A New Zealand journalist is going viral after a seagull flew straight into her face mid-shoot — and she’s choosing to laugh about it.
On Tuesday, Dec. 2, reporter Jessica Tyson was filming a segment on fast fashion in Auckland when strong winds sent a seagull crashing into her head, she explained on Facebook.
Tyson, a former Miss World New Zealand, was about to record a second take when the bird slammed into her, jolting her head to the side. In the clip she later shared, she quickly turns away from the camera and grabs her face.
“Holy s—,” she exclaims in the video.
Tyson had been working on a fashion industry story for Te Ao with Moana, a current affairs show that covers news from a Māori perspective. (The Māori are the Indigenous people of New Zealand.)
After the collision, crew members rushed over to check on her.
“You alright?” a man asks in the footage, which she also posted on Instagram.
“Yeah, oh my God,” Tyson replies, soon realizing her eye area is injured.
“You’re bleeding,” a colleague tells her.
“Am I?” she responds, touching the side of her face. The video then cuts to a shot of Tyson with a cut above her left eye and blood running down her cheek.
“Its beak or claws must have hit me because I was left with a scar above my left eye, below my eyebrow — just missing my eyeball, luckily,” Tyson wrote on Facebook. “Afterwards, the bird looked fine and rejoined their friends close by. I rushed to a nearby corporate office in downtown Auckland to clean up before continuing filming.”
On Instagram, she joked about powering through the mishap, writing, “The commitment to the job is real!”
Hundreds of viewers reacted in the comments, mixing concern with a bit of humor.
“Omg Jess! You poor thing,” one Instagram user wrote. “Not me thinking, ‘Omg it’s a sign.’ ”
Tyson agreed that the timing felt strange. She shared that she’d also recently cut her finger and hurt her arm after falling off her bike. “Sooooo weird!” she wrote.
“We did some karakia [a Māori prayer] to try make sure it doesn’t happen again!” she added.
Replying to another follower, Tyson said that the moment of impact — and realizing she’d actually been struck in the face — was “the craziest part” of the ordeal.
“All is well now, though,” she assured fans. “I can understand why people are so afraid of birds!”
