The Language of the Gulls

by David I. Hughes

The first thing Lana learned about love, she learned from the gannets.

They mated for life, she noted in her waterproofed notebook, perched on the wind-scoured granite of Gwennap Head. But their loyalty was a brutal, practical thing. It was not about affection, but about the efficient rearing of chicks on this precarious, guano-strewn cliff edge. If one partner failed to return from the sea, the other, after a period of circling and crying, would find a new mate by next season. Love, here at the western extremity of Cornwall, was a contract written in salt and survival.

Lana Trevelyan was a warden for the Cornwall Bird Observatory, spending the spring and summer in a converted rocket store on the headland, monitoring the vast seabird cities. Her world was one of precise data: population counts, fledging weights, feeding frequencies. She spoke in Latin names: Morus bassanus. Uria aalge. Rissa tridactyla. The cries of the thousands of birds — the frantic kitti-wa-a-ake calls, the guttural guillemot growls, the silent, deadly plunge of the gannets — were not music to her. They were a language of vital statistics, a cacophony of need.

He arrived on a day of flat calm, a rarity that made the air feel thick and the bird calls unnervingly clear. Lana saw him first as a disruption — a human figure where there shouldn’t be one, on the path to the old coastguard lookout. He wasn’t dressed for the cliffs in his dark jeans and a leather jacket, and he carried no binoculars, only a battered moleskin notebook.

She approached with the brisk authority of her role. “This is a protected nesting area. The path’s closed beyond the stile.”

He turned. His face was all hollows and keen lines, his eyes the blue-grey of the sea at dusk. He looked exhausted, but not from the walk. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice softer than she expected. “I was just . . . looking for the silence.”

Lana almost laughed. “You won’t find it here. This is one of the loudest places in Britain. Just not with human noise.”

A smile touched his lips, fleeting as a sun-break through sea mist. “That’s the kind I need.” He introduced himself as Finn. He’d rented the shepherd’s hut in the valley below Porthgwarra. He was a poet, or had been. He’d come to Penwith, he said, because it was “a place that remembers how to end things properly.”

She should have sent him away. Instead, she found herself saying, “The true silence is inside the noise. You have to learn to separate the layers. The wind over grass. The swell against the cliff base. The distant trawler. Then the birds — the mob alarm call, the location cry, the begging chirrup of a chick.”

He listened, his head tilted, as if she were reciting a verse. “You hear the words,” he said. “I just hear the grief.”

That was how it began. Not with a touch, but with a shared act of attention.

Finn started appearing on the periphery of her days. He never interrupted her work. He’d sit on a rock fifty yards away, scribbling in his book, a still, dark shape against the vibrant, teeming life. Sometimes, she’d catch him just staring, his gaze fixed on the horizon where the sea met the sky in a seamless, aching line.

One afternoon, as she was packing up her kit, a peregrine shot past like a brown bolt, scattering a cloud of panicked puffins from their burrows. The air filled with a chaotic scream of alarm. Lana tracked the predator instinctively. Finn was on his feet, his notebook forgotten, his face alight with a terrible wonder.

“Did you see it?” he breathed when she approached. “Not the kill. The . . . the rearrangement. The way the world suddenly has a new, sharp centre.”

He showed her the line he’d written. Not a full poem, just a fragment, scrawled hastily:

The falcon’s punctuation in the sky,
A full stop written in a panicked cry.

That was the second thing Lana learned about love: it could arrive not as a feeling, but as a new way of seeing. Finn’s poetry gave names to the shapes of her world. The gannets were no longer just Morus bassanus; they were, as he wrote one evening,

White lances seeking meaning in the swell,
Their dive a question that the deeps might tell.

Their love affair was built in the spaces between her transects and his stanzas. It was wordless walks along the cliff path to Carn Barra, where the only sounds were their footfalls and the endless sigh of the sea three hundred feet below. It was shared flasks of tea in her rocket-store, while a gale hammered the corrugated iron and he read her halting lines about the “granite bones of the land.” It was his hand, surprisingly warm, finding hers in the damp chill as they watched the sunset bleed into the ocean from Land’s End.

He asked about the birds, and she told him of their peril — the warming seas leaving them starving, the plastic in their guts, the storms that wiped out whole colonies. He listened, and days later, a poem appeared on her table, written on the back of a tide timetable.

