I’ve always thought there to be three guarantees in life: death, taxes, and seagulls nicking your chips at the beach. But I was in Aberystwyth last week and after sitting on a seafront bench with my chips for 10 minutes it dawned on me I hadn’t had to fend off an attack. The only threat was a pigeon which, unmoved, stared at me until I’d finished before waddling away.
I left feeling a sense of unfulfillment. As though I hadn’t had to work for my dinner. So I’m delighted to hear traders and visitors in Tenby are still being given all kinds of hell by the seagulls there. Maybe they’ve all migrated there from Aber.
Jan Riley, who works at the Pembrokeshire Pasty and Pie Company at St George’s Street in Tenby, tells me one particular seagull is the craftiest of the lot. “We’ve got a church over the road and it’s basically on the corner of the gate and it still sits there and waits until you pass and he’s on you. It could be the same one because he’s quite clever. We watch him waiting there and he’s hoping the people passing don’t spot him.”
I’m not quite sure how Jan knows his gender, but she’s the closest thing to an expert I’ve spoken to for this so I’m going with it. I’m so intrigued by this brazen chap I’ve taken to Twitter and Facebook to search for him. Lo and behold they’re full of videos of hilariously disgruntled tourists following another attack from the very spot Jan describes. Locals have lovingly named the gull Steven Seagal. I can’t be the only one to find this sort of thing amusing, because one of the videos has had thousands of views online.
WARNING: The below video contains swearing
"We do get it quite regularly because people come back and say: ‘You’ll never guess what, he’s taken my pasty,'" Jan says. "And it’s cost them a lot of money for a pasty because they’ve paid for two and the seagull’s had one. It happens quite often."
Jonathan May at the Three Mariners Pub, which is directly opposite Steven's plinth, says: “He’s there right now. Funnily enough someone is photographing him as we speak. People love him. He’s the most famous seagull in history.”
Emma Vickers loves Steven so much she's decorated her front door as a homage to him and her visits to Tenby each summer. "It's completely based on the dude who pinches pasties and the memories we have of our time here," she says. "He will keep us company until we're back next year."
Tyler Mears, who is from Tenby, says she ended up paying two lots of £4.50 for an ice cream after another ruthless swoop. “I wanted ice cream so much I went back into the shop and ate it in the corner,” she says. “Oh no, they wouldn’t come into the shops,” Jan laughs. “I’ve never seen that happen.”
Or would they? To my mind undoubtedly the best news story of the month in May was the tale of seagulls in Padstow nicking sirloin steaks from the plates of diners at the Shipwrights pub. Staff said they’d experienced such frequent avian heists of their steaks that they’ve had to include a separate steak theft loss margin in their budget. Even the seagulls are posh in Padstow.
In Swansea they settle for chicken shops. This week several diners were sent packing from Chick-o-land when one seagull who would rival our friend in Tenby in the brazen stakes rudely swooped in before one man who really wanted his chicken wings grabbed the bird by the tail and threw it out of the door.
Seagull expert Prof Paul Graham at University of Sussex told the BBC we should respect seagulls as "clever birds". "When we see behaviours we think of as mischievous or criminal - almost, we're seeing a really clever bird implementing very intelligent behaviour," he says. Prof Graham adds that when excluded from their natural habitats by human activities, species that can adapt to urban life, such as the herring gull, have little choice but to move into urban areas to pick through our waste. I'm with him, and I think - secretly - most of us are too.
