Biological conservation efforts typically gravitate toward the more charismatic species. Save the pandas is a more popular slogan than save the earthworms, and most people likely care more about protecting flowers than a rare grass or fungi.
For birds, eagles and condors are beloved poster children of environmental movements. But for gulls — sometimes erroneously called “seagulls,” though they are not exclusive to the ocean — they are described as nuisances and pests, which experts say couldn’t be further from the truth. Nonetheless, public sentiment against gulls is often strong.
In June, police in Hereford, England began searching for a group of men believed to have killed a gull. A month later, a man was arrested in New Jersey for decapitating a gull after the bird tried to take French fries from his child. Then, in August, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals announced they were investigating the suspicious deaths of 10 seagulls found in Norfolk, England. One of the birds had a hole in its body believed to be caused by an airgun.
"The shift from celebrating gulls to culling them had little to do with ecology."
Acts of violence against gulls are likely rare, but they illustrate the larger societal disdain many people have for the seabirds. In the comment section of TikTok videos discussing the New Jersey case, one commenter wrote “Seagulls are like rats of the sky.” “It’s ridiculous to arrest a dude for animal cruelty for killing a freaking seagull,” another commenter says. “I’m not saying he’s right but I understand,” says a third commenter.
Gulls today have fallen under the unfortunate designations of “pest” and “nuisance.” Anyone who’s visited a coastal community or beach knows why: They’re loud, they steal our food, they swoop down on us, and they poop everywhere.
In the U.K., negative feelings toward gulls seem especially high. The U.K. public generally feels strongly protective of birds. “Exceptions are gulls where there are up to 1,000 pairs or more in a single town or city,” says John Coulson, author of the book “Gulls,” who has been studying the birds since the 1950s. There are “strong battles between those wanting culls and those wanting them protected.” Coulson remembers visiting a pub in the English seaside town of Whitby that hung up a sign saying "Keep Whitby tidy. Eat a gull a day.”
Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes.
We didn’t always dislike gulls. Throughout the 1800s, gulls were seen as a useful aide to fishermen, both by signaling that their boats were getting close to shore and by eating the remnants of dead fish on their nets. People also revered them for their beauty, much to the birds’ detriment. Gulls were killed in massive numbers for their feathers and their eggs were taken from the wild for human consumption. Their populations suffered severe declines. The Herring gull, the species most people probably associate with “seagulls,” was nearly wiped out along the Atlantic coast. The Ring-billed Gull faced near extinction.
After the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 protected gulls from hunting and egg harvesting in the U.S., populations rebounded. Around the same time, beach recreation was rising in popularity across the world. Complaints about gulls followed, says John Anderson, professor of ecology at the College of the Atlantic, who studies seabirds. Farmers, who used herring to fertilize their fields and subsequently attracted gulls to their farms, joined in the complaints, Anderson adds. In the 1930s, the U.S. government initiated a massive gull control program in New England where they destroyed over 800,000 herring gull and Great Black-backed gull eggs over the course of around two decades.
“The shift from celebrating gulls to culling them had little to do with ecology,” Anderson and others write in a 2024 essay. “Instead, rising populations were initially viewed as a problem because gulls had become a nuisance to humans.”
"Birds are just doing what birds do. They're not evil."
Negative feelings grew as gulls started moving into cities in the mid-1900s. Gulls were attracted to our rooftops free from predators and the buffet of food at open landfills. “The bottom line is that we invited them here in the first place," urban gull expert Peter Rock told the BBC.
People started experiencing gull behaviors, such as their early morning calling, much closer to home. “I think that when people are confronted with nature in the city people are both fascinated by it and sometimes inconvenienced by it,” says seabird ecologist Louise Blight.
Many people still look down on gulls today. What’s different is the growing awareness of our impact on wild animals and our willingness to coexist with them. Many travelers now know the principles of being “bear aware” and communities that live near bears are switching to bear-resistant garbage cans. Gulls illustrate that when we view some wild animals as pests, we don’t always consider how we are impacting them.
A 2022 survey in Scotland found that 92% of respondents thought gulls were a problem in their area. By far, the most common suggested solution was culling birds. Solutions that focused on changing human behavior — such as stopping people from feeding the birds and tackling litter — were mentioned far less.
The good news is that far from all people hate gulls. Professor Noah Perlut with the University of New England studies urban gull populations in Portland, Maine and says most people he hears from are indifferent toward the birds. A small number of people are “absolutely infatuated” with them, and an even smaller number of people hate gulls. The younger generation seems more empathetic towards gulls, says Jenna Reynolds, president of the nonprofit Save Coastal Wildlife in New Jersey. Many people find gulls’ “wily” behaviors entertaining, Blight adds, and they’re a star of many memes.
