Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest
facts of flight — how to get from shore to food and back again.
For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this
gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More
than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.
This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make
one’s self popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds
of low-level glides, experimenting.
He didn’t know why, for instance, but when he flew at altitudes less than half his wingspan above the water, he could stay
in the air longer, with less effort. His glides ended not with the
usual feet-down splash into the sea, but with a long flat wake
as he touched the surface with his feet tightly streamlined
against his body. When he began sliding in to feet-up landings
on the beach, then pacing the length of his slide in the sand,
his parents were very much dismayed indeed.
“Why, Jon, why?” his mother asked. “Why is it so hard to be
like the rest of the flock, Jon? Why can’t you leave low flying
to the pelicans, the albatross? Why don’t you eat? Jon, you’re
bone and feathers!”
“I don’t mind being bone and feathers, Mum. I just want to
know what I can do in the air and what I can’t, that’s all. I just
want to know.”
“See here, Jonathan,” said his father, not unkindly. “Winter
isn’t far away. Boats will be few, and the surface fish will be
swimming deep. If you must study, then study food, and how
to get it. This flying business is all very well, but you can’t eat
a glide, you know. Don’t you forget that the reason you fly is
to eat.”
Jonathan nodded obediently. For the next few days he tried
to behave like the other gulls; he really tried, screeching and
fighting with the flock around the piers and fishing boats,
diving on scraps of fish and bread. But he couldn’t make it
work.
It’s all so pointless, he thought, deliberately dropping a
hard-won anchovy to a hungry old gull chasing him. I could be
spending all this time learning to fly. There’s so much to learn!
