Why on earth do we tolerate them when many other nuisance and even non-nuisance species are eradicated?
I gather numbers may be static or on the decline, but urban gulls are on the increase.
I drove Mrs AC to work early today - it’s our refuse/recycling day, and as we passed a ‘student area’ there were literally packs of ravenous seagulls tearing green recycling bags apart and a whole street was festooned with an array of loose recyclable goods. What an utter mess.
I’d notcied the same thing a few weeks ago a few streets away from us.
We have seagulls nesting on our chimney stacks and then they go into parental berserker mode when the chick falls off and lands in your garden before it can fly.
Perhaps domestic moggies need to grow a pair asI can’t see us all having trained hawks.
Flying rats. The collective noun should be designated packs not flocks.
I’d include wood pigeons in the same category. They’ve eaten all my grass seed this year.
But in terms of seagulls the solution is a gull guard. I had a new roof put on last year and had a gull guard fitted - no more decoration on the roof! Essentially a wire that is almost transparent from the ground supported by two little posts. I haven’t had the chimney cages fitted but I guess that is another deterrent.
I hate ‘em but at the end of the day they are only trying to survive.
Maybe the question should be ‘don’t put your rubbish out until collection day’.
Where I live, in a Victorian terrace, the rubbish starts to build up in the back lane within minutes of the bin men having been.
I guess that seagulls are adapting to a man-made situation; that there’s less for them to eat in the sea so they have turned to rich pickings on land from our profusion of easily plundered refuse and fast food eaten and discarded in the street.
We’re fined if it goes out too early (evening before is the earliest).
It did make me wonder if the residents of the student area (I was there as a student years ago, and many of the terraced houses were bought up for rental) perhaps leave a lot of food residues in the recyclables - I wash most out but have often wondered if I’m wasting my time doing so as they presumably have to accept a mixture of fairly clean to fairly dirty items, not to mention the waste of water/energy washing the stuff when it’s probably done better on an indistrial scale.
Yes they’re adapting, just like urban foxes, but they’re pretty vicious cretaures.
I once stupidly stopped the car to ‘rescue’ an injured gull, picked it up and was distracted by a passer by asking me why I didnt leave it to die, and as I replied the gull lunged at my chin with its beak and caused a nice gash. Took it to the local vets, no idea what they did with it. I think I was probably lucky as I heard of someone doing something similar on a beach and they had their eye pecked out.
I quite like wood pigeons but this year they’ve raided the cherry tree and crapped all over the cars! Seriously, one day I could not see out of the windscreen after one of them had deposited 20-30 pigmented parcels on the windscreen overnight - perhaps it was ill!
Might look at gull guard in the future, fortunately the gulls have nested a few doors away in recent years but not so long ago, when the kids were much younger, they were a problem.
Apparently a dalmation was grabbed by a gull te other day and has not been seen since.
Why do we tolerate humans? All they do is breed excessively. They think they can do what they like, drive other species to extinction and destroy the very planet that gives them life. Before turning one’s negative gaze on other species perhaps one should look in one’s own back yard.
Appreciate it’s not the gulls’ fault that they want food, same goes for rats, mice etc.
Sadly not all animals are seen by humans as cuddly and desirable, and we are apt to pick and choose those we prefer to preserve or control.
I wish I’d had my phone this morning as the litter from the torn bags was incredible.
Local councils probably need to re-appraise their collection methods when things like this happen, but I doubt that will mean anything simpler for already complex recycling processes in many areas. I quite like the green bags we have currently which accept a variety of items including paper/card/plastic/glass/tins - they are trialling separate glass collections a few streets away with (to me) stupid plastic containers with a narrow base/broad top - they look as though they’ll easily topple, and I can just imagine if we had them that the late night revellers from the nearby pub will have a whale of a time smashing them on tehir way home.
The green plastic bags however are flimsy, blow onto roads in windy weather, are easily ripped by gulls/animals or occasionally humans I’ve found in my front garden rifling through the contents presumably looking for persoanlly identifiable data.
Gulls are brilliant. It’s the humans who are stupid morons. Throw away food when people are starving. Wonder why the gulls open the bags. Do they have a brain? One wonders.
Hence my point above - these bags are for recyclable non food waste, food waste goes via a caddy (and yes I waste too much as many of us sadly do).The food waste locally is processed for energy using a bicohemical process, and should just be organic matter but I’ve seen idiots simply chucking in food in standard plastic bags/containers too as they’re either too lazy or thick to separate the waste from the packaging.
Again, gulls do not seem currently to be tearing my green bags, but I’ve seen it a few times recently and wonder why it has increased - could it be the weather or are people in some areas more likely to throw food along with the recyclable non-food waste.
Have you ever been dive bombed by a human? Have you had your car shat on endlessly by a human? Perhaps in your case. As far as I’m concerned they’re vermin, Dublin is destroyed by them, theres a large Central Park with lakes and ponds bang in the centre of Dublin, traditionally it was the home of ducks and swans, not anymore, the ‘protected species’ have literally taken over, I saw a young child been attacked by a gull there recently and a sandwich taken from him. Cull the Gull I say!
Which goes to show that it’s the stupid greedy humans that are the issue and not the gulls, which are simply following survival instincts. Maybe you should revisit your post and ask whether humans should be designated a pest species. Can you imagine a gull throwing away good food?
Humans have always tried to eradicate pests - weeds, vermin, flies, ants, foxes/wolves, venomous creatures that would leave us alone.
The urban gull has become a pest it wasn’t a few decades ago - schools have been closed, members of the public advised to carry umbrellas to ward off gulls and so forth. Clearly not the gulls’ fault they are trying to survive/procreate but like it or not humans don’t like non-human pests.
I’ve always been an animal lover at heart, but there’s a tipping point where most humans will start to get annoyed by pests.
Suspect I can’t edit the thread title to ‘Seagulls pests or survivors?’ or something similar now, but sorry urban seagulls are becoming pests, whether or not it’s our fault.
I think some people should take a step back and take view of life. Literally. Complaining about a species making a mess on the planet or that their grass seed getting nicked? I mean, come on.
Quite, and they’re as bad to their own kind as they are to the rest of the animal/plant kingdom, but unless someone can wave a magic want of enlightenment to homogenise us all into nice altruistic people who’d rather be eaten by a tiger than survive to disseminate our genes, we’re stuck with a mixture of human good and evil, and it’s been so since any progenitor ‘Adam and Eve’ characters were imagined.
When I mentioned i wish I’d had my phone earlier my intenet was to write to the council showing the inefficacy of the current recycling collection methods. We can’t stop the seagulls doing their thing unless there’s a change in the law to allow them to be controlled (ok culled), but there may be better ways to collect the recyclable stuff - sadly, some if not many many humans would balls this up due to their lack of concern for anyone but themselves.
