Gull-Lover's Travels

Call me gullible if you must, but I’ve had a crush on seagulls since childhood summers on the Gulf Coast, where they wheeled high over water, laughing with my sister and me. I renewed the crush in moody, rainy November when a dapper little Venetian gull sat by me as my husband plotted logistics during our trip to Italy. Bird and I people-watched quietly until an outdoor market vendor dumped fish scraps on the pavement. The sky filled with frantic gulls fighting for bits of awful offal, jabbering like the flying monkeys of Oz, though I don’t recall the monkeys pooping on Dorothy and Toto. The moment was not endearing, but I forgave. Poop happens, and I had on a hooded raincoat.

Italian gulls accompanied us from Venice to the Amalfi coast to Rome, where our journey ended at an apartment with a rooftop terrace encircled by bell towers and neighboring roofs, both pinnacles for roosting gulls who claimed their various locations at sunset and called to each other. The last call of the day is a “choke call,” so named because the bird lowers his head, seeming to gulp, and then throws his head back and heaves the call (hu-oh hu-oh hu-oh) out of his throat. Translation: “I’m here, you’re there, stay there.” Each species has its own calls for warning, courting, pleading, and family and food moments. Before hatching, chicks peep klee-ew, a sound imitated by adults as baby talk to the kids and for snuggly adult moments. 

Though gulls of similar size seem identical, over twenty species exist. Italy harbors six species, the most common being the Herring Gull. The Gulf Coast is home to at least nine species. Most prevalent is the Laughing Gull whose high-pitched, nasal-toned ha…ha…ha comments on sunbathers’ shapes and sizes. Species range from 11.5 to 30 inches long with wingspans from two to five feet and weighing 4.2 ounces to 3.8 pounds.

Not all gulls are seagulls. Some live in dry deserts or inland; others seek land when breeding. The birds are scattered over the planet, even in Arctic and Antarctic regions, and are as content in noisy, crowded, polluted cities as on peaceful sea coasts. Existing over thirty millennia, they evolved into today’s versions, exchanging prehistoric sulfurous landscapes with high, barren cliffs strewn with nest niches, for modern smoggy cities and skyscraper nests.

This bird is an adaptable, committed opportunist built for survival. Long wings allow quick exits with minimal runways and the ability to hover patiently while observing submerged prey drift close to the surface. Gull vision beats ours. They see in color, including infrared, and see violet skies, not blue. Among a small group of birds whose eyes move in sockets, increasing sight range, gulls can watch underwater edibles while keeping an eye on a French fry oozing from a toddler’s grasp (which is no match for gull talons’ grips). Those talons and hooked beaks provide razor-edged, flesh-ripping defense if bird or nest is threatened. Beaks serve as daggers, nutcrackers, and oyster knives. Small claws on the lower leg keeps them steady on high perches in hefty winds. Yet another survival trick up their feathered sleeves: they drink saltwater! A gland at bill base pumps salt out a nostril, desalinating retained water.

Their physical attributes are enhanced by an innate instinct for living the good life and an ability to remember and teach successful lifestyle strategies to their young. Gulls are monogamous, and a rare divorce is grounds for excommunication from the communal breeding colony. Both parents share nest-building and child-rearing duties, including food-gathering lessons. Of course dumpsters, landfills, and debris from sloppy sun worshippers on boardwalks and beaches equal free meals—and many ignore warnings not to feed birds. Once gulls get food, they stubbornly stay. Seagulls, however, take foraging beyond accepting handouts. Swimming gulls form a circle around a school of fish, paddling closer together to shrink the circle and easily harvest the unscholarly school. Gulls also stomp webbed feet in unison, imitating the sound of rainfall or a mole digging for grubs, both of which make earthworms bail out of the soil, offering themselves as a buffet. Perhaps it’s an instinct to conserve energy by hovering over paved roadways and bridges reflecting solar heat. Maybe it’s obvious that following plows turning over soil and the grubs within, and tracking trawlers gathering fish in nets provide easy pickings. Similarly it’s instinctive to hunt with effective hunters and swipe their kill. It seems beyond sheer instinct, however, to teach offspring to drop mollusks onto rocks from on high to crack the shells or to scatter breadcrumbs on the water to lure swimming fish to the surface.

Gull haters have their reasons—like having sandwiches snatched from a hand—and they deem seagull behavior unsanitary and their screeching obnoxious (the reason for calling a group of seagulls a squabble). They do squabble, but if predators threaten a gull, it’s squabble to the rescue in a replay of Hitchcock’s The Birds. They protect their own, yet will cannibalize one another to avoid starvation. The goal is survival, and it’s the reason they are the state bird of Utah. When Mormon pioneers planted their first crop, ravenous crickets gorging themselves on the crop were devoured by thousands of migrating seagulls who saved man, settlement, and themselves from starvation. Farmers honor them for predicting bad weather. When unsettled seas make snagging prey difficult, gulls move inland, warning farmers of impending storms. Sailors see them as protectors since legend says they are reincarnations of sailors lost at sea; and in Native American lore, they symbolize adaptability and freedom. Others, like me, see them as fascinating birds who retrieve fond memories of sunlit beaches and sandcastles with their amusing behavior, which defies the term “bird-brained.”

Lucile feels obligated to acknowledge seagulls are responsible for E. coli at some beaches, but the experience of being on the same level with roosting gulls while hearing and watching their evening ritual above the ancient city of Rome was a near mystical experience. To the fastidious, she suggests: drink treated water, swim in pools, and take a hooded raincoat if going to a beach.