Whose Perch is it Anyway?

DDW's March 2014 Challenge - Pusillanimous

I sat down with the kids over lunch, and we looked the word up. Pusillanimous is a combination of timidness, with mean spiritedness, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Its used for people - so I beg forgiveness for my anthropomorphism here.

My eldest and I went to the park, and I was debating either going for some pusillanimous behaviour (shy kid demanding icecream sort of thing), or the birds.

There are two of these lines of posts on the lake in the park, and they are often covered in seagulls. The birds are timid - we were throwing bread earlier to the Canadian Geese, and the seagulls would only snatch those pieces from the periphery, where the geese were not interested. But equally, seagulls can be mean spirited. This particular bird had been circling round, looking for a landing spot - but they were all taken. None of them wanted the posts near the shore - as they were too close to people. So he came in anyway. The next shot in the series actually shows him kicking one of the others off their perch to land himself!