More about gulls- and a really good book

After I wrote my blog-post about 'seagulls' last week ("Seagulls" and another green area in North Ormesby) a couple of comments by friends on Facebook made me realise that I still had a bit of work to do to convince people that gulls are anything other than flying nuisances that exist to cause annoyance for humans.

Then yesterday, completely unconnected, I picked up a book I started reading earlier in the year and hadn't quite finished. It is called Field Notes from a Hidden City - An Urban Nature Diary by Esther Woolfson (and incidentally it is one of the things that inspired me to start writing this blog). Esther Woolfson lives in Aberdeen, in the North of Scotland and this is a lovely book, tracing the course of a year and describing affectionately, but also scientifically, some of the creatures, plants and wild places that she encounters in and around the city and even in her house.

Just by chance (it's a few months since I last put it down and I couldn't remember where I was up to), my bookmark was in the middle of a passage about urban gulls and how unjustly vilified they are. Rather than try and paraphrase it I am going to quote sections of the entry from the 11th of August (page 313-322).

On the playing field of a school near the centre of town, a collection of infant gulls is resting on the grass, twenty or so of them, their parents lying nearby, or padding around them in the careful way they do. A row of soft-feathered, grey-brown chicks stands neatly along the edge of the roof of an old garage on the periphery of the field, lined up one by one on the moss-covered grooves… I watch them for a while, this peaceable, domestic scene, adults and chicks dotting the grass, pursuing their social, complicated lives.

This is gull season, even more than the other seasons in this sea-edge town of harbour and fish-houses and long-term city-gull residences. All year round, gulls and their young are everywhere, feeding, flying, calling. The sight and sound of them are as much a part of the place as the stone or air but now is the culmination of the months of gull preparation for nesting, egg-laying and hatching, months during which there have been calls from rooftops, imperious white heads peering from among chimneys; weeks where the fledglings were being fed in the nest.

Although the gulls’ move inland has been fairly recent in other places, Aberdeen’s gulls are long-time residents, nesting on city roofs for the past fifty years at least. Among the reasons we know of for gulls becoming more urban are the usual ones, the ones we caused ourselves. Following the introduction of the Clean Air Act of 1956, prohibiting the burning of waste, gulls began to feed at landfill sites. In the years since, as we’ve increasingly depleted the life of the seas and filled the streets of our towns and cities with edible rubbish of every sort, gulls have moved into cities to feed on still more of the things we’ve left behind.

Most commonly, the gulls are Herring Gulls, Larus argentatus, the birds referred to dismissively, often contemptuously, together with every other large, white-and-grey coastal bird as ‘seagulls’… When I think about the word and the way it’s used, I regret that so many people in urban areas where gull numbers are increasing appear to have so little time or sympathy for these remarkable birds. It seems ironic too that a single word seagull should be used of one of the most complex families of birds to be found on earth. (pages 314-5)

Woolfson goes on to talk about the work of Niko Tinbergen, a Dutch zoologist, who spent a lifetime studying the behaviour and ecology of Herring Gulls. Although I've been hearing about Tinbergen since I was at university, to my shame I have never read his great work The Herring Gull's World: A Study of the Social Behaviour of Birds, but after reading about it here, it is now on my list of books I have to read very soon.

Visible, audible, omnipresent, drifting endlessly in the sky above us, L. argentatus is another of the ‘urban exploiters’ who seem numerous, safe in their very existence, but who aren’t; birds whose numbers have been falling until now they occupy their own place on the ‘red list’ of endangered species in the UK.

In a newspaper article, someone complains of the sound of gulls in London, on the grounds that they ‘squawk’. ‘Squawk?’ Tinbergen writes: ‘The voice of the herring gull is wonderfully melodious…’ and I agree, it is. There are few sounds as evocative, as stirring, as the profound plaintive beauty of their calls. Tinbergen enumerates the calls of Larus argentatus: call-note, charge call, trumpeting call, mew call, alarm call, ‘choking’ and the sounds made during courtship and mating. The ‘mew’ call, the one most associated with desolation and tristesse, the call that seems to be the summation of loneliness and sorrow is, Tinbergen says, nothing at all to do with sadness, but instead ‘indicates breeding activity, with an emphasis on the friendly attitude towards mate, territory, nest and young’. (page 317)

Incidentally, other urban exploiters who seem to be numerous and free from danger include our two most archetypal city birds - the House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) and the European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris), both of which, along with the Herring Gull,  are on the most recent version of the Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern (Birds of Conservation Concern 4), because of how steeply their numbers have dropped in the UK in recent decades. 

Field Notes From a Hidden City - An Urban Nature Diary by Esther Woolfson (2013) is published by Granta Publications and is still available from bookshops (you'll probably have to order it) or online.

The Herring Gull's World: A Study of the Social Behaviour of Birds by Niko Tinbergen (1953) was published by New Naturalist, with the most recent edition being from 1990. 

[NOTE - The Clean Air Act of 1956 was introduced following London's Great Smog of 1952, which, according to government estimates was the direct cause of at least 4000 (possibly up to 10,000) deaths]