Let farmers deal with the pesky gulls ravaging our birdlife

We need to talk about gulls. If you are reading this in an estuarine city or seaside town, or perhaps near a municipal tip, your ears will be pricking up and there may already be steam coming from them. Soon the papers will be full of summer stories of toddlers having ice creams snatched and pet dachshunds being savagely attacked.

Complaints to councils have doubled in recent years – usually for noise, guano-spattered pavements and damage to buildings. Gulls, particularly of the lesser black-backed and herring variety, are becoming a big problem.

As a country bumpkin with gulls soaring placidly above the Solway Firth outside my window, I have no great axe to grind on their anti-social behaviour, except perhaps to make the jibe that there is something about the urban condition that seems to make both humans and gulls behave badly. But I do mind a great deal that the gull population has reached damaging levels – because they now pose a huge threat to more vulnerable British birdlife.

Farmer-conservationists spend this time of year obsessing about the nests of waders and meadow birds. We are a close-knit brotherhood, sharing stories of success and failure of curlews, lapwings, skylarks and other increasingly rare and very beautiful birds. The odds are stacked against them. They nest out in the open on the ground, often in short grass, and rely heavily on the camouflage of their eggs for safety.

Their list of predators is formidable – badgers, foxes, carrion crows and misguided right-to-roamers with dogs. But just lately, one of the most lethal killers of lapwing chicks identified by conservationists from the North Pennines to the North Kent Marshes has been the gull, and especially the immigrant Mediterranean gulls in the South East.

These gulls are not by any stretch of the imagination rare, while curlews and other waders may be facing extinction. Until very recently the problem was not so great. There was a general licence to cull gulls and some other birds until 2019, when, under pressure from the Chris Packham-backed Wild Justice activists, the regulations changed.

This has resulted in severe injustice for groundnesting birds, and also for distressed citizens in gull blighted towns. The RSPB, which, before its unwise entry into the culture wars, might have been expected to take an empirical view of bird protection, says of gulls: “We question the appropriateness of lethal control on a declining, red-listed species and highlight the need to comply with European bird protection law.”

Applications to Natural England for special licences to cull gulls highlight another problem. By the time the usually knowledgeable landowner on the ground has submitted a request to the frequently ignorant civil servant in an office and they have “followed a process”, the damage has been done.

Usually that process, which always trumps outcomes, involves the precautionary principle – the precaution being seemingly to ensure the civil servant is not held accountable for making a decision. Then, if a token number of licences is finally issued, it tends to be too late for the chicks.

We need to have a serious conversation, not just about gulls, but about our wildlife being destroyed by a predator imbalance that the Government has made much worse.