We name them guardians of the savage coast,
But mark the rib-cage on the one that’s lost.
This feathered life, so taut against the gale,
Is scribbled on the water, thin and pale.

“It’s not hopeful,” he said, watching her read it.

“It’s true,” she replied, and kissed him for the first time. Their love, like the birds’ love, felt seasonal and precarious. It was rooted in the knowledge that he was a passing thing, a man escaping one grief only to find a fragile, feathered joy with her. He’d left a life, a marriage, in London. The details were hazy, wrapped in the same sea-mist that clung to the cliffs each morning. She knew the core of it: a loss so profound it had stolen his words, until this landscape gave them back, tempered by salt and sorrow.

The coast was their third companion, and it was merciless. It offered staggering beauty — sunsets that ignited the zawns, bioluminescence in the cove at Porthcurno — but it was beauty without sentiment. It was the beauty of a perfectly adapted kittiwake chick, fluffy and fierce, and the beauty of the black-backed gull that would, given the chance, swallow it whole. Finn saw this duality and wrote it into his growing collection, which he called Penwith Elegies.

One poem, her secret favorite, he’d left on her pillow:

Your skin is salt-map, traced by wind and spray,
A landscape I am learning by heart, not say.
We meet where rock meets relentless, turning blue,
Two temporary things, yet making something true.

The tragedy began, as all things did here, with the weather.

A late, unseasonable storm boiled up from the Atlantic, a week of screaming south-westerlies and lashing rain. The birds hunkered down, feathers plastered to their bodies. Lana’s work became triage. She watched through her scope as nests were washed away, as exhausted parents struggled to feed their young. The air was a torrent of rain and distressed cries.

In the eye of the storm, on a day when the wind dropped to a menacing growl, she found it. A guillemot chick, prematurely fledged, blown from its crowded ledge on the sheer face near Tater Du. It was huddled on a narrow, slippery shelf of rock, halfway down the cliff, its black down plastered wetly to its body. Its parents wheeled and called overhead, helpless.

Protocol was absolute. Do not intervene. Natural selection. The colony’s balance. She recited the rules to herself, her knuckles white on her telescope. But she also saw the data. This was a late chick from a proven pair. Its genes were valuable. Its survival, against these odds, would be a tiny victory in a war they were losing.

She thought of Finn’s poem: scribbled on the water, thin and pale.

“No,” she whispered to the wind.

She returned to the rocket store, her mind a battle-ground of science and empathy. Finn was there, trying to light the stove. He took one look at her face and put the matches down.

“What is it?”

She told him. He listened, his poet’s mind seeing the shape of the story before she finished.

“You can’t,” he said, simply. “It’s not a chick, Lana. It’s the cliff’s. The sea’s. You don’t get to choose.”

“That’s the old way of thinking,” she argued, her voice tight. “We’re the reason the seas are warm, the fish are gone. The least we can do is correct the balance when we see a chance!”

“You’re not correcting a balance!” His voice rose, sharp with a fear she didn’t yet understand. “You’re writing a different ending because you can’t bear the one that’s already written. This place… it doesn’t do happy endings. It does true ones.”

They argued into the dusk, a fiercer, more fundamental fight than any they’d had. It was the biologist against the poet, the savior against the elegist. He saw her plan as a terrible arrogance, a human imposition on a non-human drama. She saw his resignation as a beautiful, useless grief.

She went at first light. The storm had abated, leaving a world washed raw and quiet. The air was preternaturally still, the only sound the weary drip of water from the bracken and the distant, forlorn calls of the guillemots.

She told herself she was prepared. She had her climbing harness, her ropes, her experience from years of monitoring. She told herself it was a clinical rescue. She’d done risk assessments for this. But as she anchored her ropes to a sturdy rusted iron stake — a relic of the coastguard — her hands trembled. She thought of Finn asleep in the hut, of his turned back as she’d left.

The descent was a world of wet, black rock and the smell of crushed samphire. She focused on each move, each placement of her foot. The chick’s shelf was wider than it looked from above. She reached it, her heart hammering against her ribs. The chick stared at her with dark, unblinking eyes, too weak to protest. Gently, she tucked it into the warm, padded carrier on her chest. A tiny, living weight.

