Mediterranean Gull
Why the strange courtship habits of this bird are a complete mystery
Dominic Couzens investigates the strange courtship rituals of this once-rare bird
They arrive dressed up to the nines like a human couple competing for the tango, all smart black-and-white, with red ‘lipstick.’ They bow, they look up to the sky, they are a picture of elegance. Pairs of Mediterranean Gulls in the breeding season never look anything less than perfect. Somewhere these birds must hide combs and hairdryers and gel. They must wax their gorgeous long, red legs.
The scene is my local patch, a reservoir just north of the PooleBournemouth conurbation, on the south coast of England. Every year, something very odd happens here, just for the last two weeks of March. For this brief, hallowed period, when the countryside is only playing with spring and the wind whisks across the water and rips the pollen from the waterside willows, an ordinary lake transforms into a Mediterranean Gull playground.
From January to early March, we are lucky to see more than a handful at Longham Lakes. But then the numbers suddenly build up, and on some days during that hallowed fortnight, there are more than 200 birds. In the spring air, their ‘gowk!’ calls are suddenly louder than anything else and in the middle of the lake is a concentration of excited partners, almost every one an adult.
Breeding season role
They are almost invariably in pairs – and, presumably if they’re not, they are here to change that. The birds simply ride the water, and occasionally bow their heads. They don’t chase around or perform spectacular flights.
Most seem to arrive already paired, so the preliminary courtship business must have taken place elsewhere. But for this short while there is no doubt that these waters have a role in their breeding season.
Once the cupid fortnight is over, our gulls depart and build nests six or so miles away in Poole Harbour and elsewhere. I have never heard or read of a Mediterranean Gull’s need to court or cement the pair bond anywhere so far away from the colony or its immediate vicinity, so I am at a loss to explain why they come to my local reservoir. Gulls do form ‘clubs’ where, in particular, young birds form pairs a little way from the cut and thrust of a breeding site, but as far as this Club Med is concerned, I don’t know why they come here at all.
One of the fascinating things about our personal gathering of Mediterranean Gulls, is its modernity. Longham Lakes, my patch, didn’t exist until 2003, and the dancefloor reservoir was not filled until 2010. Not only did Mediterranean Gulls not meet there in the past, there was nowhere to meet. And of course, as many readers already know, the Mediterranean Gull itself is a very modern phenomenon.
If you look up past records, you are immediately struck by just how rare the Mediterranean Gull used to be. The first record wasn’t until 1866, when a bird turned up in Essex and was, inevitably, shot. Even by 1940 there were only half a dozen records ever. Amazingly, even in the 1980s only around 100-150 individuals were wintering in the whole of Britain.
The first breeding took place as far back as 1968, at Needs Ore Point, in Hampshire, but until recently colonisation was painfully slow, partly because it was mostly males that found their way here.
But nowadays, the species has gone from accidental to very rare, to rare, to scarce, to noteworthy and finally to footnote-worthy. I have recorded it flying over my last three gardens. There are now more than 2,000 pairs breeding in the country in a good year, and the species has occurred in almost every region of Britain and Ireland. Several thousand can be found in the winter, although actual numbers are very difficult to count. It is still increasing, although as is typical for a recent colonist, the number of breeders fluctuates greatly.
There are some parallels with the contemporary explosion in the Little Egret population. The Little Egret was first recorded in England in 1826 and was, of course, shot. By 1950 there had been an equivalent paucity of records, just nine in history (although it might have bred in medieval times.) The Little Egret took much longer to breed here, not nesting until 1996, although it has made up time since. The original influx of birds also has the
IF YOU LOOK UP PAST RECORDS, YOU ARE IMMEDIATELY STRUCK BY JUST HOW RARE THE MEDITERRANEAN GULL USED TO BE
same origin. The immature birds of both herons and gulls have a tendency to wander, often very far, in the late summer, between July and September. In both species, the colonisation was pioneered by wandering juveniles.
There is one big difference, though. The Little Egret is a very common bird throughout the warmer parts of Europe and much of the Old World. The Mediterranean Gull, on the other hand, is endemic to Europe and its distribution has always centred, despite its name, on the Black Sea (it is, however, common in the Mediterranean in the winter.) Its sudden itchy feet have taken it into areas that it had presumably never inhabited before in all its evolutionary history. Scientists have postulated, although these things are impossible to prove, that its sudden adaptation to colder breeding areas came about as a result of some kind of genetic jump within the population.
Unusual insect diet
The sheer different-ness of Mediterranean Gulls in their historic breeding core areas is a feature of a visit to Hungary, Romania or Ukraine. Here, Mediterranean Gulls are birds of the shores of steppe lakes, and their main food is something many people don’t associate with gulls – insects.
These include beetles, ants, moths and butterflies, and grasshoppers and crickets. Colony members will fly as far as 37 miles, just to take advantage of a good hatching of grasshoppers on the steppes. It feels gloriously exotic for a gull, and you can’t help feeling that, for all its charms, southern England must be a disappointment.
Mediterranean Gulls are experts in aerial capture of flying insects, a habit that is familiar to us from our own Black-headed Gulls – see how the latter take excitedly to the sky during ‘Flying Ant Day’ in the summer. Med Gulls also cultivate a sideline in landing and running after creepycrawlies – their long legs, always clearly making them stand taller than Blackheaded Gulls, may be an adaptation to this.
They also have three other feeding methods: plunging down to water from a moderate height in an inelegant dive; dipping down to snatch food from the surface; and taking food from the water surface while swimming.
When it comes to breeding, Mediterranean Gulls display another feature which is common in some birds that are expanding their ranges – they nest within colonies of other species. In Britain, they have undoubtedly hitched a lift on the back of the Blackheaded Gull. They also breed among Common Gulls, and apparently also have a distinct penchant for nesting close to Sandwich Terns, presumably to use the latter birds’ noise and aggression towards predators. In the early days, single Mediterranean Gulls would also sometimes hybridise with Black-headed Gulls, too, which I suppose constitutes half a foothold.
The days, though, of hybridisationcolonisation are long gone. In modern Britain, a Mediterranean Gull has no shortage of potential partners to perform a floating tango in the March chill.