Back in the day things were simpler. Eat, sleep, take a good dump – circle of life. If you were lucky – or good – splash a good and runny un across the window screen of some shiny car. All these fledglings want to know – how is it you got to be so good? How is it you can plant a wet one nine times out of ten, and plant it good and true, right in the kisser?

It was Beady Eye that started it – raving about chips. Triple cooked these were, and these weren’t fancy dans from some restaurant, these were real chips, these were chippy chips. Eldorado, he called it, a storeroom full to the roof of shiny gold twice cooked chips waiting to be plunged into the fryer a third and last time before rising in all their glory. Shards of golden crispness giving way to pale white and fluffy. I’m proud to say that I gorged as never before. My pale white belly was full as an egg as I lumbered into the journey home. But that’s the beauty of our life: throw it all up then back to Eldorado for another meal of snatched crispy goodness.

So full I was that I nearly took off the face of the cliff when I crashed into land. Right away chicks fifteen, seventeen and eighteen were hollering – Feed me! Feed me! Feed me!

But what about sixteen?

Where was she?

Feed me! Feed me! Feed me!

I beat aside the selfish beaks of her siblings, but chick sixteen – no way would she have let herself be trampled by her brothers and sisters (oh, I do still mourn chicks three, eight and eleven).

Chick sixteen was not in the nest.

I felt a moment’s surge of hope.

Could she…have flown?

Every time I left the nest: Daddy! Daddy! Let me fly. I’m a flyer too!

All those times together, gull and chick, her downy feathers set by the wind into a mockery of sleek flight feathers, all those times I was thinking, could she? Of course not, she was too young. But the nest was empty.

A terrible chorus of screeching began – the alarm call. A moment later Beady Eye beat to a hover in front of me.

‘Hurry! It’s chick sixteen!’

This child of mine had flown. Somehow she had made it safely to the sand below, but lacking her flight feathers she was unable to take to the sky.

Unable to escape the human beast.

We arrived only in time to glimpse the last moments of her torment, to see this human child stamp once, and crush her head into the sand.

We divebombed him. He ran, he fell, and then as his hands tried to beat away the wings of Beady Eye I cratered his chest and unloaded a stomach’s worth of triple cooked chips now softened into goo.

But that’s not what you wanted to know is it. That’s right, why am I the Eagle of aerial bombing? Well, you would be too, because revenge is not chips served cold. Revenge is taking to the wing, Beady Eye as spotter, then line up my next bombing run, my once a week treat, and always boom! Right in the kisser.