Meet your new neighbours: The marauding seagulls invading Britain's towns

They're noisy, filthy, violent... and they're moving into a street near you. No, not gangs of teenagers, but the seagulls invading Britain's inland towns by their thousands

By Victoria Moore for MailOnline
Updated: 15:11 EST, 9 January 2009

There is neither a ripple of sea nor a rocky outcrop in sight. It is bleakly cold. And yet, from overhead, comes a familiar, elongated screech  -  the cry of a bird more usually associated with summer holidays and the seaside than a January day in an inner city car park. Before you can say 'Jonathan Livingston', my guide Peter Rock has whipped open the boot of his dirty green car, pulled out a telescope mounted on a large tripod and aimed it at a nearby rooftop.

'Here we go,' he says. 'You stay just where you are, fella. Yes, I thought so. Can you see the colour on its back? That's a Lesser Black-backed gull and he's got one of my rings on his leg so I know I've seen him before.

'At one time, before the war, he wouldn't have been here now. He'd have been in West Africa, or in Portugal loafing on a beach and eating sardines. Even if he came back in the spring to breed, he would have been very unlikely to hang out somewhere as urban as this.'

Seagulls can be aggressive towards humans, especially when nesting

This particular seagull is not unusual, though. For some years now, gulls have been leaving their colonies on islands and other remote places in the maritime wild and moving in on our towns. This is no trifling matter. Herring gulls  -  the species most British people automatically connect with the word seagull  -  are enormous creatures.

With a wingspan of four-and-a-half feet, an adult bodyweight of around a pound, a long, vicious beak, a flight speed of 60mph and sharp talons that are swift to draw blood if they move in to attack, each bird represents an impressive threat as it hurtles through the sky.

En masse, the ear-splitting noise of them all shrieking at once, not to mention the mess their excrement makes of rooftops, pavements, cars, and windows, or the damage they do to buildings, and a flock of seagulls is an even more fearsome prospect.

Peter Rock, an avian expert who claims to know more about urban seagulls than anyone else on the planet, has been warning of their ascent for some time but it is only recently, as the scale of the problem has become apparent, that officials have begun to listen to him.

Seagulls have adapted to the urban environment, but are posing an increasing threat to people and property

Gulls did not used to live in towns. 'I had a call from the BBC who were filming a period drama in Bath,' says Rock. 'They wanted to know whether there would have been seagulls in Bath in Jane Austen's time. The answer is No. But there are today  -  more than 500 pairs.'

The invasion of the urban gulls began, quietly and cautiously, almost a century ago. The authoritative guide to British bird life, Birds Britannica, records that herring gulls 'were the original pioneers' of nesting on buildings and breeding on roof-tops, a habit they acquired only in the 1920s.

The lesser black back was 'a relative latecomer to the habit. The first recorded instance was on factory rooftops in Glamorgan in 1945 [and] by 1970 there were still only 60 pairs nesting on buildings throughout the country.'

The numbers are now extraordinary  -  and you don't even have to live by the sea to be under threat. At the last count, back in 2004, Gloucester had 1,996 pairs of gulls, Worcester 342, Swindon 87 and Cheltenham 151.

It is Rock's contention that even in towns and cities far from the coast, we could soon be overrun.

Although traditionally sticking to the coast, gulls are now invading inland areas

'Three years ago, I estimated that we had 130,000-180,000 pairs of gulls nesting on rooftops in the whole of Britain and Ireland. It's quite clear that the growth of these urban colonies has been startlingly high.

'If you work on the breeding rates  -  urban gulls both start breeding earlier and hatch more chicks than those in the wild  -  and project forward ten years from that figure, I estimate that by 2015 we could have over a million pairs of gulls nesting on our rooftops.'

'A very serious problem'

Already, we are alarmingly close to the first urban 5,000-pair colony, which is likely to be in Aberdeen, where some 3,500 pairs of these rapacious pests have already made themselves at home. Once settled in, gulls virtually never return to the wild, they are urbanised for life  -  a very long time, considering that the average seagull lives to 20 years, and the record is 35.

'It is a very serious problem,' warns Rock, who besides researching gulls in conjunction with Bristol University has worked as a freelance consultant to some of the many councils desperate to rid themselves of this modern-day plague. 'The urgency of getting something done is intense. But it's not easy because the gulls always seem to be one step ahead.'

He begs me not to mention Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 thriller, The Birds, based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier in which birds carry out an increasingly menacing series of attacks on humans. But as the gulls move in on what we have long considered to be our territory, it is hard not to draw parallels.

These seagulls in north London were caught on camera dive-bombing residents

To a seagull, assessing an urban settlement from its aerial vantage point, a city is a very attractive place to be. Where we see the grey rise and fall of concrete Holiday Inns, industrial units and grand Victorian crescents, bounded by roads and bypasses, the gulls see a series of soaring cliffs and islands.

Georgian chimney stacks? Lovely for nest-building. Flat roofs? Just the ticket! With pebbles or chippings? Fantastic  -  it couldn't be more like the sea.

Look above you, at parapets in Birmingham, London or Aberdeen and you may very well be looking at a prime seagull breeding ground. A city will always be a few degrees warmer than the countryside. And, crucially, there is also plenty of space.

