Gulls, Humans, and the Environment

Nowadays gulls are trash birds, the subnatural inhabitants of drosscapes. Their coming among us has lowered their sea-bird status. Today they are seen as déclassé and mongrelizing in their habits. Some have also been demoted from whatever former taxonomic security they had. All have become in-between birds in an in-between world. By moving towards us, they’ve risked becoming like us. Bin chickens, some call them. We’ve grown to fear them and shame them, and yet, humans are the ones to blame.

The following excerpt is from Landfill by Tim Dee. It has been adapted for the web.

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Listen to the following excerpt from the audiobook of Landfill.

Viola Ross-Smith is the Science Communications Manager at the British Trust for Ornithology. She worked as a research ecologist for the Trust before that, studying seabirds, including gulls on urban rooftops and on offshore islands. Before that, she studied lesser black-backed gulls on Flat Holm, ‘getting very dirty’, working especially on the pecking responses of young birds when they were soliciting food from their parents. She grew up ‘without gulls’ near Oxford and remembers properly noticing her first gull on a school excursion to Conwy in North Wales. ‘I liked their noise.’

Breeding gulls are new in Thetford. When Viola arrived in 2010 there were none. That has changed. We went to an industrial estate at the edge of the town and, as we talked, herring and lesser black-backed gulls came and went above us non-stop. They were breeding on the roofs of metal sheds.

The rooftop is like an offshore rock stack for them. There are no foxes up there. The town has a plentiful supply of food; it is surrounded by agricultural land and we’re not far from the rich pickings of the pig fields near Livermere. Gulls are moving into urban spaces in Thetford as they have done elsewhere. As well as breeding herring and lesser black-backs these roofs in Thetford attract a winter roost and in the winter of 2016-2017, we had Caspian and yellow-legged and Iceland and glaucous gulls here. The connectivity of the gull world was visible too – we had ringed birds from Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine.

During the twentieth century, gull numbers went up across the UK. They started breeding in coastal cities like Bristol, Cardiff, Aberdeen, Felixstowe and so on, and then they started spreading out. These rooftops represent a vacant niche. The lesser black-backs would have been migratory once, but that seems to be changing. They have less need to undertake long journeys for winter food. And these birds are natally philopatric which means many of them come back to breed where they hatched themselves, so if hatching success is high in urban areas, which it tends to be, and those chicks are well fed and not predated, they’ll come back to where they started and the population will expand.

They are still pioneers here, with just ten or twenty pairs, but they have begun and look set to carry on. In fifteen years time, I think it will be a lot noisier here. That said, gull colonies can come and go with great speed. Lesser black-backed gulls started breeding on Orford Ness in Suffolk in the 1960s – their population was estimated to reach approximately 20,000 pairs in 1999 – but now it has dwindled to fewer than 400 pairs, and in some recent years not a single chick has fledged. There are predatory foxes there but we don’t really understand how these colony buildups and crashes occur.

‘The more we know the more we are learning about the individual personalities of these – and all – birds. More and more characteristics that we think of as unique human qualities seem to be held in common with many other animals including gulls. It’s humbling, I think.’

‘It is odd isn’t it: a lot of people love the sound of gulls at the seaside but in the cities they hear the same sounds as raw and aggressive. I’m not sure about all this overhyped scare-mongering. It’s hard to believe how many times I’ve been asked whether gulls are getting bigger year by year (they aren’t!). It is us making the story, not the gulls. All the chip taking and ice-cream theft is a feeding opportunity, not an attack, that’s all. If we made it more difficult for them to get into rubbish bins they’d go elsewhere.’

‘Gulls will protect their young, and fledged chicks on the ground often blunder into people, and their parents will bomb humans, but they strike with their feet, not peck with their beaks. Gulls don’t do revenge attacks. Nor do the birds provoke the antipathy of, for example, Dutch people or French people in the way that they do here. It seems a particularly British thing. And some of these reported attacks seem a bit far-fetched to me. Some gulls do specialize in taking mammal prey – rabbits, rats and moles – but they are taken themselves by foxes (I’ve had study birds decapitated by foxes) so I think most pet dogs would be a threat to them rather than a meal. And children? Well, I’m not worried for my baby.’

It’s also important to remember that we’re responsible for all this. We’ve thrown so much edible stuff away; we’ve driven the gulls from their traditional breeding sites; we’ve discarded fish guts, providing gulls with a ready, predictable food supply and then we stopped, causing local breeding colonies to collapse as gulls that could not find food elsewhere were unable to provision their chicks. The same now is happening with landfill.

Gulls are caught in an ecological trap with us. And what will happen next depends on how we manage our urban environments. If we continue to leave rubbish around, the birds will feed in these environments. The cause and effect relationship is well established between the appearance of landfills and a boom in gull populations; so, it would be odd if the phasing out of landfill food waste didn’t have the opposite effect. Away from food waste sources it is hard to know how they’ll manage. There might not be seagulls on sea cliffs anymore. The herring gull is on the red list of conservation concern; other gulls are on the amber list. But these are based on rural areas, and they are doing better in urban areas. Maybe our cities will save the gulls.

Recommended Reads

Low-Risk Silvopasture: Chickens, Turkeys, Guinea Hens, Ducks and Geese

https://www.chelseagreen.com/2013/intelligence-and-intuition-ben-kilhams-groundbreaking-work-with-bears/