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]

Weeds and wildflowers revisited

During my recent visit to Henry Street Rec (see Seagulls and another green area in North Ormesby )

I photographed a couple of undistinguished-looking little plants which most people would classify as weeds but which I think are worth looking at nonetheless.

The first, Common Mouse-ear (Cerastium fontanum) was growing at the side of the main path near the entrance on Henry Street. This is one of a group of small, white-flowered plants in the family Caryophyllaceae (the Campion family) which fill some botanists with dread but which I really love. In early spring I can often be found with my head down and my bum in the air looking at one or other of these little beauties with a hand-lens (for some reason, some people think this is rather eccentric behaviour).  

Sadly lacking its pretty little white flowers at this time of year, Common Mouse-ear  may get  its name
from the shape of its leaves. A single plant can produce as many as 6.500 seeds.

The other plant, Charlock (Sinapis arvensis) is one of the many yellow-flowered plants in the Cabbage family (Brassicaceae). It can be a troublesome weed of arable crops and looks quite similar to Black Mustard (Brassica nigra) from which we get the mustard seeds that we use in cooking.

Charlock - Sinapis arvensis

"Seagulls" and another green area in North Ormesby

Seagulls are a bit like grass. That may sound like an odd statement but the thing they have in common is that a lot of people think that there is one thing called grass and one thing called a seagull.

In fact there are  about fifty species of gull in the world of which seven are common in the UK (and many more that can be seen here more infrequently) while grasses are even more diverse with about 12,000 different species worldwide of which over 200 have been found growing wild in the UK. I might talk more about grasses (which I think are amazing) in a future blog but gulls are my main focus today.

A couple of weeks ago I visited a small park near to my house and took some photos of what I found there. The park is called Henry Street Rec ('Rec' is short for Recreation Ground) and it is just around the corner from my house. I recently learned a bit about the history of the  Rec. This part of North Ormesby used to be a very popular place to live, with houses on McBean Street, which faces directly onto the park, being the most expensive in Doggy. Then at some point (I haven't been able to find out exactly when - if you know, please leave a comment below) toxic waste was found under the surface of the field and, overnight, fences went up around the park with "Hazardous Waste" signs stuck to them and nobody was allowed in. The toxic material seems to have been left over from some industrial works that used to be on the site. This situation lasted for a long time and nobody wanted to live on McBean Street, or the nearby roads, anymore. Local people say that it caused the death of North Ormesby and made it into an undesirable area.

The hazardous material was eventually cleared away and the park restored but many people still think of it as 'the toxic site', years after it has been turned back into a lovely open space with a wide area of mown grass as well as some wilder areas with trees, bushes and long grass,

One of the first things I saw was a Common Gull, which was being very faithful to one small patch of grass next to the St Alphonsus Primary School field. The Common Gull, despite what you might think, is not our most numerous gull and there are some authorities that say that it gets its name from the commons, or public grazing land, where it could be seen in the winter. This medium-sized gull has a yellow-green bill and legs and a grey back. Its scientific name, Larus canus, means Grey Gull.

The 18th Century English naturalist John Ray suggested that this bird should actually be called the 'uncommon gull', although it is now a frequent sight on school playing fields in the winter - often far from the sea

Very near to the Common Gull, but unfortunately not close enough to get both species in one picture, were a couple of Herring Gulls. This is probably the species that most people are thinking of when they talk about 'seagulls'. It is fairly similar looking to a Common Gull but is a larger bird, with a lighter grey back and it has a red spot on its beak. 

The Herring Gull (Larus argentatus) is part of a very complicated group of
closely related species found across the whole northern part of the globe

At this point a Lesser Black-backed Gull flew overhead, and I managed to get an in-flight photo of it. As its name suggests this species has dark wings and back but is not as big as its relative, the Great Black-backed Gull.

The dark grey/black of the upper wings can just be seen on this Lesser Black-backed Gull (Larus fuscus) . To be absolutely certain that this was not a Great Black-back I would like to see its yellow legs and feet

The fourth gull species that I saw at Henry Street Rec that day was Black-headed Gull. This small gull really has a chocolate-brown hood, rather than a truly black head, and only during the breeding season at that. For most of the year it has a white head with a greyish smudge behind the eye. It has a red bill with a black tip, and reddish legs. I didn't manage to get a picture of any of the 'Black-heads' I saw on that day.

These four species are the ones you are most likely to see in towns all over the UK, and none of them is actually called a seagull. In fact there is no species called a seagull anywhere in the world, unless you are using the scientific names, in which case the Great Black-backed Gull, whose name Larus marinus literally means 'gull of the sea' is the bird you are looking for. This is the largest gull in the world and can be told from the Lesser Black-back by its jet black, rather than dark grey, back and wings, and by its pink legs. Although it can be found inland it is much more commonly seen at the coast.