It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea. A

mile from shore a fishing boat chummed the water and the word for Breakfast

Flock flashed through the air, till a crowd of a thousand seagulls came to dodge

and fight for bits of food. It was another busy day beginning.

But way off alone, out by himself beyond boat and shore, Jonathan Livingston

Seagull was practicing. A hundred feet in the sky, he lowered his webbed feet,

lifted his beak, and strained to hold a painful hard twisting curve through his wings.

The curve meant that he would fly slowly, and now he slowed until the wind was a

whisper in his face, until the ocean stood still beneath him. He narrowed his eyes in

fierce concentration, held his breath, forced one... single... more... inch... of...

curve... Then his feathers ruffled, he stalled and fell.

Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never stall. To stall in the air is for them

disgrace and it is dishonor.

But Jonathan Livingston Seagull, unashamed, stretching his wings again in that

trembling hard curve - slowing, slowing, and stalling once more - was no ordinary

bird.

Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight - how to get

from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but

eating.

For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything

else.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.

This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one's self popular with other

birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone,

making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting.

He didn't know why, for instance, but when he flew at altitudes less than half his

wingspan above the water, he could stay in the air longer, with less effort. His

glides ended not with the usual feet-down splash into the sea, but with a long flat

wake as he touched the surface with his feet tightly streamlined against his body.

When he began sliding in to feet-up landings on the beach, then pacing the length

of his slide in the sand, his parents were very much dismayed indeed.

"Why, Jon, why?" his mother asked. "Why is it so hard to be like the rest of the

flock, Jon? Why can't you leave low flying to the pelicans, the albatross? Why don't

you eat? Son, you're bone and feathers!"

"I don't mind being bone and feathers mom. I just want to know what I can do in

the air and what I can't, that's all. I just want to know."