The secret plight of seagulls – and why we should learn to love them

A great annual conflict is underway. Each summer, as hordes of holidaymakers descend on beaches and seaside towns across the country, humans and seagulls come face to face in a chip-based standoff. ‘Giant swarms’ of gulls apparently attack beachgoers, traumatise children – and fill the tabloids. Gulls are even being blamed for postal delays: last month, Royal Mail claimed that aggressive birds had prevented postmen from making deliveries in Liskeard, Cornwall.

It doesn’t help that our summer holidays coincide with fledgling season, when gulls are at their most aggressive. To many, these large, intimidating birds, which have occasionally been caught on camera eating whole squirrels and drowning pigeons, are considered a menace. It’s easy to see why.

Gulls have colonised our cities. Primarily seabirds (although no species is called seagull), there are seven types regularly breeding in the UK, and more visiting, either frequently or rarely. There’s the great black-backed gull, the (not-so-common) common gull, the black-headed gull, the kittiwake and the Mediterranean gull.

Two species, the lesser black-backed gull and herring gull, have taken a particular liking to urban environments. Dubbed ‘flying rats’, they terrorise people in pub gardens, create a mess and disrupt our sleep.

Gulls are divisive, to say the least. Just take this recent, punctuation-free diatribe on Reddit. ‘They make noise in early hours of morning more of an issue in this heat when windows are open S—t on your car Divebomb dog walkers as their young are nesting… Hate these f—kers so much.’

One person who replied countered: ‘I love seagulls. We have a pair that nest on the next roof, and I say good morning every day. And they say crark.’

The picture isn’t rosy for the gulls. As urban populations are rising, rural – some would say natural – ones are declining. All of Britain’s breeding species are on the red or amber lists of the British Trust for Ornithology’s (BTO) Birds of Conservation Concern, with some set to move from amber to red later this year. The BTO recently announced that the UK’s gulls are ‘in serious trouble’ and called for the first time for volunteers to count gulls during the autumn, as part of its monitoring programme.

‘The perception is that gulls in general, and herring gulls in particular, are common and thriving,’ says Marianne Taylor, author of The Gull Next Door: A Portrait of a Misunderstood Bird. ‘The data shows that most species have suffered severe declines over the last few decades, but these losses have mainly affected rural populations, so have escaped most people’s attention.’

Viola Ross-Smith, the BTO’s science communications manager, points to a survey published last November called Seabirds Count, the first major British seabird study since Seabird 2000. In Scotland, the UK’s seabird stronghold, gulls had declined by between 44 and 75 per cent, depending on species. Only two species are growing in number in the UK, the Mediterranean and yellow-legged gulls, which are making tentative excursions into the south of the country from Europe as the climate warms.

According to Tony Whitehead, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ (RSPB) gull expert, there are now 176,000 pairs of herring gulls and 269,000 pairs of lesser black-backed gulls in urban areas, compared with 61,000 and 55,000 respectively in ‘non-urban situations’. The balance from rural to urban has flipped.

In their natural setting, gulls face numerous pressures, among them avian flu, depleted fish stocks, habitat loss and disturbance (dogs trampling over nesting sites, for example), and predation. The last of these, says Ross-Smith, has increased as our ecosystems have been ‘driven out of whack by our own activities’.

Kittiwakes, the most rural and numerous of our gulls, are impacted by sandeels, a key food source, moving north as sea temperatures rise.

But to understand how gulls went from just another seabird to public enemy number one, we must head to the city.

Herring gulls greet visitors at Brighton train station, and throughout the city their presence never really goes. Walking towards the seafront, they’re always overhead. Even their image is everywhere: on pub signs, advertising yoga studios, the nickname for the local football team.

Reaching the pier, the smell of fish and chips permeates the air. It’s no surprise, then, to see hundreds of herrings and lesser black-backeds (and the odd great black-backed) circling above, an incessant chorus of squawks. I order lunch from a seafront chippy, asking the server how best to handle the birds. ‘Make a deal with them, throw them a chip,’ she says. It isn’t helpful advice, I think, as I sit down to an anxious lunch. Thankfully, the gulls are more interested in the large groups of French school-trippers, who periodically scream and run from the birds that lust after their packed lunches.

Gulls will eat virtually anything, but are inexorably linked with fish and chips. In Whitby, Stuart Fusco, owner of Quayside fish and chip shop, says, ‘They can be very annoying, but it’s only [because of] the amount of tourists coming to Whitby and feeding them. During lockdown they all disappeared. We have on our packaging, “Beware of the seagulls, don’t feed them,” but they still catch some people out.’

Peter Rock arguably knows more about urban gulls than anybody else. It is his 45th year studying them, mostly in the south-west of Britain. Before GPS units were invented, that involved capturing nestlings – a hazardous task, often on rooftops – and fitting them with plastic rings. Rock might ring 400 in a season, hoping to glean as much information on gulls as possible.

