“They’re a menace,” says Jenny Riley, shooting a wary glance at the gulls whirling above her beach hut near the pier in Lowestoft,Suffolk, as she shelters from the hot afternoon sun with her friend Angela Forster.
The two older women have each had a hut on this stretch of powdery white sand for decades, and often eat sandwiches or fish and chips there, but as in many places on Britain’s coast, it can be a perilous pastime. “The birds are really vicious,” says Riley. “If you’re eating anything, you more or less have to go in to the hut or they’ll take it from your hand.
“This is the worst summer I have known for seagulls, and I’ve lived my whole life in this place,” Riley adds, and her friend agrees: “The mess and the smell in our town now is dreadful.” Is there anything they would like to see happen? “Cull them,” says Forster. “Although I wouldn’t like to see them go completely – after all, they are the seaside.”
Their sense of decades-long decline in a town whose fishing industry has almost vanished since the 1960s is perhaps not a surprise – but when it comes to the gull numbers, the women are not wrong.
Local experts estimate the town’s herring gull numbers at 10,000 – or 15% of its human population – though the birds’ numbers are hard to calculate. Lowestoft’s more visible gull problem, however, is its kittiwakes, another gull species whose population has grown from a single breeding pair in the 1950s to more than 1,000 nests today, splodged messily on to window sills, architraves and shopfronts throughout the town centre and leaving anyone passing underneath at risk of a foul-smelling guano splat.
And this is not just a problem for Lowestoft.
All over Britain, and coastal areas in Europe and the US, communities are in a flap about seagulls.
North Yorkshire council is developing what it calls agull management strategyin response to increasing complaints of “gull mugging attacks” in towns from Scarborough to Whitby. InLyme Regis, Dorset, authorities have introduced a public space protection order (PSPO) banning the feeding of birds to deter swooping herring gulls, having also tried flying drones and birds of prey to scare them away.
The Highland council recently conducteda census of the birdsto feed into its own management plans as herring gull numbers in Inverness and elsewhere soar. It is illegal, otherwise, to harm or capture any wild bird or interfere with its nest. Nevertheless, in March the former Scottish Tory leader, Douglas Ross,called on the Scottish parliamentto give people licenses to kill gulls, mentioning other Scottish councils that had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on the problem “to no effect”. Put to a newspaper poll,two-thirds agreed.
If it can seem at times that seagulls are taking over British towns, the fact is that their numbers aren’t rising at all – they are falling sharply. “Seagulls”, in fact, don’t really exist – the term is a catchall for 50 species of gull worldwide, six of which are commonly found in the UK.
Of these, both the kittiwake and herring gull are “red listed”, meaning their breeding populations have experienced perilous drops in recent decades; while other species including the great and lesser black-backed gulls and the (now misnamed) common gull are on the amber list, meaning moderate but still concerning decline.
In some traditional coastal nesting sites, the most recent national seabird census found, the populations haveall but collapsed. South Walney nature reserve in Cumbria had more than 10,000 herring gulls’ nests in 1999 and just 444 in 2020, a drop of 96%, according to Dr Viola Ross-Smith, agull expertat the British Trust for Ornithology. The crash in numbers of lesser black-backed gulls at the same site was even greater, at 98%.
Why? Alongside the wider biodiversity crisis, say experts, it’s partly because Britain’s gulls are moving into town.
“When we talk about urban gulls, not only in coastal communities or towns but also increasingly in large urban centres, it’s about recognising that these birds are moving,” saysHelen F Wilson, a professor of geography at Durham university whose work focuses on the social and cultural geography of humans and other species sharing the same space. “It’s not that they’re increasing in number, but they are shifting away from where we might have expected to see them.”
There are lots of possible reasons for that she says – warming seas, falls in their prey species, changing in fishing practices, more violent winter storms. Rather than seeing gulls as malign dive-bombers that are after our chips, in other words, we ought perhaps to consider their vulnerability. “We need to think about what [their growth in towns and cities] tells us about what is happening elsewhere,” she says. “Because for whatever reason, these birds are now finding urban environments much better than the coast.”
They are also just carrying out their natural behaviour. “We often describe herring gulls in very sinister ways: they’re cool, calculating, muggers, cannibalistic – these very moral ways of talking about them. But what we’re actually describing is natural behaviour, whether that’s protecting a nest or simply feeding. Herring gulls snatch food from other birds in the wild, so it stands to reason that they would take things from people’s hands.”
Ross-Smith agrees. Herring gulls, for instance, can be especially aggressive – she prefers “aggressively defensive” – while their chicks are fledging, “but I wish people understood that the gull is merely being a very protective parent”.
“We are part of an ecosystem, and we’re in a biodiversity crisis, and I think we need to be a bit more tolerant of the other species around us,” she says.
As well as big environmental stresses, each town has specific local factors that may have encouraged gulls to settle. In Inverness, for example, the closure of a nearby landfill site in 2005 was one of the drivers of a very sharp increase in the city centre, according to David Haas, a senior community development manager for the Highland council. Having previously reduced the number of nests by physically removing eggs (under license), they have now moved to a range of non-lethal deterrents including the use of lasers, sonar and hawks.
“As we changed over to these methods, it’s caused a lot of angst amongst people, understandably,” says Hass. They are also mindful that birds shooed from the town centre may simply move to the suburbs, “and we have had evidence of that, where they’re going into residential areas and causing a bit of mayhem in certain spots. But we’re addressing that too. It’s work in progress.”
Similarly, the initial migration of Lowestoft’s kittiwakes from its docks to its main shopping street and beyond followed the demolition of a derelict structure on which a small number of pairs were happily nesting. Finding town centre ledges even more to their liking than the cliff sides where they naturally roost, their numbers had reached 430 nests by 2018, then 650 in 2021, and more than 1,000 today, according to Dick Houghton, a retired fisheries scientist who now unofficially monitors the birds. “And there are thousands of sites in the town where they could nest,” he says.
Steam-cleaning kittiwake dung – a pungent brew, given the birds’ diet of sand eels and herring sprat – from the pavement below Lowestoft’s nesting sites is now a daily task, costing East Sussex council £50,000 a year, according to Kerry Blair, the council’s strategic director. “That’s difficult to sustain in the current financial environment, but we can’t not do it,” he says.
Lowestoft, too, has experimented with nest removal and egg oiling (which stops them developing) in the past, “but we’ve come a long way in terms of understanding our responsibilities”, says Blair. That’s included learning about the birds themselves, he says. Unlike other gulls, kittiwakes don’t snatch food, and spend their winters out to sea in the North Atlantic, allowing old nests to be removed each winter. But they also like to nest in the same spot each year. So if they can’t access that spot next year, it doesn’t mean they’ll fly back out to sea – they’ll simply move to the next available windowsill along.
It has led to the recognition that the birds aren’t going anywhere, so people will have to learn new ways of living with them, says Blair. Rather than merely ousting the birds from their facades, for instance, building owners are now encouraged to build bespoke nesting ledges for them on more discreet walls away from public footpaths. A row of simple wooden ledges drilled to the side of a BT building now houses as many as 120 kittiwake nests, leaving the public space free of their mess.
“That’s the journey that the council has been on,” says Blair. “The Lowestoft kittiwake, when we started to look at [the issue], was about the dirt on the pavement, but it’s turned into something else … It’s about trying to see it as an amazing gift, really, to have these very endearing creatures living among us. Yes, it brings a few problems. Let’s deal with all those problems and learn to love them living alongside us. That’s a journey, I think, and more people than you’d expect in this town are starting to feel the same.”