Making the most of
Schooldays

Richard Stewart’s article ‘Having Your Chips’ in White Admiral 63, about rooks feeding on chips discarded by children, reminded me of a similar occurrence when I was a junior school teacher in Colchester.

Where I taught, being a large school there were two playtimes. Younger children came out into the playground at 10.30 am and older ones at 10.50, giving a couple of minutes gap between the two playtimes. Every morning at about 10.20, on top of the two-storey classroom roof adjoining the playground, the birds would start to arrive. The birds in question were black headed gulls and they would arrive in ones and twos until the edge of the whole roof was a long line of white bodies staring down at the arriving children. By 10.35 the scene resembled Hitchcock’s film ‘The Birds’ with as many as 50 or 60 birds lined up, latecomers having to use the roof of the third storey tank room as well.

With timing so immaculate it seemed they had synchronised watches, the birds would take off to wheel high above the pupils two or three minutes before the teacher blew the whistle to end playtime. In fact you could have blown the whistle based on the gull’s behaviour. Even as the children were walking in the gulls were swooping down to clear off the playground any items of food dropped by the children - crisps, biscuit crumbs, the odd sweet, all eagerly fought over and devoured. Of course there was little time in between playground sessions and the start of second play would see the older children come out and seagulls still swooping onto scraps in small clear areas of ground where children were no more than a couple of metres away. Gradually as the playground became full they resumed their perches on the roof edge and waited to repeat the end of play scramble for discarded food at 11.05.

Of course this feeding was opportunistic and the quite precise timing was learned behaviour. However, as the seagulls wheeled about during the changeover of playtimes two things could be noticed. First, some children would deliberately roll food across the ground for a nearby bird to display its swooping skills and pick it up, sometimes without touching the ground. Others would throw crisps or biscuits into the air to see if a passing gull would catch it mid flight. Second was the case of the one legged seagull that visited us for at least two years and acquired much more food than its able bodied fellows by appealing to the children’s better nature, they always had plenty of sympathy for animals. Both of these are again of course behaviours learned by result and copied from observation of others. The only question was who is learning and who copying, the seagulls or the children! Indeed who was teaching whom?

The above has happened every day in term time for many years and still continues. Wet days must be a big disappointment to the flock, as must be school holidays. After long holidays such as the summer break it would take a few days for the number of gulls to get back to normal, but after half terms and weekends the birds seemed to be able to predict a return to school. Mind you I never went in on the first day of a holiday to check if they turned up then!

One final observation used to make me think even more about Hitchcock’s scary epic. On occasions I would need to climb out onto the roofs used by the gulls. The odd thing was that the roof surfaces were littered with bones! These were mainly chop bones or chicken legs. The nutrients from the bones perhaps explained the particularly thick growth of moss and stonecrop on the roof. The origin of the bones could be seen from a look at the OS map. The seagulls would spend the morning breakfasting at the local tip which would I guess would be quieter then. Our playtime probably coincided with busier activity at the dump, so a good time to take a bone up to the roof of the school to pick at and wait for elevenses.