Casper the seagull is a bit of an enigma. He carries the name of a friendly cartoon ghost who also disappears.

But Casper the seagull keeps reappearing, almost every day for the past two years since Merrin Fairless noticed him struggling with a fishing line tangled around his legs and with a hook in his face, as she did her daily thing vending fruit from a trailer in Napier’s Marine Parade.

Herself a fixture on the parade, she sought the assistance of residents across the road, one of whom used a pair of pliers to cut the hook off, and the white-and-grey gull was free to go — but it didn’t.

“There was nothing of him, because, of course, he wasn’t able to eat,” she said, relating how Casper took to a bowl of water and kept at it until he couldn’t take any more, and how cat food was produced from a resident’s home to add to the nourishment.

She soon noticed the gull returning each day, decided it was a “him”, named him Casper, and started preparing food for the bird each day.

A conversation going on as Casper the seagull makes a daily call on Merrin Fairless, the Marine Parade fruit vendor. Photo / Paul Taylor

“He waits for me every day,” she says, as she sits in the car out of a slightly chilly wind on a grey day in the city, as Casper and friends start gathering on the footpath . “Oh, look,” she says, pointing to another gull creeping into the picture. “Yes, that’s her.”

It wouldn’t have surprised her that love was in the air. “He’s in his prime,” she says. “He’s beautiful, the way that white just blends into the grey …”

Birds, gulls included, she deduces, are not as “stupid as we think”, and she adds: “They really are quite intelligent.”

There seems to be a conversation going on, as Casper hops onto the car’s bonnet and peers at Fairless through the windscreen, or hops onto the wing mirror, and squawks.

He probably resides nearby, if you believe the literature. Gulls have a lifespan of about 20 years, and are regarded as social creatures, and can tend to set up nest in urban environments much like human beings settling into suburbia, and return each year.

It’s possible Casper and his friend have other business in town, for it is the September-January breeding season.

Naming the progeny could be an issue, but Merrin Fairless is pretty quick with names.

She hadn’t even thought of the connection with a mythical, storytime ghost, and tries to explain how the gull got his handle.

“He just looked like a Casper,” she said.

And what does a Casper look like?

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s like when you have a child, and you look at him and he looks like a Stephen, so he becomes Stephen. But, he’s Casper.”