On the Wild Side with Professor Ian Rotherham: The Herring Gull has an eye for a snack

The herring gull is perhaps our archetypical ‘seagull’ and adaptable to human influences, is a born survivor. These big, long-lived, highly intelligent birds are equally at home on sea cliffs or, like the one pictured here at Whitby, in seaside towns. Herring gulls, their slighter cousins lesser black-backed gulls, and the smaller black-headed gulls are our three most familiar species often associated with people and built places.

Along the Yorkshire coast, and especially at Scarborough, the rather small and delicate gulls, colonial-nesting kittiwakes, have taken up large-scale urban dwelling.

However, it is the heavily-built herring gull that has gained a bad reputation for stealing the tourist pasty or fish and chips! Brash, big, and bold, the herring gull has an eye for a chance when it comes to free, tasty titbits.

And indeed, what an eye! Whilst it is too easy to anthropomorphise nature, the bright yellow eye with the central black dot of the pupil seems to have a piercing coldness of unsentimental calculation – generally where is the next snack opportunity.

A hefty beak with slightly hooked tip goes along with this as a multi-purpose feeding tool for an opportunistic scavenger and predator. The old song by Survivor was about the ’Eye of the Tiger’ but how about the ‘Eye of the Herring Gull’, ever alert, ever watchful!

Above all, these birds know their patch and they sit and wait until lunch comes to them with either our discarded waste, or a moment of careless mishandling of a pasty or other food.

I watched a young woman sit down with a bread stick sandwich wrapped in foil. As she sat on the bench, she made the singular mistake of waving the now half unwrapped French stick plus filling as she gestured to her companion. This was a fateful error of judgment or lack of it, as in a fleeting moment, quick as a flash, the gull swooped down and the top half of the sandwich was carried off, and the rest was scattered on the floor. It was clinical!

Professor Ian D. Rotherham, researcher, writer & broadcaster on wildlife & environmental issues, is contactable on [email protected] ; follow Ian’s blog (https://ianswalkonthewildside.wordpress.com/) and Twitter @IanThewildside