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I watched these herring gulls most mornings with my husband on our way through gardens along the seafront. They had nested on a flat- roofed building, and, because of the stepped nature of the gardens, this meant you were at eye level with the birds from the back of the building; and so had a perfect view of them. We watched them from when they first hatched until they left the rooftop. The parent bird would put up with us watching their chicks for a few minutes, until it let us know that we’d seen enough and needed to move on!
In the painting, I wanted to capture the moment the parent bird arrived to feed the chicks. The title ‘Press the Red Button’, comes from the red spot on the adult’s beak which, it is believed, the chicks peck at to stimulate the adult to regurgitate food.
While urban gull populations in the United Kingdom have doubled in recent years, they only account for a small proportion of the total population found nesting in rural areas, and it is estimated that in the last thirty years non-urban herring gulls have seen their numbers drop by 60 per cent.
