Conservation groups have spoken out in favor of protecting the seagulls after reports emerged of “XL” gulls terrorizing cities, bombing beachgoers and even attacking cats.
Experts say the seagulls are “in serious danger” and insist that humans are responsible for the increasing bird population in cities.
“Beach Bandits”
“A major annual conflict is underway,” says The Telegraph, as humans and seagulls “face off in a chip-based standoff.” Now that summer is here, “huge flocks” of seagulls are being accused of attacking coastal residents, traumatizing children and “even being blamed for mail delays.”
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Many consider these “large, intimidating birds,” which “have occasionally been filmed eating squirrels whole and drowning pigeons,” to be “a threat.”
No one is safe from the “beach bandits” who are “terrorising” Britain’s seaside towns, according to the Daily Mail. “Bands of screeching seagulls” are apparently “roaming the skies and swooping down on helpless victims across Britain” like “a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock film”.
“Trembling locals” have experienced “brutal clashes with the flying monsters,” the Daily Star reported, while “fit” seagulls are “terrorizing towns.” The Daily Mail described them as “slimy gulls” and said they would “stop at nothing,” so “enter the site at your own risk.”
“Entrepreneurs, not parasites”
But scientists say seagulls are being pushed into our cities by the loss of natural habitats. The birds have been “pushed out of their natural habitat by human activities,” according to the BBC, leaving them “no choice but to move to urban areas to scavenge our rubbish.”
The ratio between rural and urban populations has “reversed”, according to The Telegraph. There are now 176,000 pairs of herring gulls and 269,000 pairs of lesser black-backed gulls in urban areas, compared to 61,000 and 55,000 pairs respectively in “non-urban areas”.
These urban figures lead many people to believe that numbers are rising, when in fact all British breeding species are on the British Trust for Ornithology’s red or yellow list of Birds of Conservation Concern. The organisation declared that Britain’s gulls were “in serious danger” and called for volunteers for the first time to count gulls in the autumn.
Seagulls face “many pressures”, from “bird flu to depleted fish stocks”, and we “have to learn to live with them”, experts told the BBC. “When we see behaviour that we consider to be malicious or criminal – almost,” said Professor Paul Graham of the University of Sussex, “we are actually seeing a really clever bird, displaying very intelligent behaviour”.
So we could think of them as “entrepreneurs rather than parasites, refugees rather than aliens,” Tim Dee, author of “Landfill: Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene,” told The Telegraph.
Viola Ross-Smith of the British Trust for Ornithology said she found seagulls to be “actually fascinating and beautiful birds”, even though she had been “attacked and vomited on by them”.
Despite the horror stories, seagulls are generally not violent, “unless they are defending their chicks,” according to The Guardian. And although “there are occasional reports of minor injuries when they swoop down to steal food,” they “definitely want chips” and “not blood.”
