Tipping point
Landfill sites can be surprisingly productive for birds, particularly gulls, and the rewards are there for those who put in the effort. Dominic Mitchell looks at the birding potential of this sometimes hostile habitat.
Landfill sites can be surprisingly productive for birds and the rewards are there for those who put in the effort. Dominic Mitchell looks at the birding potential of this habitat.
For birders in the built environments of large towns and cities, ‘nature’ does not exist in wild, undisturbed places so much as man-made or heavily modified habitats. In such relative oases as gardens, parks, gravel pits, reservoirs, sewage works and rubbish tips, birds have learned to co-exist with the pressures and occasional fringe benefits brought by ever-increasing human populations.
I’ve spent much of my birding life in London, getting to know its most worthwhile birding locations including many of the less salubrious but nonetheless productive spots. Most of them featured in Where to Watch Birds in the London Area (Helm, 1997), which I wrote while living next to a water treatment works in Walthamstow. Here, my passing interest in gulls developed into a more focused pursuit as the birds became part of my daily routine.
Subsequently, roosts on reservoirs and other large water bodies gave different opportunities to observe gulls en masse, but roost-watching entails a relatively short time window and, by definition, a losing battle against fading light. So I switched to landfill sites and began monitoring gulls in earnest elsewhere in east London, notably the Rainham area.
Not for everyone
Aside from their ever-attendant gulls, rubbish tips may seem to have little to recommend them at first glance. The spectacle of many thousands of birds wheeling around man-made mountains of trash does not appeal to everyone, and the reality of birding in such an environment can be brutal.
It’s hard to convey the atmosphere of an active tip, because the overall experience is as much about sound and smell as it is about sight. At times the experience is a full-on assault on the senses, with a constant procession of HGVs and bin lorries spilling their putrid guts onto a plateau of decaying waste, then compactors and bulldozers crushing and redistributing each festering load, with horns blaring and reversing alarms sounding as they plough back and forth through the filth.
The noise levels are often intense, heightened further by the cacophony of hordes of mainly large gulls as they hurriedly descend to feed on each fresh lorry-load before it is flattened into the ground and covered in a suppressing layer of top soil or dry waste.
Then there is the odour from the combined rotting contents of countless thousands of unventilated wheelie bins, dumpsters and skips, further fermented during transport then poured untreated into landfill. If you’re close enough it will make you gag, and certainly line your nostrils and throat with an unpleasant, cloying coating for the rest of the day. An early lesson was to never take sandwiches to the tip – the overwhelming smell will obliterate any sensation of taste, and it can be difficult to eat anything without also consuming airborne particles of waste.
But while it can take a certain level of tolerance to spend time in such conditions, and the experience may not be for everyone, don’t let that put you off birding on landfills. The rewards can be very worthwhile, sometimes exceptional.
Gullmageddon
For most birders with an interest in gulls, rubbish tips can be extremely productive.