I recall a novelty baseball cap in the nineteen-eighties that had fake bird droppings running down it with ‘Damn Gulls’ emblazoned on the front. For seagulls – or just ‘gulls’ as is preferred by ornithologists nowadays – are considered rather brash, noisy, seaside birds that will pinch your chips the minute your head is turned. They will engage in undignified squabbles over a discarded saveloy, with one always managing to greedily wolf it down whole. As tawdry and brazen as the end-of-pier casino, they sit atop the games arcade or circle around the crazy golf course screaming their mocking cry. Hanging by an invisible thread, they glide above the promenade searching continuously for an opportunity to pounce on anything vaguely edible, and I’m sure most of us would forgo the luck afforded from the splattering of a ‘damn gull’. Despite all these misgivings, they are as ‘seaside’ as a kiss-me-quick hat or a stick of rock, and I for one would miss them terribly if they were gone.   

Gulls are adaptable, intelligent and insightful creatures, but with the natural world shrinking around them, like the urban fox, they have had to learn to take advantage of humanities’ wastefulness. A trip to a busy seaside town, or less inviting, any landfill site, would suggest that they are successful at this and as a result more numerous. In reality, gulls are struggling, and with their natural food sources increasingly scarce, they rely more heavily on our waste. Along our ‘natural’ coastline they are less obvious and breeding bird surveys indicate a decline, probably not helped by occurrences of avian flu. The once abundant herring gull has now joined the kittiwake (a non-scavenging species that relies on small fish) on the UK conservation status Red List. This highest ‘category of concern’ means that it has declined by over 50% over the last 25 years. Worryingly, nine other species of British gull are ‘waiting in the wings’ on the Amber List.   

Gulls have never really been birds of the open sea, but more the coast. In fact, the black-headed gull is mostly found inland, on marshes and farmland. Long before the building of seaside towns, gulls would have patrolled the far-reaching shoreline. Studying every inch, they would remember the best rock pool for crabs after a high tide, any alteration in the movements and habits of life along the coast was noted and news of a seal carcass on the strandline would carry for miles. The larger gull species can live for over twenty-five years, and this allows them to build up an extensive memory. Their eyesight is as good as any hawk, and they command an astonishingly keen sense of smell, detecting airborne odours over great distances.  

It is the burden of the industrialised fishing industry along our coast that has made natural food scarce for gulls, and with nesting colonies on beaches and cliffs suffering growing human disturbance, many species of gull have had to change their habits. This has resulted in gulls tending to concentrate around our large seaside towns, and increasingly they are moving quite far inland, even nesting on tall buildings in our city centres. With gulls wandering deep into the heart of the English countryside, the moment a farmer sinks a plough into the ground it is followed by a frantic cloud of gulls ready to swoop on any creature churned out of the soil. Two thousand years ago their ancestors would have been following – the now extinct – North Atlantic grey whales that frequented our shallow coastal waters and estuaries; searching, no doubt, in the wake of their flukes for herring (a species also nearly exhausted by human appetite). And a dead whale would have been such a bonanza it would have drawn in hundreds of gulls to feed upon it, much like the tons of waste food that is dumped at landfill sites.  

Gulls are an important part of our country’s wild heritage, but unfortunately, they are often overlooked or seen as pests and even birdwatchers tend to ignore them. In Norfolk we have – give or take – ten regular species of gull, and each has its own niche. One of the most familiar is the black-headed gull (its hood is actually a chocolate colour and is only worn for a few months in spring and early summer). Surprisingly, this numerous and ubiquitous gull nearly became extinct in Britain. As a ground nesting bird of marshlands, its colonies provided gulls’ eggs as a delicacy for London’s restaurants. The common, lesser-black backed and herring gull are often found loitering in parks and on playing-fields in winter, accompanied by their mottled brown juveniles. Once you get your gull ‘eye-in’, there are other rarer ones to look for. In spring and autumn, you may be lucky to find a migrant gull passing through, such as the little gull; or in winter the Norfolk coast can hold glaucous and Iceland gulls from the far frozen North.     

Gulls have a poor reputation because they seem to ‘cock-a-snook’ at us, their presence at the dump reminds us of our wastefulness, and they won’t be quiet! And why should they? With the planet becoming an increasingly difficult place for wildlife to thrive, they are trying to be nature’s survivors, so I’d ask everyone to see gulls in a different light.