San Francisco Seagulls

We’re on the road again – this time, a rail-and-road trip around the western states of the US.

We’ve started in San Francisco – and last night, we went to our first baseball game with our daughter Lini, and son in law Joe.

Whenever I thought of San Francisco and baseball (which is not, I have to admit, all that often), I thought of Candlestick Park – but it’s no longer there!

That was the famous stadium built for the New York Giants in 1958  when they relocated to San Francisco.

But the Giants relocated to AT&T Park (then called Pacific Bell Park) 16 years ago! Who knew?

🙂

The SF 49ers football team stayed at Candlestick park until 2013 – and it was demolished last year, to make way for a housing and retail complex.

There were plans to blow it up as a Superbowl half-time entertainment event, but locals – concerned about safety, dust and pollution, put the kibosh on that.)

Anyway, baseball is now played at AT&T Park, in the South Beach / South Park area of San Francisco.

The beach part of that is important to this photo.

Because the stadium is just near the water, there are lots of seagulls around, but to be honest we hadn’t noticed them – until about the seventh innings of the game.

Then they started circling the field – swooping across between the lights and wheeling around overhead.

It turns out that the birds know that the humans are going to leave after a couple more innings – and that when they do, there will be a huge feast of leftover stadium food for them to scavenge!

And as befits San Francisco seagulls, the leftovers are not just any hot-dog buns and discarded popcorn – no, being SF, they get tri-tip barbeque beef buns, and pulled pork roll remnants, and Kettle Corn cups (none of this ordinary popcorn for them!)

So – as the people leave, the seagulls swoop.

After all, it’s their “tern”

(OK .. I’ll go now…. Bad Puns ‘r’ Us)