When animal-loving Jean Cook was woken five years ago to the sounds of screeching and screaming from her back garden in the early hours of the morning, she didn’t realise that helping a creature in need could cause quite a stir… On looking out the window Jean saw a baby seagull attempting to fly. With the family cat in hot pursuit, Jean leapt into action. "Lots of people see gulls as pests because they’re dirty and they’re scavengers. But I rescue flies out of puddles! I can’t help it - that’s not the natural way to die. So seeing a seagull in distress I felt compelled to help it. The bad thing for the seagull is that one of our family cats (ancient, five teeth, claws that wouldn't pass an M.O.T.) was stalking the seagull. I sleep au naturel so I grabbed a T-shirt, pulled it on, and raced outside.I chased the intruder around the garden -young seagulls aren’t nice cuddly chicks - they have very bad attitudes."
Eventually she caught the bird, and, much to her cat's disgust, decided that if she could get up high enough and realease the bird, it would fly off. Jean climbed up a ladder to the flat roof of her extension, with the struggling seagull under one arm and an angry cat trying to climb her leg to get an early breakfast. On the roof, Jean felt for the wind direction and threw the seagull into the wind. Things didn’t go as planned. "He didn’t fly. Instead he plummeted back down to earth, landing on top of the cat knocking, it out cold."
After attempting the same routine a few times, minus the cat, it dawned on Jean that she needed to go a little higher to help the bird fly. "Thankfully the seagull flew into the wind and it took off. It was beautiful, it just floated away from me."
Still sitting on her roof in just her T-shirt and not a stitch else, Jean realised she'd spent nearly two hours trying to get the baby seagull airborne. Suddenly she remembered something, "I’d forgotten that the people who live opposite me were having a new roof. Lost in wonder at this bird flying off, I was brought back to earth by whistling and cheering. To my horror three workmen were on the neighbour's scaffolding! I certainly didn’t want begin to think about what view they might have had of my middle-aged charms, or how long they'd been there. The only dignified thing I could was curtsey and scrabble down the ladder as fast as I could!"
