Rare customers flock to chippie
A well-meaning Hastings takeaways operator has unwittingly lured a rare breed of feathered friends well out of their safety zone.
Every morning Talwinder Singh Kular gets a special welcome from his own flock of seagulls. Each day, he’s cooked chips and left them overnight to cool for his winged patrons.
The gulls took over the feeding ground after he started putting food out for sparrows. But Singh’s neighbours, such as Kris Bristow, were not impressed.
“They park on top of the buildings, waiting,” the frustrated business and building owner said.
“If you get that crap on your roof, acid eats through eventually, which is why the council spent a lot of money trying to kill all the pigeons.”
These are not your bogstandard gulls but tarapuka, native to New Zealand and the world’s most endangered seagull.
And their movements around Hawke’s Bay have been noticed for some of their unusual choices.
The birds were in the news recently after five were found dead at Rotorua’s Sulphur Bay in mid-November last year. Officials believed they were shot.
They are more commonly found in the South Island, breeding inland on shingle riverbeds. But last year, a colony was found breeding in the Bay. The Tukituki Rivermouth site was out of character, exposing them to humans, predators and surf. The colony grew. Early last year, some of the birds began visiting the building across the road from Singh’s dairy on Heretaunga St East, where they saw him feeding sparrows.
“I like to do something for the birds,” he said.
The gulls didn’t return to the Tukituki Rivermouth to breed, choosing instead a more traditional nesting site, inland on the Nga¯ ruroro Riverbed, where they were flooded out twice in November.
They spied another site at the Westshore Wildlife Reserve, recently created thanks to the new entrance to Hawke’s Bay Airport, so relocated again.
“We had all this gravel as part of the building of the road on the other side,” Napier City Council Parks Assets Planner Jason Tickner said.
“It seems we are getting species here that we haven’t seen here before, so we are very happy.”
Success for the Westshore colony was about to be declared but they abandoned their gravel spit for a shore-side berth, leaving them more vulnerable to predators.
Hawke’s Bay Regional Council terrestrial ecologist Keiko Hashiba said Singh should stop feeding them.
“They are evolved to be in this [river] environment. They are very capable of feeding themselves. It’s not a good idea to feed them.”
Hastings’ own bird whisperer still feeds his sparrows, but in the yard at the back of his shop, away from the endangered but greedy, beady-eyed gulls.