The ascent was harder. The extra weight, the slickness of the rope. She was ten feet from the top when her foot slipped on a patch of wet lichen. She swung, banging hard against the rock face. The impact knocked the air from her lungs. Above her, the ancient iron stake, corroded by a century of salt and stressed by the week’s gales, gave a soft, metallic ping.

It didn’t break. It bent.

And in that moment, she saw him. Finn. Standing on the cliff edge, his face a mask of pure, undiluted horror. He hadn’t tried to stop her. He had come to witness.

“Lana!” His voice was shredded by the wind.

“It’s okay!” she called up, her voice shaky. “I’m okay! I’ve got it!”

She found a new foothold, began to haul herself up, hand over hand. The stake groaned. Finn dropped to his knees at the edge, reaching down. He was so close. Six feet. Five.

The poetry that came to her then wasn’t his, but her own mind, repeating his lines like a prayer: Two temporary things, yet making something true.

Her fingers brushed his. And then the sound.

Not a crack, but a deep, granular sigh, as the granite lip to which the stake was bolted — undermined by centuries of battering and the recent seismic tremors of the storm — sheared away.

Finn’s scream was not a word. It was the pure, raw sound the gulls make when a chick is taken. It was the sound she’d studied for years, now given human form.

The world fell away in a cascade of rock and dust. She felt a searing jerk as her rope went taut on a lower, still-solid anchor. She slammed into the cliff, the breath crushed from her, the chick in its carrier giving a faint squeak.

Dangling, she looked up through a haze of dust.

Finn was gone.

​The edge was a raw, new scar against the sky. And from below, from the rocks where the sea was already eagerly churning the fallen debris, there came no cry. Only the resumption of the wind, and the indifferent, hungry calls of the gulls.

They found his notebook, later, blown against a gorse bush. The last page. The ink was smudged, perhaps by spray, perhaps by something else. It held his final, unfinished poem, a line fragment that would never find its pair:

And what the gulls speak, in their turning choir,
Is not of love, but of a spent desire…

The rest was blank.

Lana stayed through the autumn, long after the guillemot chick — named Survivor in the official log, but never by her — was released. The seabirds left, one by one, for their winter oceans. The cliffs emptied out, returning to their elemental state of rock, wind, and the relentless, commenting sea.

She walks the headland every day. She counts nothing. She simply listens. The coast has absorbed Finn as utterly as it absorbs the fallen stones from its own face. His grief, which she’d tried to heal, and his love, which she’d tried to hold, are now part of the geology. She understands his poetry now, perfectly. It was never about capturing beauty. It was about mapping loss.

The third thing Lana learned about love, she learned from the silence after the gulls had gone.

​It was that love, like a gannet’s dive, is a question hurled at an uncaring deep. And sometimes, the only answer is the slow, cold turning of the sea, and the lonely, echoing cry of your own heart against the granite — a sound that means nothing to the landscape, and everything to you.

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David I. Hughes is a British writer living in West Cornwall. His work explores attention, landscape, and the quiet systems that shape human experience and behavior. His debut novel, The Listener, was self-published in 2025.

His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Poetose, The Berlin Review, London Grip, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Autumn Sky, Metphrastics, The Lake, 149 Review, Shadowplay, Catalogue Zine, Poetry Superhighway, Inglenook Lit, and Dread House Lit.
His short stories have been selected for inclusion in anthologies by Hermitage Press (Salt & Stone), Four Tulips (Out to Sea), Hollowpoints (First Strike), The Martello Magazine Anthology Equivocation, and Aspier Annual Art & Literary Journal.
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In 2026, he was 3rd in the Flash500 short story award, shortlisted in the Julia and Martin Wilson Prize (Top 7) and shortlisted in the Mairtin Crawford Short Story Prize (Top 6), a finalist in the Storybottle Short story prize (Top 10), 2nd in the Writers Magazine Grand short story prize and placed 2nd in the Witty Wicklow literary competition.

His poetry was shortlisted for the Poetry Kit International Prize and was a semi-finalist for the LitFox Poetry Book Prize for "Burden of Attention" and recently received a Highly Commended placement in the Cinnamon Press Chapbook Award with "Systems of Vigilance." He recently won the Grand Prize in the October Project Poetry Prize. 

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