The thought struck me that I enjoy hearing seagulls squawking when I am on vacation abroad, preferably close to the sea with a fresh breeze when you open the windows… I can fall asleep to that.
But I absolutely loathe the sound of seagulls that are nesting on house roofs near my home, far from the sea. They are fighting with other birds all the time and won’t stop squawking all night which makes it hard to sleep at times.
So when I am abroad, seagulls are fine. When I’m at home, seagulls are a pest.
It’s the ratio.
People will swim in the sea, even though it has corpses in it. They won’t swim in a swimming pool if it has corpses in it. It’s the corpse/water ratio that makes the difference. In your case it looks like a seagull/seaside-proximity ratio.
It’s also an identity and distance thing. Like, is the Baltic Sea the same, identity wise, as the Mediterranean? Even if the Baltic Sea is very large, if there was a corpse right below me in it, I wouldn’t want to swim there.