There are, he says, about 1,000 pairs in Bath and more than 3,000 in Cardiff. They have been nesting in urban sites since at least the early 1900s, but were ‘a bit of an oddity’, says Rock. That changed with the Clean Air Act of 1956, which prevented landfill operators from burning rubbish. Gulls swooped in to forage for discarded food and flourished, becoming highly productive, multiplying like rabbits and establishing growing colonies.

Britain is ‘leading the world’ in the urbanisation of gulls, says Tim Dee, author of Landfill: Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene. ‘It’s been observed in Britain for longer than elsewhere in Europe and North America,’ he explains, although gulls are prospering everywhere, from Rome and Amsterdam to New York, and in cities miles inland, such as Saint Paul in Minnesota, USA, and Minsk in Belarus. To a gull, the rooftops and tall buildings of our towns provide places to nest that are out of reach of most predators. There’s also plenty of food, although that isn’t the main factor. You would need six tonnes of food per day to feed Bristol’s gull population, says Rock, which would be impossible. In fact, gulls can fly up to 100 miles per day visiting farms and rubbish tips. ‘Who do you think clears up Glastonbury?’ he asks. Most importantly, towns are warmer and safer, allowing gulls to successfully rear more chicks. They usually return to the same nesting sites each year, so once an urban colony is established, it’s going nowhere.

The first record of herring gulls nesting on a building in England was possibly in 1909, on an old mill in Cornwall, and urban herring and lesser black-backed gulls now dramatically outnumber rural gulls, according to Rock. ‘It’s quite a shock really, a complete reversal of the order of things,’ he says.

Gulls aren’t abandoning rural colonies. Only around one in 1,000 moves from an urban to a rural colony, and vice versa, Rock explains. ‘There are two separate populations now,’ adds Dee. ‘Marine seagulls still living as seagulls, old-fashioned birds. And these new cavalier cowboys, whatever they are, highwaymen, living on the dumps.’

Orford Ness in Suffolk is a peculiar place. The National Trust-owned, 10-mile stretch, between the River Alde and the North Sea, is a mix of shingle, marshland and wetlands. It is Europe’s largest vegetated shingle spit, a rare habitat, and is home to wading birds including avocets, redshanks and lapwings. A marsh harrier glides by as Matt Wilson, countryside manager for the National Trust’s Essex and Suffolk coastal portfolio, picks me up by boat – the only way to reach the ness. ‘We’ll see in a year what some sites see in a day,’ he says of their human visitors, proudly.

The reserve is unique, strewn with derelict buildings, as it was once owned by the Ministry of Defence, used to test bombs and research atomic weapons. ‘No nuclear material tested on this site, as far as we know,’ Wilson quips. The staff won’t venture out on to any unsurveyed bits of shingle, for their safety, but the gulls will.

Orford Ness has long been known for gulls, mostly herring and lesser black-backed, two species so closely related they occasionally interbreed. Common and black-headed gulls are also present in smaller numbers. In 2000, there were 20,000 pairs of lesser black-backed gulls alone, which, by 2013, had fallen to a few thousand. That year, a huge storm battered the shingle and wiped out nests, with only 86 pairs remaining.

Wilson, along with Reuben Denton-Beasley, the ranger in charge of gull conservation, takes me to two pagodas, once home to laboratories built as part of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment during the Cold War. They are now ‘prime real estate’, says Denton-Beasley, with several herring gulls nesting on top. The buildings provide protection from disturbance and predators, and prove, perhaps, that gulls simply can’t resist manmade structures.

The chief threat to Orford Ness’s gulls is bird-on-bird predation, ‘for which there is no good solution’, says Wilson. Herring gulls, Denton-Beasley adds, ‘are pretty predatorial to small birds, young birds – so avocets, redshanks, lapwings and lesser black-backeds. Basically, name a bird and a herring gull will probably try and eat it.’

The general decline is mirrored across the country. At RSPB Bempton Cliffs in East Yorkshire, home to one of Britain’s most impressive seabird colonies (half a million gather in the summer, including gannets, puffins and razorbills), gulls are dwindling. In 2022 there were 409 pairs of herring gulls, down from more than 1,000 in 1987, and 7,000 fewer pairs of kittiwakes than in 2017. The average productivity to maintain a successful colony of kittiwakes is 0.8 chicks per pair; at Bempton, productivity is 0.7. Largely, this is down to decreasing numbers of sandeels, an essential food source. The Government has announced a ban on North Sea sandeel fishing, which Whitehead says is welcome, but the EU has objected and a decision is pending. ‘Urban gulls have saved the day for populations of herring gulls and lesser black-backeds,’ says Dave O’Hara, senior site manager at Bempton. Kittiwakes are less inclined to nest in towns, and there are fears they could one day die out.