Conservationists say the key to changing our views is by simply trying to understand gulls better. We get even the most basic detail about gulls wrong: their name. “Seagull” isn’t a word used in wildlife conservation. There are over 50 different species of gulls, and they live in landlocked areas as well as coastal regions.
Much of the behaviors we find annoying help gulls survive in the wild. Gulls are kleptoparasites, meaning they get food from other species. People bring food to beaches — and some of us deliberately feed gulls our food — so naturally they learned to associate people with a free meal. Researchers also believe that only a small portion of gulls are committing the “bad acts.” Most gulls are rather shy, Perlut says. The bold individuals are just a lot more apparent to us.
A gull picks up a piece of trash that washed up along the bank of the San Gabriel River just a few hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean in Seal Beach on Tuesday morning, December 13, 2022. (Mark Rightmire/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)Gulls are protective parents and swoop down or vocalize at people who get close to their chicks as a warning. They also vocalize to tell their chicks they are back at the nest with food and, seemingly, to cheer on their babies when they’re learning to fly.
“Birds are just doing what birds do. They're not evil,” Tony Whitehead, spokesperson for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, says.
Research shows gulls are also highly intelligent. Studies found herring gulls are more hesitant to take human food when a person looks directly at them, gulls prefer to peck food they see people handling (gulls were not more likely to peck at a non-food item people touched), and gulls prefer food in the same color bag as what a researcher was eating out of.
Most people likely have no idea some gulls are in trouble.
In contrast to societal views that gulls are overabundant, gull populations are declining in parts of America, Canada and the U.K. Herring gull populations declined around 76% in North America since 1966. Global great black-backed gull populations have almost halved since 1985. Just this September, common gulls and great black-backed gulls were added to the U.K. Red List, a designation for birds of highest conservation concern. The herring gull was already on the list.
Most people likely have no idea some gulls are in trouble.
“People see gulls in the town and don't believe the population could be in decline when it's so easy to see them and when there seem to be so many in their area,” former gull researcher Madeline Goumas says. “The population density in the local area doesn't [necessarily] correspond with national patterns.”
Our negative feelings towards gulls likely plays a role as well. “If this was most any other species that sort of decline would produce a lot of alarm,” says Anderson. “But humans have a very odd relationship with [gulls].”
The cause of population declines isn’t well understood. It’s hard to get resources to study gulls because they’re not seen as charismatic. And there’s limited funding to study animals so efforts tend to focus on species most at risk, Perlut says.
Research does show that urban gulls aren’t declining the same way as gulls in natural habitats. Gulls probably are having a harder time finding the high-protein fish they prefer due to overfishing and climate change. If they’re eating poor diets, they could be having a harder time reproducing. On Mono Lake in California, where a quarter of the world’s population of California gulls live, climate change-induced droughts are lowering water levels and making it easier for predators to get onto nesting islands where they’ll eat eggs and chicks.
Gulls also get caught in netting, plastics and other human-made objects. And then there’s bird flu, which isn’t just infecting dairy cows and poultry lately, but has also massacred millions of wild birds.
Researchers are “extremely concerned about [highly pathogenic avian influenza], which could present an almost existential threat to gull populations,” says Anderson. Thousands of gulls in the UK are believed to have died from the virus.
We need your help to stay independent
Even if people don’t like gulls, they should still be concerned about population declines. Gulls are highly adaptable, so "if they are experiencing a population decline, the gulls may be telling us that there have been some fairly profound changes to local marine ecosystems,” Blight told Phys.org back in 2015.
Although gulls are associated with annoying behaviors, they’re also synonymous with laid-back coastal communities and beach vacations. Conservationists hope these positive associations will help people care about gulls. “I don't think anybody wants to see a seaside town that doesn't have [the calls of gulls],” Whitehead says.
“What I say to people is you're gonna miss them when they're gone,” says Anderson. “I think that if everything I and my colleagues dread were to happen, and herring gulls … become extremely rare, they might actually get a lot of respect then.”
As gulls in their natural habitats continue to face threats, urban gulls are probably going to be a continued fixture. Instead of being angry at them, we should be learning how to coexist, conservationists say. If “we could start to live together, then I think we'll overcome some of this anger and start seeing the birds for what they are, which is magnificent creatures,” Whitehead says.
Shares