Tim Newark This protest is for the birds!
The screeching of seagulls and their raiding of rubbish bins is a new urban menace – but why does no one have the power to tackle it?
SEAGULL breeding colonies are thriving in city centres across the UK this summer, making life hell for residents just as councils want families to move into empty shops. But a recent change in legislation means town councils can’t even clear their roofs of gull nests.
From Bristol to Newcastle, Cardiff to Edinburgh, thousands of Britons are having their sleep disturbed by the noise of herring and lesser black-backed gulls – at their worst in the summer months when they are breeding. In recent years, urban gull colonies have rocketed from 240 to 473 and their numbers have quadrupled since the last gull census in 2000.
Research reveals that their early morning screeching can hit 86 decibels – that’s the same as busy city traffic or a vacuum cleaner, just a few feet away from top-floor bedrooms. In the US, 80db is the equivalent of a nearby freight train, says the Occupational Health and Safety Agency.
Regular gull noise measurements of 73db at 5am are the equivalent of a ringing alarm clock. Not great for families already struggling to sleep on hot summer nights.
“It is like having twelve car alarms permanently activated outside the window on full-volume,” says one resident of a riverside development in inland Bath. “When we do sit in the garden on a warm summer’s day, the enjoyment is spoilt by the constant deafening screeching of the local gulls overhead.”
One of his neighbours was even forced out of his home.
“Two summers ago I had to leave my flat for two months,” he says, “because gull chicks had hatched on my neighbour’s balcony and the adult gulls would not allow my doors to be opened.”
NOISE is not the only threat to city life. Urban gulls are prolific defecators, covering homes, cars and people in large amounts of faeces containing Campylobacter and Salmonella bacteria – infections usually associated with raw chicken. This poses a danger to people eating food outside, such as ice creams or pasties that can become contaminated with droplets of poo from the gulls above.
Recent research reveals an even more worrying fact that an antibiotic resistant mutation of E.coli has been found in gulls in the US, Portugal and France, deriving from them feeding on rubbish containing sewage or medical waste.
Then there is the further mess created by hungry birds ripping open plastic bin bags, providing easily available food for other vermin such as rats.
Months of lockdown for cafés and restaurants has seen a decrease in the amount of available rubbish but it’s not been enough to discourage breeding gulls as it is the roofs of tall city buildings that provide safe nesting for them without fear of any predators – including us.
Until last year, town and city councils tried to reduce their gull populations by removing eggs and nests. But this has come to a halt thanks to a tightening of gull control licensing, initiated by the legal action of Wild Justice activists last year, including TV naturalist Chris Packham.
Bath & North East Somerset Council says it will not be retendering for a gull treatment contract in 2021 “as it is unlikely that a general licence will be granted for treatments on a wider scale”. Birmingham City
Council states: “In terms of our current position, Natural England has a very strict policy on what action local authorities can take in relation to gulls.” Natural England, the government’s adviser on the natural environment, defends this change by saying the “breeding population of herring gulls has fallen by 60 per cent in recent decades”.
But anyone who pokes their head out of their bedroom window in the midst of an urban breeding colony must wonder at the truth of this.
Expert Peter Rock revealed recently that Worcester’s gull population had risen to 1,072 pairs, an increase of 440 since he counted them in 2006. In Cardiff there has been an increase from 2,727 breeding pairs in 2004 to 3,147 in 2017. Just three pairs of lesser black-backed gulls were recorded in the dock area in Gloucester in 1967. By 2004, 2,000 pairs of lesser black-backed and herrings gulls had taken over the city and they’re still increasing by 20 per cent year on year.
These are “self-sustaining urban colonies”, says Mr Rock, who views council measures to control them as having little effect. “Flying birds of prey is the biggest waste of money,” he insists, as urban gulls are too numerous to be impacted by an occasional launch of falcons.
That Natural England still insists on categorising gulls as endangered species appears to come from a poor reading of the results of a seabird census carried out two decades ago.
Between Operation Seafarer (1969-70) and Seabird 2000 (1998-2002) the herring gull population had fallen from 285,929 to 130,230 – giving the much-quoted 60 per cent decline in numbers. Seemingly alarmingly on the surface of it, authors Brian Madden and Stephen F Newton analysed the results in Seabird Populations of Britain and Ireland.
What they found is a scandalous example of how incomplete and inaccurate science can be used by wildlife activists to pursue their own interests.
EXPLAINING that inland colonies were not counted during earlier censuses, they say the “percentage change refers to coastal colonies only.”
Importantly, Seabird 2000 left out many urban centres, including Durham, Dumfries, Jarrow, Sunderland, Dover, Folkestone and Cheriton. Indeed, it logged only 1,960 inland gulls in total, two thirds fewer than those reported in just Cardiff, two decades later.
“There are uncertainties as to how representative the SMP [Seabird Monitoring Programme] sample is of the entire UK herring gull breeding population,” say the authors. “We have low confidence in the ability of SMP sample data to predict trends in the entire UK herring gull population.”
Their conclusion is that the true number of gulls will not be known until a new census, which includes natural and urban nesting gulls, has been undertaken. A similar story is true of lesser black-backed gulls, the other prolific colonisers of our urban landscapes.
The worrying fact is that Natural England has been rushed into tightening urban gull control legislation through a misreading of the available data.
It is time that a new census is made, revealing the full impact of urban gulls on our cities.Then new laws can be enacted to reduce their numbers spiralling ever upwards. Only that way can city dwellers be protected from their ear-splitting noise and filthy behaviour.