Kaiu

Herring gulls are both inhabitants and consequential agents in the House: they occupy the Eighty-Eighth Western Hall as a breeding colony, shape Piranesi’s passage through it, and preserve fragments of a mysterious written page within their nests. Their ordinary demands for territory and care become part of the practical ecology of the labyrinth, while their presence forces Piranesi to balance curiosity against the safety of eggs and young.

Habitat and Behaviour

Piranesi records birds as familiar companions whose behavior is comparatively easy to read. He imagines their immediate concerns as questions of whether something is food, or as simple responses to rain, but also allows that birds may possess a deeper wisdom that appears only indirectly and intermittently. This uncertainty matters in a House where animal actions can be observed closely but not always interpreted with confidence.

The herring gull colony occupies the Eighty-Eighth Western Hall. When Piranesi first crosses the hall, the birds react to his intrusion with indignation: they squawk, fly at him, beat their wings, and try to peck him. He waves his arms and shouts to ward them off. Their aggression is not abstract menace but territorial behavior around nests and young, and it changes how safely he can move through the hall.

Their nests are distributed across the hall’s statues and plinths. Some perch on statues’ shoulders, others are crowded onto plinths; one is tucked between the legs of an Elephant statue, and another rests in the crown of an elderly king. The birds build with dry seaweed and fishbones, making structures that are ramshackle but effective enough to shelter eggs and chicks. Fresh deposits of excrement on the statues later confirm that the hall remains their roost even when the birds themselves are away searching for food.

The Scattered Page

Piranesi’s discovery begins when he takes his usual route through the Eighty-Eighth Western Hall despite remembering the gulls. Avoiding it would add seven or eight halls, or about 1.7 kilometres, to his journey. Halfway across, he notices white scraps on the pavement. Three pieces fit together into part of a notebook page, though the writing is difficult to decipher. He makes out references to a minotaur, a slave, and the words “kill him,” but cannot identify the writer or understand the rest.

The scraps appear to have been scattered across the hall, and Piranesi systematically searches the pavement, starting in the south-west corner. The gulls initially object noisily, then lose interest when he stays away from their eggs and young. He gathers forty-seven pieces, but realizes many more are missing. His attempt to recover them brings him closer to the colony’s nests, where some of the page fragments have become woven into the birds’ building material.

One of the remaining pieces is visible in a nest placed in the crown of the elderly king. Piranesi climbs a neighboring statue to inspect it, and two gulls immediately attack, screaming and striking at him with wings and beaks. He hauls himself up with one arm while fending them off with the other. The encounter shows the limit of his access: the paper interests him, but the nests are not simply repositories he can freely dismantle.

He finds a ramshackle nest made from seaweed and fishbones with five or six written scraps woven into it. He retreats to the middle of the hall rather than continue disturbing the colony. Since the gulls will not permit him to take apart their nests, and he does not want to do so while they are occupied, he decides to wait until late summer or early autumn, when the birds have abandoned the nests and their young have grown. His recovery of the page therefore depends on adapting his research to the animals’ seasonal lives.

Seasonal Return and Recovery

Piranesi returns to the Eighty-Eighth Western Hall after gathering supplies for the journey. The gulls are absent, apparently out searching for food, though fresh droppings show that they still use the hall as a roost. He begins carefully extracting the scraps from thirty-five nests. Some nests fall apart at a tug; in others, gull droppings have hardened around the paper and bonded it to the seaweed.

To loosen the stuck fragments, Piranesi makes a fire from dry seaweed taken from the old nests, heats water in a small saucepan, and applies it to the paper with a rag. The work requires care: too little water leaves the droppings hard, while too much risks dissolving the page. After many hours, by the evening of the second day, he has recovered seventy-nine scraps and checked every nest for more. He returns to his own halls the next morning. The recovery is thus made possible by the colony’s absence, but it is also materially dependent on the gulls: their nests have protected and held the fragments, even as their defensive behavior delayed access to them.

Birds as Neighbours and Interpreters

The gulls’ episode belongs to a broader pattern in which Piranesi attends to birds as more than incidental scenery. In another hall, a group of birds moves between statues associated with industrious work; Piranesi considers whether their choice might amount to a warning, and catches extra fish and lobsters before a storm drives fish away. Elsewhere, birds divide into groups and perch on different statues, inviting him to watch their sequence of movements for possible meaning. These episodes do not establish that the birds communicate human-like messages, but they show Piranesi taking animal behavior seriously even when its significance remains uncertain.

The herring gulls, in particular, resist being reduced to signs for Piranesi to decode. They have their own priorities: nesting, protecting their young, and leaving the hall to forage. Those priorities interrupt his route, repel his first attempt to retrieve the scraps, and set the timing and method of his return. The written page is a possible historical clue, but its recovery must wait on the gulls’ seasonal cycle. Through this encounter, the House’s life is shown as shared rather than exclusively human: observation and discovery depend on respecting the activity of its other inhabitants.