The Seafarers by Stephen Rutt

Author:Stephen Rutt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783964284
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson

Herring gulls call harshly. At dawn it sounds as if they are trying to hack down the darkness, each ‘ack ack ack’ an axe swinging against the night. They deliver it with full-bodied enthusiasm, bowing low, then swinging their heads up as they shriek. It is not the most pleasant sound. But it is evocative. For the last seventy-five years herring gulls have been calling over the crashing waves and sentimental strings of the Desert Island Discs theme tune. The association with the sea, islands and isolation is so strong that this very British coastal bird, not found outside the northern hemisphere, can be used to evoke in the mind of radio listeners the siren song of being marooned somewhere far off and impossibly remote.

Herring gulls first began nesting on rooftops in the 1920s and lesser black-backed gulls in the 1940s.17 Their urban populations have grown significantly, but their increased visibility is a mirage, obscuring the truth of their populations. Herring gulls have been red-listed for a decade, and amber-listed for a decade before that. Lesser black-backed gulls have been amber-listed for twenty years with no improvement. All but one of our British breeding gulls (the Mediterranean gull, a new colonist) is declining. We are seeing them more than ever, at a time when there are fewer of them than before. The move inland is a symptom of the sea and the state of our fisheries and the yo-yoing of our fish stocks. Unlike the rest of our seabirds, gulls have the adaptability and the resourcefulness to survive, to move inland, to change diet. The ‘seagull’ is hardly a seabird any more, in reality if not culture, where the association still clings on in more than just the name.

There lies an irony in being named after your food source. It plants an expectation, puts you in a pigeonhole that’s hard, if not impossible, to shake off. Herring gull and seagull – it sounds as if they don’t belong in towns. It sounds unnatural. A study from the Hebridean island of Canna has revealed a link between falling catches of fish and rapidly dwindling numbers of gulls. In 1988, there were 1,525 pairs of herring gull on Canna. By 2014 that had fallen to 95 pairs. Concurrently, at the nearby port of Mallaig, the average fish catch had fallen from 13,726 tonnes to 4,456 tonnes.18 It is just a link. Circumstantial and uncorroborated. But it fits with declines elsewhere and the general turn towards towns and new food sources.

This adaptability comes with side-effects. The modern diet is comprised of what’s available and what’s available might not be any good. It affects how the birds breed and live. A study of a colony in the Netherlands revealed that most still feed on a relatively natural diet of mussels and other bivalves. It also found that those with that diet, which is energy poor, tend to have smaller and fewer fledglings than those that feed on high-energy fishery discards and human rubbish.19 The

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