Sea Gulls in a Target Parking Lot in Durham, NC

The first time I saw them I thought they were ghosts, the ocean’s ghosts lost at land.  I was in a Target parking lot when I first set eyes on them – a flock of lily-white seas gulls in Durham, NC – 2+ hours from the nearest ocean.  They made this parking lot their home sea.  The ebb and flow of customer and car traffic had become their new tide, and the streetlights their forever twilight – replacing the subtle star lights of liberated waters.  I was curious of their presence, confused by their being. Why here, and why of all places, Target?  I suppose it could have just as well been a Wal-Mart or a mall parking lot – any parking lot really that gave the appearance of empty vastness, except on one Black Friday of every year.  Surely these sea gulls had gotten lost.  Maybe they had been carried on the winds of Hurricane Fran; maybe they arrived via Target trailer truck.  Whatever the reason, these sea gulls were real, no ghosts of the sea, no mind mirages from a late night trip to Target. These sea gulls were lost sea spirits in a sea-less, nature-less world.  These sea gulls would have baby sea gulls, and grandbaby sea gulls that would never see the sea.  Generations of sea gulls would be created from this small flock – at which point, would it be appropriate to even call them sea gulls at all?  One day these sea gulls would become parking lot gulls, or Target gulls (Larus targetus). One day this new species would be so distinctly different from all her sea gull friends that she would no longer be able to mate with the sea gulls of the real sea.  She would be a new species, independent in her own right. And we – human beings – helped make her. We played God unaware. Unknowingly we created a new species of pigeon in sea gull form.

Unknowingly we as humans are playing like gods every day – selecting for those species, which are most opportunistic, most adaptable to our human and urban environments.  As we continue to colonize this planet, we are losing old species, selecting others, and quite possibly creating new ones. 

I had a high school teacher who once asked me – If evolution suggests “survival of the fittest,” then what if this is how it is suppose to happen?  What if we, as humans, are meant to play this role of driving out species and depleting resources on our planet? What if it is meant to be that we lead ourselves (and our species friends) into an era of extinction? 

What legacy does any man or woman on this earth ever want to leave?  Most people want to leave children that will carry on their name; few may leave behind them libraries or college dormitories left in their name. 

We want to perpetuate the world in our likeness, but what if we considered perpetuating this world in our dislikeness? What if we as humans made it our prerogative to save a species, not like us?  What if, when we passed, we gave a small portion of our financial legacies to a species that needed our help?  Of course, children are the joys of our life, and we always need libraries.  But there is a world around us that is dying, and most of us don’t even know about it, let along care.  We are good to save what is us, but are we not more noble to also save what it is not us?

I suppose Target sea gulls have their place in this world.  I suppose sewer rats and pigeons do too. But how much more interesting a world it is when we have orangutans, manatees, and monarch butterflies?

Although we fell from our Garden of Eden, it does not mean we have to give in to destroying it.  We can be a willful, good people if we want to be. Let us be that people.  Target sea gulls (Larus targetus) of your lost sea, I pray that you find your path back to the sea again.  And Target people of your lost Eden, I pray that you too find your path back to your Eden of a life-full, life-giving world.