Cull gulls? No need – to make the skies safe, just bin our junk food
IT was a summery day in the spring of 2002, in Edinburgh, miles from the sea in south Morningside. Back then it was still a perjink, genteel district full of judges’ houses and ladies who met for tea and scones at Jenners.
Today, it’s part of Labour’s last Westminster seat in Scotland and, presumably, a hotbed of socialism. But that was then and I was just returning from my car when I was bewilderingly, and from nowhere, smitten by a chainsaw on wings.
There was a wild ‘Aaark!’ and a buzz of jaggy beak, perilously close to what remained of my hair. Instinctively, I flung up my arms, just as the gull – indeed, three gulls – swooped again, screaming hysterically, their tiny black eyes like a doll’s as they swooshed and buzzed and aark-aarked.
There had been two more screaming swipes of my vast, balding head by the time I had made it through the front door and away from the demonically possessed seabirds of EH10 – although not before I had been well anointed with something disgusting. So, after that alarming experience of channelling my i nner Tippi Hedren, I had more sympathy than most when David Cameron called for a ‘big conversation’ about the nation’s increasingly psychotic seagulls.
It follows assorted outrages in Cornwall and elsewhere. This summer, two little dogs have been attacked and killed. Last week, a pet tortoise in the Cornish village of Liskeard was given such a doing that he died two days later from his injuries. His owner, Mrs Jan Byrne, is still in mourning for Stig.
But what of her other shellbacked friends, George and Petal? ‘After the attack, George was extremely subdued,’ the shaken Mrs Byrne said later. ‘He wasn’t himself at all for about a week. Petal was not the same either. I think she must have seen the whole thing…’
It was time for the leader of the nation himself to act – despite the political perils, as attested by last week’s fox hunting fuss, whenever politicians take to do with our dumb friends. Gravely, Mr Cameron declared: ‘It is a dangerous one for the Prime Minister to dive in and come up with an instant answer with the i ssues of the protection of seagulls, whether there is a need for a cull, what should be done about eggs and nests.
ABIG big conversation needs t o happen a bout this and, frankly, the people we need to listen to are people who really understand this issue in Cornwall, and the potential effects. Reading the papers this morning about how aggressive the seagulls are now in St Ives, for instance, we do have a problem…’
But it is scarcely confined to that land of oo-aar, Moonfleet and cream teas. Aggressive, territorial and barking-mad gulls are increasingly a pest all over Britain. In Kilmarnock, by the summer of 2003, seagulls had so begun to model themselves on the Luftwaffe that the Royal Mail had to give its postmen helmets and sticks, while local residents petitioned the Scottish parliament.
‘They are vicious,’ panted one local postie. ‘If you don’t duck, you will definitely get hit. They are attacking dogs and cats as well. People around here are taking their dogs and cats in.’
A decade on, postmen in Abergele, Wales, have occasionally had to abandon deliveries. In Caernarfon, crazed birds have demolished dustbins, chased people down the street and terrorised al fresco cafes.
In St Ives, apparently, ‘ the seagulls attack anything – icecreams, pasties, sandwiches’, quavers a local baker. ‘ One of these days they will have some poor child’s eye out. They have already drawn blood…’ Another resident confides: ‘They perch on roofs and streetlamps, with their beady eyes on someone, before they attack…’
In recent years, the local town council has resorted to desperate measures, from falconers to loudspeaker-vans to scare the birds from nesting. This year, the burghers of St Ives are trying lurid, flapping flags, while visitors are being warned never to strut about the picturesque harbour with an ice-cream.
A 2006 study by the Scottish Government established that 27 of our 32 local authorities had significant populations of urban gulls and all but two had led to public complaints of aggression or nuisance.
Most reported that the numbers of these roof-nesting birds was steadily increasing and, while noise, fouling and littering were certainly bewailed, the real concern was their ferocity during the nesting season.
Underpinning all this is a population-shift of the seabirds, more and more electing to establish themselves inland on convenient roofs – often miles from the sea – and driven by the sad collapse of our offshore fishstocks and the related decline of our fishing fleet.
It has affected more than gulls. Only two weeks ago, to my astonishment, I heard the unmistakable call of the oystercatcher over Morningside gardens. But the gull problem is greatly compounded because, like almost all wild birds, they are protected by the law. Be it a herring gull, a black-backed gull or a common gull (which is actually rather rare), it is a criminal offence intentionally to kill or injure one, or to damage, destroy or even disturb its nest – even though, in the autumn of 2013, the RSPB itself admitted that complaints about gulls were the highest in a decade.
Mr Cameron’s own Government, just a matter of weeks ago, ended funding for a study into the problem – which may explain the Prime Minister’s endeavours this week to share our pain, not least after the forlorn fate of, Roo the Yorkshire terrier, lately dispatched to the chocolate-box invisible, or the two traumatised tortoises now undergoing counselling.
In 2004, Aberdeen City Council, despite the inevitable outcry, found a way through the law forbidding any attempt at a cull. In a three-year programme, intrepid men sprayed thousands of seagull eggs with light mineral oil, humanely precluding progeny.
THE Granite City is acutely i ma g e - conscious – it is one of the richest and most immaculate in the country, a perennial contender for the ‘Britain in Bloom’ award – and the city fathers had wearied of the nuisance. One woman had even been injured when a gull tried to snatch food from her mouth.
On the grounds of public health, the Scottish Government was able to sanction the programme, despite the sulks of the RSPB. ‘We think it’s not the best means of trying to control them,’ huffed a spokesman, suggesting wires instead to deter nesting on flat roofs.
It is always our instinct, when confronted by any sort of pest, to demand wholesale extermination – be it rats, mice, rabbits or cockroaches. In fact the issue is largely one of controlling the food supply.
A huge factor in the steady migration of gulls inland was the old-fashioned municipal rubbish tip, with tons of discarded food left to rot in the open air. Past, slovenly refusecollection practices such as putting out your waste in thin, rippable plastic bags did not help. And then, incredibly, people have deliberately fed gulls – tossing foodscraps onto the lawn or leaning off the rail of a ferry to proffer chips.
In Scotland, at least, with new practices of disposal – organic waste is now picked up in sealed containers and, in most places, fed into a ‘digester’ – there is already evidence of the seagull menace receding. I have not been assailed by a gull in many years and in Kilmarnock, where all sorts of intelligent things have been done by the local authority, gulls are no longer a serious problem.
A decade ago, a quarter of all the food we bought was blithely thrown away. But the recession has made most of us radically change our shopping habits, albeit to the well-publicised grief of Tesco shareholders.
Yet ultimately our best protection from all wild animals is to keep them wild. That instinctive fear of man is not hardwired merely to protect the furred and feathered from us, encouraging wary, healthy distance – it also protects us from them.