'Swooping seagulls who steal your food need pity not hate'
Birding expert Stuart Winter reveals the sad reason that seagulls have become such seaside pests, brazenly stealing food from out of people's mouths
A family beach picnic serenaded by lapping waves and lilting gull cries was hardly the time or place for a half-term lesson on seabird ecology. My three grandchildren's eyes began glazing over the moment I started lecturing them on why our most maligned birds should be loved not loathed.
Mention of the dreaded S-word had put me in a flap after the trio witnessed a holidaymaker being relieved of a doughnut by a demonic creature with evil eyes and razor-sharp beak – a seagull! 'Gull, we call them gulls! Never, never seagulls!' I pontificated with the same zeal I had once reprimanded an American for having the temerity to say soccer rather than football.
Standing all schoolmasterly atop a rocky Norfolk breakwater, I explained how herring gulls with their silvery, ink-tipped wings were things of beauty but, sadly, now a Red List Species of Conservation Concern after a 70% UK population crash since the 1970s.
Diminishing food resources because of landfill site closures and reductions in fish discards along with the scourge of bird flu is making survival tough for a creature that has become a pariah for its liking of fast-food scraps. As my afternoon sermon came to an end, all eyes turned to a smoky grey shape gliding elegantly above our heads.
'Gull!' The grandkids declared in unison, each waiting for approval at their correct bird identification. Time for another lecture. Pointing out the stiff wings and rotund body shape of the bird coasting leisurely over the shallows, I declared that rather than a gull we were watching a fulmar – the closest thing to an albatross patrolling British waters.
Mere mention of an albatross, the mighty wanderer of storm-lashed southern oceans and ancient rhymes, had them captivated. So close was the fulmar I could point out features shared with its legendary relation: tube-shaped nostrils to distil sea-water and the ability to projectile vomit foul-smelling stomach contents to deter predators. After all the sermonising, I didn't have the temerity to admit that fulmar derives from 'foul seagull' in Old Norse!
Can you recognise the wren's song
The rock concert season is upon us but the sound of silence has descended on a countryside slouched in summer stillness. Warblers are no longer warbling and cuckoos have called their last. Nightingales have been put on mute. Exhausted robins are resting voices while replenishing feathers worn ragged by the labours of parenthood.
Although spring's dawn chorus is a fading earworm, one headbanger still blaring out dawn to dusk is arguably nature's most powerful vocalist by weight to sound. The Eurasian wren, a chocolate-coated, ping pong ball of a bird with a sticky up tail and barrow boy's gape, has a voice that defies its diminutive proportions. Weighing a mere nine grams, the male marks his territory with a 90 decibel song as loud and powerful as a rock drum solo that's audible from a kilometre.
Yet there is more to the wren's rat-a-tat song than the five-second paradiddles belted out without respite. Each of its verses contain more than 100 individual beats, many in the high frequency 7-8 kHz range, and repeated incessantly every month of the year. Rudely woken by the proclamations of a particularly raucous wren outside the bedroom window at 4am last week, I was reminded of the first lines of Walter de la Mare's beautiful poem, Jenny Wren:
Of all the birds that rove and sing, Near dwellings made for men, None is so nimble, feat, and trim, As Jenny Wren.
Wrens have gender identification issues across different cultures. In Germany, they take on a masculine persona and are called Zaunkonig, or Hedge King. Here in Britain, the bird was given the affectionate moniker of the Jenny Wren in the 1640s, largely because of a long-held belief the species was the female partner of the robin.
While ear-splitting males are the headline act, one wren vocalisation noted in literature that I would love to hear is the lullaby whispered by mother wrens when incubating eggs or tending fledglings. The gentle sounds are said to be reminiscent of distant twittering swallow song.
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