Every year during the annual Tasmanian gull count I’m reminded we must never under-estimate these amazing birds even though in some quarters they are derisively called “rats with wings”.
The truth is our gulls are highly intelligent and not quite as unhygienic and unsanitary as we might imagine. And, like many other bird species, they also have a sense of time and place to rival our own.
I first became aware of gulls’ awareness of time during my primary schooldays in Britain. Each day a flock of European black-headed gulls would turn up at precisely one o’clock, as the bell rang out to announce the end playtime after lunch. The gulls knew there would be a bounty of half-eaten sandwiches and discarded lollies.
Out of school hours, my interaction with gulls was usually on the coast and I marvelled at how the gulls congregated precisely where humans out to have fun gathered.
Gulls, like the people promenading in the briny air or sitting on the beach, appeared relaxed under the sun. That was until food appeared, and it was not just the kids who became excited at the prospect of ice-cream, dandy floss and hotdogs.
There was menace among the gulls, though. They were not the shy and wary kind that came to the school playground. These were the herring gulls of the coast, bigger and more raucous. They were in mugging mood, mobbing children especially, forcing them to drop their food, even stealing the treasured hotdogs from hands.
The seaside, especially at the popular resort of Brighton with a pier jutting far into the English Channel, was supposed to be for the enjoyment of holidaymaking humans, but the herring gulls appeared to make it a playground of their own.
This early exposure to the wrath of bullying gulls has stayed with me my whole life. And when I arrived in Hobart I was happy to find a lack of gull aggression here, even though the silver gulls have their moments when they indulge in gull anarchy on the Hobart docks.
Like the urban black-headed gulls in Britain, the silver gulls are smaller than the herring gulls and our own bigger species, the Pacific and Kelp gulls, which always appear friendlier in comparison.
I’m thinking gulls at this time of year, when I take part in the annual gull count conducted by Birdlife Tasmania. And as I’ve dusted off my clipboard for the survey for the past 20 years, I’ve considered how in a strange way the gulls’ lives mirror our own.
Gulls are intrinsically part of the human habitat, so monitoring their breeding success makes them a litmus test for wider environmental health.
The Covid-19 lockdown must have been hell for them, too: suddenly no people, no chips. As cafes and takeaways reopened, gulls were as quick as the humans to re-claim their waterfront space.