Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting. This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one’s self popular with other birds. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight-how to get from shore to food and back again. To stall in the air is for them disgrace and it is dishonor.īut Jonathan Livingston Seagull, unashamed, stretching his wings again in that trembling hard curve-slowing, slowing, and stalling once more-was no ordinary bird. Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never stall. Then his feathers ruffled, he stalled and fell. He narrowed his eyes in fierce concentration, held his breath, forced one . . . The curve meant that he would fly slowly, and now he slowed until the wind was a whisper in his face, until the ocean stood still beneath him. A hundred feet in the sky he lowered his webbed feet, lifted his beak, and strained to hold a painful hard twisting curve through his wings. It was another busy day beginning.īut way off alone, out by himself beyond boat and shore, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was practicing. It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.Ī mile from shore a fishing boat chummed the water, and the word for Breakfast Flock flashed through the air, till a crowd of a thousand seagulls came to dodge and fight for bits of food.

To the real Jonathan Seagull, who lives within us all

Jonathan livingston seagull author