Sandra’s Miscellany

I was paging through Dead Reckoning yesterday while working on a writing presentation I plan to give, and realized that I’d said nothing whatsoever about The Seagull Incident.

About 3-4 years ago, the dSO and I got up to find a Bonaparte’s Gull caught in fishing line here in the marina. The people in the fishing boat next to us admitted they were upset about it; their son had lost his hook and a wad of line the day before, and now they were bummed that a seagull had gotten caught in it. Fishing is prohibited in the marina for plenty of boat-related reasons, but it was, perhaps, inevitable that a seagull would be fooled into thinking the fishing line looked like food of some sort.

So the dSO and I got in the dinghy and rowed out to the seagull. From there, everything that happened in the book happened to the dSO and me, except I was the one holding the gull while he clipped the line from its body.

The gull felt weightless in my hand (the hand she wasn’t biting) and took off just as described — she held onto my finger with her beak until I released her feet, and then she simply spread her wings, opened her beak, and lifted up on the wind.

Good karma.