Seagulls and St Ives

Here's a report from The Telegraph on the menace of aggressive seagulls which appears to have got completely out of hand in the lovely seaside town of St Ives in Cornwall.

Now I've been to St Ives, albeit many years ago, but what kind of useless council do they have down there that they're will to admit defeat and throw in the towel over these stupid birds?

Because anyone who knows anything about seagulls (me, for example) could have told them they were wasting their time with hawks and that what's really required is a strategy that involves replacing (not pricking) their eggs with false ones and denying these foul birds a man-made nesting site on top of public and private buildings.  

For reasons that no one can explain convincingly to me seagulls are a protected species which rules out the obvious answer of 'culling' the birds to reduce and control their numbers,    but the council's answer of learning to live with the problem is a terrible advert for effective local government.

So for the foreseeable future I will not be heading back to Cornwall and St Ives.

They swoop to conquer: seagulls win the ice cream war on St Ives beach

The 'infestation' of seagulls at one Cornish resort has grown so severe the council has conceded defeat in its efforts to control them, admitting that people will have to 'learn to live' with the birds.

The Telegraph's Tom Rowley falls victim to one of St Ives' greedy gulls Photo: Jay Williams/The Telegraph



By Tom Rowley - The Telegraph

Swooping down on landfills and rifling through rubbish sacks, seagulls have long had a voracious appetite for our leftovers.

In recent years, though, it seems they become bolder, snatching ice creams and sandwiches straight from the hands of families strolling along at seaside resorts.

Such attacks are most frequently reported in Cornwall, where locals could be forgiven for thinking Hitchcock’s The Birds was a documentary. As well as chips and pasties, stallholders have seen seagulls snatch spectacles and even ceramic milk jugs.

According to the RSPB, the number of gulls in seaside resorts has swelled with the popularity of eating on the move. It expects the population to continue to rise, with better-fed birds hatching more chicks.

The “infestation” at one Cornish resort has grown so severe the council has conceded defeat in its efforts to control seagulls, admitting that people will have to “learn to live” with the birds.

Over more than seven years, St Ives town council has tried a raft of ruses to protect holidaymakers’ lunches. First, councillors broadcasted loud crashing sounds at beaches to scare seagulls away, but they soon realised there was no threat.

They then brought in hawks, but the birds of prey focused on pigeons rather than gulls, which ganged up to “mob” them. Finally, they tried pricking eggs, but the birds just built new nests.

“The number of breeding pairs continued to increase,” said Tim Andrewes, a town councillor. “We can’t do anything. We just have to learn to live with them. Even if we were allowed to cull them, all you would do is create a vacuum into which more gulls would fly.”

The Sunday Telegraph risked life and limb to visit the front line of the tussle between bird and man last week, to discover how residents and visitors are coping with these permanent — and permanently hungry — neighbours. At the ice cream stall on Porthmeor Beach, beneath the town’s Tate gallery, Annie Jackson warns all her customers to sit under parasols and to “keep the cones very close at all times”.

The 66-year-old was caught out herself holding an ice cream. “I felt several of them over my head and one took the ice cream,” she said. “Then it took my glasses off my face as well.”

There is a warning sign in the stall but she says she still sees several attacks a day. Occasionally people get scratched as gulls descend.

“One lady came in with a nasty slash on the back of her neck and a child came in screaming,” she said.

In an unscientific test, The Sunday Telegraph bought three ice creams in turn and paced along the beach to see how much could be eaten before the food was spotted. No seagulls spotted the first one — two scoops of strawberry — even though it took eight minutes to polish it off. But there was no such luck with the second — vanilla with a chocolate Flake — clocked by a seagull after six minutes. The bird dived from behind, knocking the cone from my hand.

It must have alerted its colleagues, for within three minutes a bird hurtled towards my final ice cream. It tore into the cone but the vanilla ice cream fell straight from its beak on to the beach.

In just half an hour, the gulls targeted three family picnics on the same stretch of sand. The Davies family from Didcot, Oxfordshire, were picked upon when a seagull grabbed a prawn sandwich Charlie Davies was eating. Earlier in their holiday, a gull dropped a pasty it had stolen on to the head of Charlie’s 15-year-old daughter, Susie, only a day after her mother had her ice cream pinched.

“It’s worse here than anywhere around the coast,” said Mrs Davies. “We’re eating in the tent now.”

Tony Whitehead, from the RSPB, said not all gulls behaved this way, indicating it was a “learned behaviour”, copied in some areas. “There are some seaside towns — St Ives for instance — where the birds are quite forward,” he said. “In other places, they don’t nick pasties.”

The gulls are more likely to steal food in August as their chicks have flown the nest. “They do not need to find food that the young chicks need, such as fresh fish,” said Dr Viola Ross-Smith, research ecologist at the British Trust for Ornithology.

For now, then, the gulls appear to have the upper hand. “If you wave your hands, they will move away,” said Dr Ross-Smith. “They are not actually going to attack you — it is not going to be like something from Alfred Hitchcock.”