Budgie 2

The last few weeks have seen a few sorry looking seagull fledglings around Plymouth Hoe, heads still fluffy, squatting on the floor as though on their nests.
This one fell from a nest and has taken up residence on the steps of the Conservative Club, just two doors up from us. We were dropping it scraps. Then a lady appeared out of the club with a bowl of water, and we knew the creature has a chance.
She had fostered an earlier seagull, she told us, one with a broken leg, buying it tuna and pilchards. When it grew fit enough to fly it kept returning, of course, eating the scraps from the Conservative plates, growing enormous. Eventually it was run over by a lorry.
That was Budgie. This is Budgie 2. Last night its parents seemed to be swooping around it as its call changed to a mew, but it's there on its own again tonight. Since it is the lady's day off, I've just fed it some chicken stuffing. It gives out a frightening squawk, flaps its wings (surely a good sign), and runs forward to peck away.
Nature of course will do its thing. On Saturday we were walking around Rames Head and saw some magnificent savagery in the skies, a peregrine falcon flying off with its magpie catch, other magpies chattering warnings from the hedgerows. Then a buzzard started flying against the peregrine till the magpie, now dead, was dropped to the field. We thought of the magpies who robbed the blackbird chicks from the nest in our pyrocanthus tree a couple of years ago. What goes around, comes around.