Gull Trouble

At the same time more seagulls are showing up in coastal cities, their overall population is shrinking. What is going on with New England’s rascal bird?

BY SARA ANNE DONNELLY

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TRISTAN SPINSKI

Student intern René Borrero, cradling a great black-backed gull chick, ducks down as an adult gull swoops in during a datagathering expedition on Maine’s Appledore Island. Behind Borrero is Sarah Courchesne, codirector of the island’s gull research program; both are wearing helmets as protection against dive-bombing birds.

ast summer, there were 96 herring gull chicks living on the flat roofs of the Portland Museum of Art. Hatched in nests of grass, mussel shells, and plastic trash, the chicks spent their days wandering the gravel expanse under the blazing sun or curled up in fluffy brown speckled balls in the scrub brush growing around the cupolas and waist-high border walls of their urban world. Surrounding them were adults by the dozens, perched on the roofs’ highest points, scanning the sky for predators such as bald eagles (rarely a concern here in the city) or ushering chicks out of the blazing, heat-stroke-inducing sun (often a concern here in the city).

From the sidewalk five stories below, the adult herring gulls, with their distinctive bright white bodies and blacktipped gray wings, their chests puffed out, their heads held high, formed a striking phalanx atop the decorative halfmoons of the PMA’s facade. Sometimes, the gulls spread their wings and swooped down, laughing their highpitched haw haw haw as they scanned the ground for scraps of food. They perched atop lampposts. And, yes, they occasionally pooped on things. And people. In short, as gulls do, they acted like they owned the place.

Last June, University of New England ornithologist Noah Perlut opened the hatch to the museum’s largest roof and climbed up with two undergraduate assistants. Immediately, gulls lifted up in a low-swirling cloud of frantic flapping and screeching like a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds. Perlut’s students cowered, eyes wide, each holding a crooked arm overhead for protection. But Perlut only smiled, unperturbed. He’d been studying Portland’s rooftop gulls for eight years. He knew the drill.

“You can go ahead and grab chicks!” Perlut yelled to his students before plopping down onto the gravel with a large cardboard box he’d brought to hold chicks waiting to be banded. Perlut, a tanned father of three with a surferdude chill about him, unzipped his frayed gray-and-green backpack and pulled out a notebook, pen, and Ziploc baggie of bands in UNE’s unique orange-and-black color combination, which helps amateur bird-watchers as far away as Texas identify these banded birds as his. Perlut’s gull study and many others rely on these amateur sightings to track birds via the federal website reportband.gov.

Gulls are migratory birds and usually nest on islands, but since at least the 1970s some herring gulls have chosen to rear their young on Portland rooftops. In 2011, the first year of his study, Perlut banded nine chicks on a single office building downtown. By the summer of 2019, he and his students were banding 148 chicks on 14 commercial rooftops in the center city, including the PMA. Perlut estimates there are around 300 chicks born on city rooftops every season in Portland, including in nests on houses, but he can’t say whether that’s a change from years past because counting birds isn’t what he’s after. He’s interested in why they’re here and how long they’ll stay. “Part of this is for the love of understanding the animals that we’re so in contact with every day,” he says. “They just have a bag full of mysterious behaviors that we see here on the street and we think it’s that simple, when their lives are in reality much more complicated.”

Portland may want to brace for an influx, if trends elsewhere are any indication. In coastal towns and cities in the United Kingdom, including London, the urban herring gull population has quadrupled since 2000 and has even spawned a genetically distinct subspecies. There are reports of gulls staggering drunk out of brewery vats, dive-bombing grannies and small children, and pecking a pet chihuahua to death. In Rome, Italy, yellow-legged gulls have lately terrorized tourists at the Forum, screeching and circling by the tens of thousands at sundown. Closer to home, the Jersey Shore town of Ocean City recently became the first on the East Coast to deploy trained falcons, hawks, and owls to scare away “increasingly aggressive” gulls that, according to town officials, had become “dependent on an unnatural supply of food stolen from people on the boardwalk and beach.”

Here in New England, flocks of gulls in the street of Boston last winter mucked up the testing of self-driving cars, which identified the birds as a single, large roadblock for which they needed to wait indefinitely, while in York, Maine, a photograph of a tourist’s first-ever lobster roll being stolen by gull beak right out of her hand recently went viral.

And in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the distance between the harbor and the downtown is only a couple of blocks, musician Bradley Royds recently made himself a lightning rod for the local love-’em-or-hate-’em gull debate by obtaining federal permits to remove nests from the roof of his downtown studio, where he’d noticed a loud and pernicious increase of the birds over the past five years. Gulls were ripping open trash bags, dive-bombing residents, and screeching from their city nests at all hours. What’s more, Royds says, gulls can carry disease. (They can carry E. coli bacteria, which can be transmitted to humans through the birds’ poop.) “This is an ecological and humanitarian effort to do the right thing for our town,” Royds says. “Otherwise they will move in and take over, and they have absolutely zero respect for humans. Or themselves, really. Vicious, vicious little creatures.”

