From The Sunday Times January 4, 2009
The rise of the urban seagull
Seagulls are thriving in cities — attacking people, deafening residents, damaging buildings, spreading panic and disease. By 2014 there could be as many as 6m of this new urban menace
Richard Girling
...Long article: some snippets follow...
Herring gulls are huge birds, each one a kilo in weight with a wingspan of 4 1/2ft. A thousand of them in the air together are a tonne of hardened muscle wielding a terrifying armoury of beak and claw. And there are many more here than a thousand. Exponentially more. We are heading into a zone where gulls not only outnumber their human neighbours, but outweigh them. Gull city.
The city of the future. The way things are heading, Britain’s town centres are going to be overrun by an army of voracious and aggressive birds that will hold the rooftops against all-comers. They have already made headlines with their attacks on humans, whose heads they slash, raking them with their claws at 40mph, and they are notorious for the sleep-defying intensity of their cries, the corrosive damage caused to buildings and cars by their droppings, and their cargoes of disease.
What began as a nuisance is becoming a pestilence. Fifty breeding pairs in a town are all it takes to make a deleterious impact, and many already are way beyond that. As long ago as 2004, Swindon had 87 pairs, Cheltenham 151, Worcester 342, Bath 536, Newport 800, Bristol 1,933, Gloucester 1,996 and Cardiff 3,103.
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Aberdeen, Cardiff and Gloucester are all strong candidates for the first 5,000-pair colony. Five thousand pairs means not only 10,000 adult birds yelling, defecating and racing for food, but also between 10,000 and 15,000 permanently hungry offspring and 4,500 immature non-breeders — a grand total of nearly 30,000 gulls. You don’t need to be a student of Hitchcock to recognise the potential for violent conflict.
Urban nesting by gulls in Britain is a new phenomenon. Before the second world war it was unknown, but at the current rate Britain will have more than a million breeding pairs by 2014. Two species are on the march: the herring gull, Larus argentatus, and the lesser black-backed gull, L. fuscus. They are of similar size and both need to eat 15% of their body weight daily. In urban Britain this is as easy as breathing. Gull city is gull heaven.
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[At a landfill site near Bristol] First up is a nine-year-old herring gull that he sees here regularly. Then a lesser black-backed of the same age not seen since July; an eight-year-old herring gull not seen since May; a seven-year-old absent since January…
All have one thing in common. Like hundreds of thousands of others across the country, they seldom feel the ruffle of a sea breeze. Every last one of them was born in town, where their high intelligence and ruthless aggression are now causing panic. If the first prerequisite of a successful campaign is to know your enemy, then urban Britain is in for a tough fight.
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Textbooks will have to be rewritten. By nature, the lesser black-backed gull is a migratory species that spends its winters around the coasts of Iberia and north Africa. But given the warmth and ease of urban living, fewer and fewer are making the trip. By Peter Rock’s calculation, more than a third now live here permanently. As this confers a significant breeding advantage — they get the pick of the nesting sites — Darwinian theory says the residents will become the dominant strain and so the pressure on towns will increase exponentially.
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The RSPB argues that gulls do not attack humans but only “protect their nests”. Problem is, the nests are on the humans’ roofs. An urban building is not a sea cliff, and it is perverse to pretend that it’s the gulls’ own territory that is being invaded. Neither is it strictly true that aggression is confined to nesting sites. Any humans with food in their hands — sandwiches, pasties, hamburgers, chips, ice creams — are prime targets for a beak.
The NHS does not keep records of minor injuries, so it is impossible to know how many have needed treatment after gull attacks. Local newspapers fill the gap with stories of postmen knocked from bicycles, householders terrorised, scaffolders forced down their ladders, scalps ripped. A headline in The Independent might have been lifted from a straight-to-video movie: “Attack of the killer seagulls”.
There has been at least one well-publicised death, of an 80-year-old man who was attacked and fell while trying to clear guano from his garage roof in Anglesey (he died of a heart attack). A woman tore tendons and split a bone in her foot when she tried to escape an attacker in Weymouth. Last summer a woman was taken to hospital after being savaged at Burnham-on-Sea. If reports are to be believed, at least one dog has been pecked to death and a school in Sussex has had to rig netting over its playground to keep the children safe. Yet violence is not necessarily the worst problem. Gulls can start their noise as early as 4am, and the slow torture of sleep deprivation can cut more deeply into the human psyche than fear of a bloody head. Roofs and windows are plastered with droppings so alkaline that they eat through the paintwork of cars. Birds damage roof insulation, block gutters and flues with their nests, and redistribute the contents of bins with the kind of wild energy that makes foxes look fastidious. They are also blamed for spreading disease.
Gulls feeding at sewage outfalls or landfills can become agents of bacterial warfare when they visit reservoirs on the way home. Gastrointestinal pathogens delivered via bird droppings include salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, cryptosporidium, listeria and yersinia. And it is not just humans at risk. Gulls also infest farmland and draw cows and sheep into their cycle of decay. An outbreak of salmonella in Scotland was the climax of a poisonous chain reaction that began with an infected human, then travelled via sewage, gulls and pasture into cows and milk. In Lancashire, gulls infected feeding troughs with salmonella and caused an epidemic of abortion in sheep. “The sheep licked the droppings,” explained an expert in the journal Microbiology Today, “and the salmonella caused the foetuses to rot in the ewes.”
Another great unknown is the effect on local economies. We know what some local authorities are spending to eradicate or deter the birds — £30,000 a year in Bristol, for example — but have little idea how much it’s costing in terms of cleaning, repairs, private defences and tourism. This will be the focus of Rock’s research through the winter.
....the problem is not confined to Britain. From Norway to Portugal, every coastal country along the western seaboard of Europe now has roof-nesting gulls. So have the US, Canada and Australia.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/e ... 424706.ece