July 2026
I feed two herring gulls.
GoldenEye and Bullet.
GoldenEye is the dominant male around here. When he sees Bullet, he often swoops down and chases him away.
Bullet leaves.
GoldenEye stays.
For a while I started greeting Bullet with a short whistle whenever he appeared.
Just a small hello.
Nothing more.
Then one day I whistled.
A few seconds later GoldenEye came flying from behind a tree roughly one hundred metres away at full speed.
Not from somewhere nearby.
Not from somewhere I could see.
One moment he wasn't there.
The next he was crossing the sky towards me.
The moment I saw it, I understood exactly what had happened.
I thought I had created a signal between myself and Bullet.
I hadn't.
I had created a signal inside GoldenEye.
The whistle had become attached to something important enough that he could not ignore it.
That was the uncomfortable part.
Not that he heard it.
That he responded to it immediately.
A simple sound made by my mouth had become relevant to his existence.
The gull chick pecks the red spot because the red spot concerns its existence.
GoldenEye comes because the whistle concerns his.
The mechanism appears different.
The result may be the same.
The signal enters awareness.
Behaviour follows.
Then another thought occurred to me.
Now that I had created the signal, I could ring it whenever I wanted.
I could call GoldenEye from the sky.
I could interrupt whatever he was doing.
I could make him spend energy.
I could distract him from opportunities.
I could distract him from rivals.
I could distract him from his mate.
I could distract him from his children.
I could repeatedly summon one of the most successful creatures in this environment using nothing more than a ghost made by my mouth.
A creature shaped by millions of years of evolution.
A king of the sky.
Chasing something that does not exist.
And the more I thought about it, the less the whistle interested me.
What interested me was how little is required.
A red spot.
A whistle.
A signal only becomes powerful when it attaches itself to something an organism cannot afford to ignore.
Once that happens, the organism does the rest.