This Is Guernsey

By Tim Earl

‘THERE are a-gulls and b-gulls, but never sea-gulls,’ night-class pupil Ted Banks told me years ago.

I added a codicil: ‘If you are lucky you could see an e-gull.’

It’s a simple mantra, but thought-provoking.

We take gulls for granted… and to most of us they are all seagulls.

But, as Ted was trying to get across, they are not.

The well-known ‘seagull’ is properly called a herring gull. Black-headed gulls are rarely a problem and shot to fame in the film Watership Down, while little gulls are just fabulous with their bath-duck squeaky calls.

There are others – lesser black-backed that migrate to Portugal, Spain and Morocco for the winter, common gulls which are not seen in Guernsey often; and delightful kittiwakes named after the haunting cries they give at their colonies.

Rarer are glaucous and Iceland gulls, known as ‘white-winged gulls’, as their wing tips have no black on them – a title shared by the increasingly common Mediterranean gull.

Many gulls are hated. Raucous, aggressive and dirty, they rip open bin bags and steal chips and ice creams from the very lips of young children.

Gulls perform far more good service for mankind than bad, however.

Hands up those who dislike swarming ants on thundery summer days or scream when seeing a rat on our beaches.

If this newspaper were fitted with cameras, I would see lots of hands right now.

Their owners can sleep easier in their beds thanks to gulls, which feed on flying ant swarms high above our heads and rid beaches of dead and decaying matter that would otherwise attract and feed rats.

Vast flocks of gulls circle way up in the sky, feeding on ants in the summer. When noticed, few people realise what the birds are doing – consuming the queens which would form new colonies next year.

And at least one Guernsey farmer puts out any waste food from home into his fields, knowing that after eating it the gulls’ droppings will act as a free fertiliser.

I’ve never understood why management of the tip involves covering up our rotting kitchen waste.

If gulls were allowed to eat it and then poop on nearby fields the benefit would be massive and our tip might fill up far more slowly and with less leachate.

Gulls are good and should be loved by all, I say.

Perhaps I should expand my Magpie Appreciation Society to include them.

Happily, gulls are not without friends. A new breed of birdwatcher is studying them with a greater understanding of their habits and movements.

They have learned, for example, that Sark’s gulls are feral scavengers living off man’s waste, while their Alderney counterparts (or those that breed on the island of Burhou, at least) are truly wild, with fish as their principal food.

Birds from Le Havre and the French Channel Island of Chausey regularly visit Guernsey and Alderney, while our lesser black-backed gulls have been photographed enjoying winter holidays in the Algarve and Morocco.

These facts have been learned by a neat bit of field ornithology called colour ringing.

Most of us know about putting rings on birds’ legs to find out how long they live and where the holders migrate. These rings are metal and can be read only if the bird has been caught alive or, more commonly, found dead.

I learned recently of a gannet (not a gull, but useful as an example) that lived for 31 years after I ringed it as a chick on the Garden Rocks colony off Alderney.

We will never know anything about its life in between the two great events – being ringed as a baby and the ring found on its corpse so many years later.

A new technique being applied to gulls is getting vastly more information about the intervening years.

They are being fitted with coloured rings, each of which bears a highly visible number that can be read in the wild while the bird is alive.

Thus, the great black-backed gull with ring number E.36 (white letters on a green background) was ringed on one of the Chausey islets in July this year, seen on the River Axe in August, and had its number noted by me on Platte Saline, Alderney, in October.

Herring gull 1AA5 has been seen no fewer than 21 times (mostly at or near the Chouet tip) after being ringed as a chick in Sark last year.

Nearly 1,000 birds have had colour rings fitted largely by Paul Veron and Jamie Hooper.

Earlier this year the North Thames Gull Group came over and helped catch gulls by firing nets over the flocks, with terrific results.

Some lesser black-backed gulls ringed as chicks on Burhou have been spotted in Portugal, as the remarkable pair of pictures reproduced on this page show.

It is amazing to see images of helpless chicks in the nest and the same birds a few months later, hundreds of miles south.

The bird featured, 1.J2, was one of 11 seen on a beach there this autumn.

Many others were recorded by other Portuguese and Spanish observers all helping to build a picture of lesser black-backed gull migration and wintering habits.

I caught up with CR (colour ring) spotting while in Alderney last month and already have seen 15 birds with legible ring numbers (studied with the help of a telescope).

Of those, three were ringed on Burhou, two near Le Havre, three in the Chausey islands, one in Sark and six in the Vale.

One had visited England and another the Calvados area of France in the interim.

As more people see gulls with the rings on them and are able to read the numbers, so our knowledge of their movements and lifestyles will improve.

There may be no such thing as ‘seagulls’ but there are plenty of CR-gulls.

Take a look, record the number, let La Societe Guernesiaise, Paul Veron or Jamie Hooper know and you may be the recipient of some fascinating news.

Article posted on 7th November, 2009 - 2.30pm