure when I first became aware he was there. On the recent hot nights the open window had let in even more than usual of the raucous squawking and high thin keening of the gulls, enough to disturb sleep and cause grumpy, swearword muttering, turning and adjusting of sheets. I've been watching him for maybe a week or slightly more, a fledgling herring gull, clumsy in his first attempts to fly, his whole world the roof of the tenement opposite mine.

Over this time I've become attuned to his voice, his repetitive calls for food as persuasive as those of a human child. I've seen one or other of his parents respond to his cries and to his strange head-bobbing dance with regurgitated chips and kebab meat, human rubbish forming the staple diet of the urban seabird.

Herring gulls are reportedly in decline in their natural habitat of coastal cliffs and have been accorded a 'red' conservation status by the RSPB. Yet they are so ubiquitous in our towns and cities that they are considered a pest by many. As an omnivorous scavenger they are perfectly suited to living off the waste our society produces, and the landscape of high flats and tenements forms a not bad approximation of the habitat they evolved to live in.

Watching this gull as night and a light rain falls, his form silhouetted against the darkening sky, the flats across the road are transformed into a sea-cliff. The short, dead end street I live on becomes a sheltered cove of the sort that invariably brought thoughts of smugglers to my mind as a child. The broken down fridge, discarded digi-box and mess of plastic bottles and old video tape that fills the corner against the wall are so much flotsam and jetsam left behind by the tide.

At first he flapped a bit to no real purpose, or used his wings for frantic balance as he stumbled down the slates after a morsel of food. After a few days I began to see him manage short flights, a couple of metres at best, across the rooftop where he was born. These flights were hilarious, almost tragically lacking in the grace with which an adult gull can hang in the wind, or swoop and glide high above the city streets.

I would love to have photographed all this, to have a permanent record of so much fascinating animal behaviour, but I couldn't get past the idea of the neighbours seeing me leaning out my window with a camera and telephoto lens.

When I got home from work today, I have to admit, I went straight to the window to look for him. There was no sign, not a bird in sight. I can only assume his slaptstick attempts at aviation have graduated into real flight. In my minds eye he glides out along the Clyde, out past Ailsa Craig and Arran, to the Atlantic.