Grazing and reproductive success of red deer – the effect of local enrichment by gull colonies. Your Awesome Neighbourhood Herring Gull (And Its Many Cousins), September 2015Īvocets in Flight and Phylogeny, October 2018 The incredible bill of the oystercatcher, July 2010 is there anything a gull won't swallow?, December 2009 Mobile phones, medals, a doll's legs, an entire army. Kleptoparasitism at Westbury Manor, January 2009 Mysterious channels of Alca torda, January 2009 To the Sahara in quest of dinosaurs (living and extinct), December 2008 Why the Lion Grew Its Mane, a book review, November 2008 Gulls and other charadriiform birds have been covered a few times on TetZoo before… though here’s your usual reminder that some of these articles are now paywalled, or have had their images removed. Please consider supporting my research and writing if you don’t already, thank you so much. I want to live in a world where there are other animals besides more humans and our domesticates, and the whole idea that gulls are a ‘problem’ is, frankly, tired bullshit that we should be done with.Īrticles like this are possible because of the support I receive at patreon. In short, the urban gull ‘problem’ is a direct product of the human problem.īut I seriously question the idea that these often magnificent, slow-growing, long-lived and behaviourally fascinating birds are anything like the ‘problem’ that hack journalists would have us believe. We’ve also made life harder for them at coasts and seas thanks to development, pollution and industrial fishing. Why are gulls so ubiquitous and – to hark back to the hack journalist take – problematic and pestilent? Is it because they’ve devised a clever plan to usurp humans and kill us all by pecking at the face? No, it’s because we’ve created ideal places for them to live, forage and breed thanks to our epic production of useable and edible waste, and our production of (mostly) predator-free, friendly places ideal for resting, feeding and breeding.

There’s A Human Problem, Not A ‘Gull Problem’. A single gull, hanging out on the same area of railway platform or beach promenade for perhaps more than 30 years (a Herring gull ringed in 1965 was still alive in 1997, and older individuals are now on record too), creates the impression of abundance. One is that gulls are both big and comparatively long-lived, meaning both that they’re way more obvious than small birds, most of which are ignored by the majority of people, and also seen repeatedly in the same areas. Why are people fixated on the idea that we have a ‘gull plague’, or that there are somehow ‘too many’ gulls? I think that a few factors may be at play.

Eternal lands hack