“It’s just, like, you can’t make this up.”
Residents of Nantucket, Massachusetts, were left amused — and a little baffled — after an unusual mystery unfolded on the quiet island last week.
Heather Stevens Woodbury, who helps run her family’s Wicked Island Bakery, got a surprising text from an employee: her car window had been smashed in.
“I thought, ‘Why would someone throw a rock at my car? I’m a nice person, I do a lot for the community,’” Woodbury told The Dodo.
Police arrived to investigate, but instead of signs of vandalism, they noticed something stranger: piles of broken shells scattered around nearby vehicles. Then, inside Woodbury’s car, they spotted the culprit — a cold, freshly dropped quahog sitting on the floorboard.
“The officer looked at me and said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but I think a seagull dropped it,’” Woodbury recalled.
It turned out her window hadn’t been smashed by a person at all, but by a hungry gull using her car as an impromptu shell-cracking tool.
Woodbury couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity — though she quickly realized how awkward it might sound when filing the insurance claim. “How do you explain a seagull, a clam and gravity?” she joked.
The bizarre break-in reminded her of another infamous Nantucket bird incident. “Last year, a seagull actually stole someone’s wallet out of their shopping cart. There are even photos of it sitting on the grocery store roof with the wallet in its beak,” she said.
Now, locals are joking that the same brazen gull may be behind both crimes. The island paper, the Nantucket Current, even called it a repeat offender.
To make matters funnier, Woodbury placed the clam outside her shop later that day — only for it to disappear again. “Either someone took it as a souvenir, or the seagull came back to collect the evidence,” she said.
As Woodbury put it: “You really can’t make this stuff up.”