I was on Salcombe Regis beach today with my sister. The sun shone and we lazed on the pebbles. A soupy, pale haze hung in the sky like a midsummers day and intensified the light so that I had to squint through my eyelashes to look out at the pale sea. It isn’t yet the crisp sun of winter. It doesn’t even seem like Autumn. September was the hottest on record, and the weather seems even hotter now.

Eventually we broke out of our sun daze and hobbled down over pebbles to swim. I looked out to sea, flinching as each cold wave touched warm skin. At chest depth I looked down at my feet, and stared into a shoal of hundreds of whitebait, flashing their silver sides as they flitted away from my leg. These little fish are forced into the shore like this as they try to escape the jaws of mackerel and bass, no doubt lurking further out. They will even throw themselves to their death onshore to escape that terror.

When I turned around, the sea was streaked with dark blue and silver. I was in the midst of the anxious, shifting cloud. We tried to scoop one up but caught only sea water. Conscious of the life of the sea around my body I felt strangely wary and out of place, seeing how the fish darted around me and then rippled out of sight when they turned their bodies.

We got out after 10 minutes and I noticed the gulls were aware of the meal to be had in the sea. Smaller black headed gulls flew buoyantly, lofting their bodies with each stroke of their slender wings. They scanned over a small patch of sea and then dived down hesitantly on the fish, often pausing and adjusting their descent halfway with a manic flap. They landed with their wings raised above water, dipping their head and body beneath the surface, as if they had a distaste for entering the cold sea. Herring gulls also hunted on the wing, looking heavier in the air, not as free of the earth. They seemed even less practised at diving than the black headed gulls. They preferred to bully the smaller birds for their catch, diving on a successful gull with a chorus of squawking cries as the fish bearer hurried to escape the pile on.

It felt good to see gulls feeding on a natural food source, knowing how they have adapted- and degraded- themselves to suit a coastline dominated by humans.