It’s this tension between the world of animals and the world of people that fascinates Perlut. Last summer, he was involved in more than half a dozen research projects, each on a different species, each from a different part of the globe, some long-term gigs, some one-offs, all linked by Perlut’s central concern of how wild animals adapt to life alongside humans. He got into gulls on a whim after watching the birds nest outside his wife’s office window in down- town Portland. He wondered: Will gulls that fail to procreate successfully in the city try again the next year? Are chicks born on these rooftops forever city birds that will mate and rear their own young here? “These are animals that are all around us, and sometimes we know it and sometimes we don’t,” he says. “The gulls in Portland are a great example of that, where they have this secret life that’s incredibly complex.”

That secret life is proving to be a problem lately, as scientists in New England scramble to explain the birds’ unprecedented decline. Both the herring gull and the great black-backed gull, the birds we New Englanders are most likely to call a “seagull”—a colloquial term that isn’t specific to any species—have declined in the Gulf of Maine at a rate of roughly 40 percent over the past decade. Over their two centuries of history in coastal New England, gulls have declined previously because of natural predation, environmental stressors, and a robust featherpoaching effort to supply the Victorian hat industry. They’ve always rebounded quickly, but not so lately. The population just keeps thinning.

Perlut found out about the decline from a scientist buddy a couple of years into his study, and suddenly his quirky little impulse project became part of a big important picture. Could Portland and other communities on the Gulf of Maine be a refuge for gulls struggling to survive in the wild, as cities and towns elsewhere in the world appear to be?

That morning on the museum roof, one of Perlut’s students handed him a tawny weeks-old chick that had molted most of its fluff for young feathers. He turned the bird gently onto its back, rested it in his lap, and clamped a band loosely around its leg. “The dangers are equally present on an island versus a city—they’re just different dangers,” Perlut said, as the bird’s round black eyes blinked up at me. “On the rooftops, birds can fall off and die; birds can get heat stress and die; birds can be eaten by somebody else, including other gulls or predators, and die. On an island, gulls can be eaten by other gulls, particularly by other species of gulls, and there is also a much stronger potential for things like flooding, which could kill them, especially if they’re hatched closer to the shoreline. So there’s just different peril. And that’s really what our work has identified, that the perils are sort of equal in terms of the volume of them, but they affect the birds’ lives in different ways.”

Perlut stood the bird up on the gravel, and it rushed for the shelter of the border wall. Under the screeching chaos of the still-swarming adults, the juvenile jumped up onto the wall, panicked, and leaped off the building.

The students rushed to look over the edge. Below, a man and woman on the sidewalk outside a Starbucks crouched over the bird. “Hey!” the students shouted at the couple, waving their arms. “Yo!”

“Is he all right?” Perlut asked, fishing around in the cardboard box for another bird to band.

“It looks like he’s still alive,” one of the students said. “He’s hurt, though.”

About half an hour later, the gull was returned to the rooftop in a box. Its developing wings had saved its life, but it had a limp that Perlut said might be a sprained joint. The students opened the hatch and climbed down off the roof while Perlut lingered to check on the gull. He watched it stagger away. It stumbled and collapsed briefly in the brush near a nest, which made one of the adults still screeching overhead dive for it. The bird scrambled up and limped on. Perlut walked after it, checking to make sure it wasn’t fatally injured.

In addition to a small metal band from the federal Bird Banding Laboratory program, this gull tagged as part of University of New England professor Noah Perlut’s studies has a plastic ID band stamped with letters big enough to be read from a short distance with binoculars.

He returned, his normally jovial face tense. It’s not easy sometimes, watching what these birds go through. “As a scientist,” he said, “unless they’re really hurt, we have to let, sort of, natural courses.” He looked back at the young bird one last time while the swarming parents overhead continued to scream. It was getting late, and he had a lot more roofs to visit. He grabbed his backpack and disappeared down the ladder.

On the ocean, gulls are good luck. Gulls are strong, brave, commanding. They are harbingers of land, of fish just below the surface, of a coming storm. Legend has it they hold the souls of drowned sailors and fishermen, so killing one is bad luck. In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic 1855 poem, “The Song of Hiawatha,” when his hero is swallowed by a sturgeon, it’s the seagulls he calls to claw him out of the fish’s belly.

“Set me free from this dark prison, And henceforward and forever Men shall speak of your achievements, Calling you Kayoshk, the sea-gulls...the Noble Scratchers! ”

Preeminent Dutch ornithologist Niko Tinbergen spent decades studying the European herring gull, a close cousin of the New England version, ultimately winning the Nobel Prize in 1973 in part for his gull research. From a blind that was little more than an overturned box tethered to the turf on the rocky shore, the bespectacled Tinbergen crouched over his notebook, peering at the birds to divine, as he wrote, “the secrets of community life.”