Back at Orford Ness, Denton-Beasley’s position is part of a gull project that is a conservation mitigation funded by the offshore Galloper Wind Farm. Areas of the reserve have long been used for recreational purposes – fishing, camping, bonfires, dog walking – which are destructive. Denton-Beasley’s job includes community engagement, crucial to raising awareness of the gulls’ plight. ‘It’s a bit of a hard sell from a conservation perspective,’ says Wilson. ‘What people see is a pest nicking chips, making noise, occupying picnic tables. What we’re trying to say is we’ve had an absolute population crash, which is representative of a bigger national picture. A couple of hundred birds that you’re seeing opportunistically foraging out of your hand is not the picture of the threat they’re facing.’

In year three of Orford Ness’s gull project there’s been a steady, if slow, improvement. There are now 300 pairs of the two main gulls, a long way off the 20,000 pairs of lesser black-backed gulls in 2000.

Though gulls suffer from an image problem, they have plenty of admirers. They may steal, but they are highly charismatic. Paul Graham, professor of neuroethology at the University of Sussex, takes a keen interest in animal behaviour and, living in Brighton, says the gulls ‘gradually worm their way into your brain’. He studies them to help understand why they succeed in urban environments when most seabirds don’t. He recalls seeing a gull steal a chip – a huge bird flying in from a distance, swooping over the victim’s shoulder, precision-grabbing the object and flying away without touching the person. ‘I remember thinking, I’ve got to study that, it’s a remarkable feat of coordination and skill.’

Most research has been done on herring gulls, due to their proximity to humans, but large gulls are on the whole similar, says Graham, and incredibly smart. One study by the University of Bristol found they visit schools at specific times – such as morning break – when food is more likely to be thrown on to the ground. ‘It’s amazing that they know how to tell the time, basically,’ says Dee. ‘They know dumps are closed on Sundays, although they do get confused on bank holidays.’ They seem to associate human life with an easy meal: a video of a gull entering a Co-op to steal a sandwich, and waiting for the automatic doors to open, has become a widely shared internet meme.

Gulls have a long history with humans: following trawlers or ploughs to access bycatch and worms. They are flexible generalists, able to feed on anything from fish and crustaceans to Pret sandwiches. Kleptoparasites, they steal from all sorts of animals – not just humans. Their long lifespan – one of Rock’s ringed birds is 28 – and four-year immature period provides ample opportunity for extensive social learning. Like in primates, those juvenile years are spent picking up cues from parents and peers.

There’s evidence gulls learn from humans, just like some domesticated animals. A study in which Graham was involved, published in 2023, found gulls were more likely to take food when a nearby human was eating the same thing. They are sneaky, too. Research from the University of Exeter has shown that gulls can perceive a human’s line of sight, and tell when we’re watching something, waiting until our gaze is averted in order to steal. ‘Sneakiness is not often seen in animals between species,’ says Graham. ‘People associate it with very well-trained pets or primates. That kind of intelligence is really impressive.’

Very few gulls, however, actually take food from our hands – it’s a big risk. They don’t like being watched and will retreat if stared at. While attacks do happen, they are rare. Many gull lovers – or larophiles – believe they’re due an image change. ‘We could regard them as entrepreneurs rather than scroungers, refugees rather than aliens,’ says Dee. Ross-Smith agrees: ‘They’re much maligned, and I can see why people don’t like them, but they are actually fascinating and quite beautiful birds. I say that as someone who has been attacked and pooed on by them.’

Whatever side of the debate you’re on, one thing is crucial: we must learn to live with them. Experts advocate larger, more secure public bins and better education on leaving food lying around.

Protection is also crucial. ‘We have quite important populations in terms of the global picture,’ says Whitehead: 30 per cent of the world’s lesser black-backed gulls, between 16 and 43 per cent of herring gulls, and six per cent of kittiwakes. ‘The UK has a massive responsibility for seabirds as a whole, and within that, gulls. The fact gulls are declining in places like Bempton is an alert that there is something wrong with the environment.’

Are gulls misunderstood? ‘I would say so, but I don’t want to be preachy,’ says Graham. ‘If you have a small child who’s had their ice cream stolen and is traumatised, you’re gonna be a bit peeved. But humans have gone into their habitat and changed their world.’ It should come as no shock that they are making a fist of it in ours.

As for culls, pest control and politicians who promise to rid towns of the gull menace? ‘Good luck with that,’ says Rock. These birds are highly adaptable, and our interference is ‘little more than a minor inconvenience’. You can move one from your roof, or put up nets to prevent them nesting – at great cost – but they’ll simply move on, joining another colony if they have to. While for rural gulls the opposite is true, the urban gull is going nowhere, and its numbers are growing. For now, it seems, there’s plenty more fish in the bin.