My wife and I were recently having an outdoor lunch in Brighton (on the south coast of England). The man at the next table got up for a minute or two to get a drink, leaving his lunch on the table. By the time he returned the seagulls had demolished said lunch.
Believe it or not, but seagulls, and a possible cull of them, have become a political issue, with the Prime Minister weighing in, no less. Patrick Barkham in The Guardian comments: “Gulls – herring gulls, in particular – have moved inland because we have depleted the seas of fish and cleaned up landfill sites, while leaving lots of food lying around in our towns, in plastic refuse sacks and gull-friendly litter bins. Rather than embarking on “futile culls”, we should change our behaviour”. Quite.
In fact, overall numbers of seagulls have fallen. They become more aggressive in the summer, when their chicks are learning to fly. Gulls may be dirty amd noisy, but they are highly intelligent: in ploughed fields, they stamp on the earth to mimic rain and lure worms out of the soil. They are also surprisingly sociable: they live in complex nesting communities, and mate for life.
A few years ago my wife and I went on a gullet (no pun intended) sailing holiday off south- west Turkey. In two weeks on the water we saw practically no seagulls at all, and were offered no seafood to eat, either. Nor was there any sign of fish in the sea ( they might have migrated north at that time, apparently). But the point is that the seas there are fished out and the sea birds are disappearing, along with the fishermen. What we are doing to our planet!
I have never been a fan of seagulls. They’re annoying little pests that make a horrid noise, are generally dirty, and make a nuisnace of themselves in public spaces (especially at beaches.) But if we were not to litter as much, their population would reduce naturally due to lack of food. There is no need for a cull- which could potentially result in a overpopulation of fish (and therefore food shortages for the fish) as a result of a lack of predators. Human intervention in nature is generally bad; despite a deeper understanding of the ecosystem, we still really don’t know what we’re doing.