Turns out, gulls most of the time just like to chill. “One must persevere,” Tinbergen noted, “and never be discouraged when many hours go by without much of interest happening.” When they do, well, do something, it’s often kind of awkward. Tinbergen observed that the birds aren’t particularly great fliers, and their swimming and walking abilities are only so-so. To watch a gull dive for a fish, as he described it in his seminal 1953 account, The Herring Gull’s World , is like watching a ping-pong ball bobbing on the surface of the ocean: “The whole performance lacks the expertness that characterizes the analogous ... diving of terns.” If they wow at anything, Tinbergen decided, it’s being a little bit good at all things. Gulls are consummate generalists. They reminded him of another consummate generalist: human beings. “The student of behavior is struck by the deeper similarity between man and animals,” he wrote. “It is as if the animals are continuously holding a mirror in front of the observer, and it must be said that the reflection, if properly understood, is often rather embarrassing.”

On Great Duck Island, off the coast of Maine’s Acadia National Park, College of the Atlantic professor John Anderson has spent more than 20 years observing the birds. Like Tinbergen, he finds he can relate to them—their individualism, their tenacity, their penchant for literally shooting the breeze. He likes to climb to the top of the Great Duck Island Lighthouse and watch the birds circling idly in flight. “I think that gulls show every apparent indication of what we call joy,” he says. “They’re having fun. I mean, if you could jump off a high place and soar, wouldn’t you?”

A few years back, Anderson noticed a persistent and widespread decline in New England’s gull populations that he couldn’t pin to any specific stressor. It’s a trend that’s in keeping with broader threats to birds in North America. Last year, the journal Science published a study that found that the total bird population in the United States and Canada has gone down by 29 percent—roughly 3 billion birds—since the 1970s. And while critics assert that a decline in gulls in particular is merely a correction for a population artificially ballooned by landfills that were open from the 1970s to 1990s, Anderson says that while the decline actually began around the same time that open landfills in Maine were being capped, it really accelerated after they had been closed for some years.

“I don’t think it’s a simple cause and effect,” he says. Instead, the continuing species-wide decline of these generalist birds is “to me very scary, because it suggests that multiple things are happening in the environment. We’re looking at a perfect storm of increased predation, declining food sources, changes in fishery patterns, and none of it is good for gulls.”

None of it is good for people, either, Anderson argues. If these highly adaptable birds—there are 36 species in the gull family Laridae , inhabiting every part of the globe, including Antarctica, nesting in all kinds of landscapes, and eating all kinds of food—if these birds can’t make the Gulf of Maine work for them, what does that mean for us humans?

In 2013, alarmed by the persistent decline in gull numbers and its implications for the Gulf of Maine at large, Anderson created the Gull Working Group, a loose affiliation of gull biologists who share findings to try to solve the mystery of the birds’ decline. (Noah Perlut is a member.) The researchers have found that many of the most common species of gulls in the North Atlantic are in decline, including gulls in Finland, the British Isles, and Eastern Canada. Climate is a probable common factor, although current evidence doesn’t point to its being the primary cause.

“Particularly here in the United States, a lot of the emphasis in the 20th century was on gulls as pests, and the potential impact of gulls on other species, and gull management,” says Anderson. “I think now we’re moving into a very different place, where there are more and more of us who are sort of rethinking gulls. And we’re now confronting this business of major declines and having to work out what that might mean in the broader sense.”

New England’s herring gulls might be amenable to city life, but the region’s second most common gull, the great black-backed, might not be. Great black-backeds are the largest gulls in the world, with a six-foot wingspan, an ornery temperament, and a reliance on marine-based food sources. That worries Sarah Courchesne, an associate professor of natural sciences at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and codirector of the gull research program on Appledore Island, off the New Hampshire coast. Courchesne has seen the number of great black-backed breeding pairs on Appledore decline by roughly 60 percent since the early 2000s. Because black-backeds aren’t as flexible as herring gulls in their feeding habits, a drop like this could mean they “just kind of disappear from our landscape,” Courchesne says.

I met Courchesne at the height of summer breeding season on Appledore Island. She was there to check in with her summer interns, one of whom was researching whether great black-backed gulls are developing an adaptation to better accommodate life among humans. As we walked the island’s trails that morning, we passed a volatile tapestry of nests, each of which was manned by at least one very protective parent, and dozens of herring gulls and great blackbacked gulls keeping watch from the roofs of the island’s dormitories and research buildings. Being dive-bombed by one of these birds triggers a primitive, hit-the-dirt panic. To this end, it’s wise to wear a helmet around Appledore’s gulls. Outside the mess hall, a good Samaritan had laid a pile of sticks for anyone who’d forgotten their helmet that day. (Gulls protecting offspring tend to dive for the highest point, and it’s better a stick held aloft be that point than your head.) A few summers before, an intern had braved the island without helmet or stick only to be concussed by a diving great black-backed gull and emergency-ferried back to the mainland.

Courchesne is forgiving, though. “Some of them are really quite gentle,” she says. “Some of them you can almost pick up by hand when they’re sitting on their nest. And others are incredibly defensive of their offspring.