Far from the sea, urban seagulls terrorise skies
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Saturday, 28 August 2010 Britain’s population of urban seagulls, the source of increasing complaints about dirt, health threats, noise and attacks on people, is now rising so fast that it may reach one million birds by 2020 if concerted action is not taken to manage the problem. The national population is likely to be “substantially over 100,000 pairs” or 200,000 individuals, according to the leading expert on urban gulls, Peter Rock, an adviser to a string of councils in the South-west which are blighted by the urban gull invasion, among them Bristol, Bath and Gloucester. The Government, however, has long claimed that there are only about 30,000 pairs – and has just turned down funding for the first serious research project on the ecology of urban gulls, which would seek to understand why their numbers seem to be exploding. But pressure is mounting on the Government to recognise that what in the past has been seen as little more than a joke has become a serious environmental concern. The phenomenon of the big urban gull colony is fairly recent: populations in towns and cities began to grow noticeably only in the early 1990s, mostly of herring gulls and their close relatives, lesser black-backed gulls. But what is not understood is why urban gulls are flourishing, while herring gulls in the wild, in colonies in the countryside, and on the coastline, are in steep decline, and have been placed on the “Red List” of threatened species. … Graham Madge, a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said that while urban gull populations were growing, the coastline colonies were in decline: “It is beyond doubt that the numbers of roof-nesting gulls have increased, but we believe that this rise does not offset the dramatic losses we have seen from the overall UK population, which has halved since the 1970s.” …
