An elderly man was left furious yesterday after a seagull stole his false teeth.
Dave Pascoe, from Hayle witnessed the incident, he said “I was sat outside the pub, by the red phone box looking at the harbour. There was an elderly man, he must have been in his eighties eating a really big sub roll sandwich. As usual, there were loads of seagulls flying round and I suddenly saw one swoop towards him and grab his sandwich. The bird flew off with the roll and something fell out of the man’s mouth. It all happened so fast, the man swung for the bird, missed, then did a double take as he looked at the object on the floor and with this weird voice, shouted “My teeth!” It was his false teeth on the floor! I think he was biting the sandwich when the seagull pulled it from his hands, taking his full set of top teeth out in the process. As he bent down onto the cobble road and scrambled for his dentures, another seagull swooped down, picked up his teeth and flew off out to sea, following the other bird holding his sandwich! The man looked really angry and was waving his fist, yelling and swearing “Give me my fu**ing teeth back!” I felt bad that I couldn’t stop laughing, but seeing the man double take at his teeth and then shout “My teeth!” was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen! I have no Idea who he was, but he looked at me and said “That’s right, you laugh! Luckily I’ve got a spare at home!” He then calmed down and burst out laughing, mumbling “Bleddy seagulls” before walking back towards the town.
The RSPB are calling for the government to introduce bylaws that fine people who feed gulls in urban areas to help combat the rising number of seagull attacks in Cornwall.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Gulls are aggressive animals to begin with. Training their natural fear of humans out of them will only cause us grief.
James, it’s a dangerous place, Cornwall.
People should shoot them. The gulls that is!
Christopher, even though I dislike them, one has to admire their ability to survive and breed. Apparently they manage to average a life span in excess of twenty years. If they, and their chicks in turn, average two chicks a year, at the end of of their first decade that one pair will have over 700 descendants.
Here’s where we differ from Mrs O, don’t shoot the gulls; shoot the silly gits that feed them. In Polperro, because it’s virtually a pedestrian zone, they actually line up in the street outside the local fish and chip shop at opening time, because they know that some aryiat will feed them.
Janus, you are so right. I never go out without a spare pair of glasses or a clean hanky. It’s a walk on the wild side down here!
My mother lives in Hove, Her next-door neighbour used to feed gulls. He did not feed them from the balcony in his flat – but every day he walked two or three miles down the beach, almost into Brighton, and fed them there. When he died, hordes of gulls came to his flat for many days. My mother, who does not like birds, was terrified… Don’t tell me that birds are stupid.
Here in Oz, the birds look at us with utter disdain. We had a couple of parrots chewing huge lumps of wood out of our garden furniture – I had to go virtually right up to them before they decided to fly away,
Boadicea, we spent a night in Penola some years back and I took a stroll down to the little park in the town centre. The was a flock of Corellas playing in the trees (by ripping lumps off them) and playfighting on the grass. It was like watching a bunch of drunken teenage hooligans. A passerby that we got chatting with turned out to be an immigrant from Camborne and he said that he would rather have the gull problems in Cornwall rather than the Corellas, because they caused so much damage.
Thinking about birds here we are extremely lucky, none are destructive or psychotic!
We feed a selection in the garden and none do any damage to anything at all.
The big birds are beneficial. The gimmigrants from Alaska are all meat eaters and harvest grubs and worms from the arable berry fields and are welcomed by the farmers as they clear up the parasites. They are also a magnificent sight in their huge formations trailing across the sky. Currently they are all going home, beating a ferocious pace northwards back to their summer home, quite wonderful to see.
The bald headed eagles only eat fish and rodents, so no sweat there either. They are currently doing their aerial displays for mates over the river, quite an incredible sight. Nobody feeds them because they do not eat veg or seeds.
There are so many wild cherry trees here in the woods that even in the fruit season there are not enough birds to despoil crops! Nobody ever nets anything except grapes.
My only regret is that we do not have cardinals here. They were very jolly in the south eastern section of the USA. Used to look like Christmas ornaments when they hung out with the blue jays!