Seagull screeching contest sees 9-year-old top the pecking order with impressive variety of bird calls
Birds of a feather flock together, especially at one seafaring competition.
Dozens of people from across Europe dressed as seagulls and descended upon De Panne, Belgium on Sunday for the continental Championships of Gullscreeching.
In the highly untraditional competition, competitors are judged on how well they can dress like a seagull and mimic the bird’s sounds and behaviors, according to organizers of the event.
Besides the general adult category, the fourth annual gull-screeching championship boasted a junior competition for kids and a “colony” category for those competing in flocks of two to five.
The only instruction given to competitors is to “screech and behave as a seagull. Do it well, because you have only one chance.”
Cooper Wallace, a 9-year-old gull aficionado from England, took home the win in the junior category.
He began practicing his gull noises for years ago after he was bit by one during a day at the beach. He got so good at mirroring screeching that pedestrians would stop on the street and look for the avian creatures.
“My school friends thought it was annoying at first. But not now. I did it,” Cooper told the Times of London “I just wanted to make the noise to remember I got pecked by one. But I like seagulls.”
Donning a seagull onesie, Cooper performed a variety of different screeches and lunged at french fries his younger sister, Shelby, was holding. He scored 92 out of a possible 100 points — the highest score of any competitors from all three categories.
One of the five judges, marine biologist Jan Seys, said that Cooper “managed to include several call types in his performance and each of them resembled a real seagull call in a most impressive way.”
Seys said that judges “pay attention to timber, rhythm as well as variation” to determine score.
“The gull caller who can capture this variation well, and demonstrate it as truthfully as possible, wins,” he added.
The organizers of the unique screeching competition believe that the “scientific observation” required to accurately copy the sea bird’s call will reduce the “friction between seagulls and humans” and might cause beachgoers to “start caring for them.”
Despite calling seagulls “a bit scary” and saying that he now eats in a tent at the beach because one once stole a sandwich from him, Cooper has taken this message to heart.
“I feel like they are a really nice animal, I like them because of their noise,” he told the BBC.