Or at least, there is as far as birds are concerned. There is no doubt that humans disagree. Physical attacks on humans by rogue seagulls are still mercifully rare. But they do happen.

A man ducks to avoid a gull's dive-bomb attack

A few years ago, Marie Munro, a pensioner, ended up in hospital after being stalked for several weeks by one particularly intimidating seagull, which took to dive-bombing her whenever she left the house, as well as attacking her and her husband Len in their back garden.

On one occasion, when the bird went directly for her face, she stumbled and fell, splitting a bone in her foot and tearing a tendon.

Then there are the South Shields seagulls who swooped in on locals to steal their lunch. The 36-year-old woman who had to be treated for head wounds after a savage seagull attack as she walked around a town in Somerset minding her own business last summer. The retired ambulance driver who lost his balance and fell off a wall when a group of gulls attacked him as he was clearing bird mess from the roof of his garage and was found dead by neighbours after suffering a heart attack. The list goes on.

To Rock, who cheerfully admits he has been whacked a few times himself by angry birds, these scare stories are beside the point.

He stops short of saying he feels affection for the objects of his research, but he says that most gulls go into attack mode only during the breeding season if they think their nests are under threat.

'Although, just as you do with humans, you do get the odd lunatic bird  -  we had one once that we all dubbed psycho...'

A nuisance for property owners

Noise is by far the greatest nuisance factor cited by those who have to put up with the thousands of birds who have become their highly unwelcome neighbours. Seagulls' squawking typically begins at 4 o'clock in the morning and is, as anyone who lives near a colony will tell you, impossible to sleep through.

Mess from droppings is another slippery, smelly and deeply unpleasant side-effect. A recent survey of small businesses in Worcester placed 'removal of seagull mess from pavements' among the top priorities for the city centre.

One local, an elderly lady who prefers not to be named, no longer leaves her house without an open umbrella to protect her from the seagulls that nest on her roof and like to perch on the edge, bottom facing dangerously outwards. Being highly alkaline, the excrement is also corrosive and eats through paintwork on buildings and cars. And forget urban foxes. Scavenging seagulls are far more efficient at ripping open plastic binbags left out for collection and scattering their contents up and down the street as they scavenge for food.

The third biggest problem is damage to property. 'In the wild when they get involved in territorial disputes, seagulls indulge in displacement activity on something inanimate  -  usually they pull up grass or something equally harmless,' says Rock.

'On rooftops, instead, they smash the hell out of the insulation, the air conditioning, they will pull up the felt if it is showing and I have even seen instances where they have pulled lead flashing away.'

Seagulls often nest on rooftops or in chimneys, posing a hazard to residents and creating a filthy mess

He believes the key issue in gull control may well turn out to be food. Gulls began nesting on buildings and moving inland partly as their wild colonies, on clifftops, were filling up, but also because, after the Clean Air Act of 1956, household waste, rather than being burnt, went straight to landfill.

A rubbish tip may be unsightly to us but it is a banquet as far as seagulls are concerned. They need only 150g of food a day, and while it might take seven or eight hours to find that in the wild, at a landfill site they can satisfy their appetite in a matter of minutes.

When I ask Rock whether there might be a natural upper limit on the swelling population of seagulls his answer is a mere shrug. 'Food is the only limit,' he says. 'And there is an awful lot of it about.'

It is not as if people have not tried to get rid of the gulls. A cull is out of the question  -  poisoning and shooting both carry too much danger.

What to do to halt the invasion

Scare tactics  -  such as alarms, or plastic models of predators  -  are either treated with derision by the birds, or all too often have a negative effect, such as the case of the company who set off noisy alarms to stop birds defecating on their once-pristine, now opaque glass roof only to find that the first thing a terrified bird about to take flight does is decrease its load...

Painting a roof bright red seems to deter gulls from nesting  -  no one knows why  -  and is a tactic that might be used in a sensitive area, such as a hospital.

But it doesn't solve the problem, just moves it somewhere else. Some councils are using a ploy suggested some years ago by Rock whereby eggs are removed from nests, dipped in oil and replaced.

Starved of oxygen, the eggs will not hatch but the parents are fooled into looking after them, so will not immediately lay more.

It is both painstaking and effective: Bristol Council has committed to spending £30,000 a year on it for a decade. But Rock no longer believes in it himself. 'It's just not effective enough.'

He now has plans for a three-year research programme, conducted in conjunction with Bristol University, which would study gulls intensively to find out more about their feeding habits and then, he hopes, be in a better position to deliver a long-term solution.

There's just one problem: he has no funding.

In the meantime, he warns, there will be no respite.

Gulls used to bother us only during the five summer months of their breeding season  -  as any birdwatching guide will tell you the lesser black-backed is migratory  -  but over a third of them now stay in Britain during the winter too, and every year it increases.

It's a territorial matter: like Germans with sunbeds, they just don't want to let others occupy their prime perches.

Take the bird we find on the roof of Bristol Temple Meads station. Rock first ringed it in 2004 and has since caught up with it in Madrid and Talavera de la Reina, also in Spain. It began breeding in Bristol in 2007 and wintered there for the first time that year. Now, he's not going anywhere  -  but he will continue to reproduce.

They may be unwelcome tenants but urban gulls, it seems, are here to stay. And until or unless a solution is found, our neighbourhoods will never be the same again.