This week The Hedgehog & the Fox go looking for those much-despised denizens of our urban landscape, gulls, in the company of writer, birdwatcher and radio producer Tim Dee. Gulls weren’t always held in such contempt. Tim writes in his new book, Landfill:
Gulls were the sea’s creatures for a long time. Far out, they didn’t find their way into human places, or feature much when early naturalists first began to write about birds they had seen. Gulls were unfamiliar and were figured as wild and remote, keeping cold company with oceans, storms and ice.
How different from the gulls we now see squabbling over gaping rubbish bags on city streets. ‘Gulls have come towards us,’ is how Tim puts it. And so they find themselves caught in an ecological trap with us; when we piled food waste indiscriminately in landfill sites, the good times rolled for the gulls. Now our waste management practices are changing and the pickings are less rich. Some gull species are endangered, yet still they are demonised, still high on the list of creatures the tabloids love to hate.
