young

It isn’t the first snap of the adult gull’s beak that breaks the neck of the young chick. It is not the second, third, or fourth closing that kills it. The chick flaps its mottled wings against the smooth white feathers of its attacker’s face, striking a frenzied rhythm, out of time. Mostly beating them against the air, gaining no ground, kicking an arc in the gravel with a stretched out limb, locked in panic, quivering towards paralysis. The parents look on, screaming disapproval: a smaller species watching the inevitable champion takes its prize. It is the fifth snap, a crunching click of the sharp beak between two tiny vertebrae, that severs the spinal cord of the young chick. The smooth white feathers now ruffled and red, wet with conquest. The parents of the young chick turn away; the male lowers his head and opens his beak, letting out a low call, long and resounding through the cove. I move on.