Double Life – Seagulls

By Daniela Fubini*

One of the most puzzling things when I moved to Tel Aviv, finally at the sea level after my first, dry year in Jerusalem, was the fact that I could not hear nor see seagulls over the coast line.

Everything else was in place: the beach, the thin and bright sand; the umbrellas, more or less lined up with folding white plastic chairs to look into the blue water; the familiar sound of the low waves breaking into white foam right before reaching the sand.

Yes, the temperature of the water was alarmingly higher than the one I was used to in Northern Italy. And yes, the Israeli game of matkot, a simplified version of tennis in which nobody keeps track of the points, somewhat an oddity as well. But the most striking difference was that above us, there are really only skies, and if we see birds they are most definitely not white, no long wings and yellow beak, they don’t play graciously with the kind breeze making circles in the blue, and they don’t make the typical cry that resounds from far away onto the surface of the lagoon. Right, the lagoon is in Venice, Italy, and we are a few thousands of kilometers away, but this is still not enough of a good explanation for the disappearance of seagulls.

One theory is that bullies ravens took over their territory. Angry birds, those ones. They took over the whole city, actually, and one even dared peaking at my little niece’s head years ago. What a chutzpa.

But then, I changed jobs and moved my office hours to Ramat Aviv. There, over the high-end mall and the radical-chic neighborhood, I see seagulls spreading their wings and making the circles etcetera. I cannot hear their cry because they fly too high, but their profile in the wind is enough to make me feel at home, and chapeau to their choice of beach. They must be smarter than we think, and surely smarter than ravens.

*Daniela Fubini (Twitter @d_fubini) lives and writes in Tel Aviv, where she arrived in 2008 from Turin via New York.