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Gulls: A Social History
This is the story of those marvelously adaptable birds—the gulls—and the most destructive of man. Over the past 150 years man’s actions have thrown some species of gulls totally out of context with their world, yet they have managed not only to survive but, for better or worse, to multiply at a rate that matches man’s own. Nature fitted the forty-four species of gulls to be efficient predators and scavengers, and for hundreds of years they lived the precarious existence of wild things, foraging along the shore and feeding on birds’ eggs and nestlings. When man arrived on the scene, they rapidly learned to follow the fishing boats and even went into the fields to eat the insects turned up by the plow—at one point saving an entire harvest by consuming swarms of grasshoppers. The nineteenth-century craze for plumage on women’s fashions nearly extirpated several kinds of gulls from our coasts. At last naturalists and concerned laymen established bird-protection societies to halt the indiscriminate slaughter. Then a new element entered the open garbage dumps. The graceful predators became omnipresent scavengers whose population explosion for a time seemed to have no end; whose range extended year after year; whose feet carried contaminants from dumps to reservoirs; who endangered aircraft; and who destroyed colonies of terns and puffins by consuming their eggs and young. Man’s latest relations with gulls have been programs aimed at poisoning them and smashing their eggs. Yet the gull remains the attractive, remarkable bird it always was. It is only man that has turned it into a pest. In addition to relating this pointed ecological case history, Gulls presents a handsomely illustrated account of the gull’s natural life, highlighting those seen in America—the familiar Herring Gull, the Great Black-backed, the Ring-billed, the Kittiwake and the Laughing Gull—with vivid accounts of the author’s trips to gull islands, both to watch the egg-destruction program and to study gull colonies.
179 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
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June 16, 2025
The moral is a familiar one even half a century later (1975 - 2025): how man perturbs natural systems and how species adapt to or perish among the iterative disturbances. In this case: gulls.
Mainly Herring Gulls (often colloquially, if inaptly, called "seagulls"). But the book discusses many species of birds, and how the proliferation of gulls themselves has pressured other bird species and transforms their own habitat surroundings.
You don't read this book for the moral so much as for insight and details -- if you stick with it there is a lot to learn about the history of human interaction with gulls. It's the kind of book that is rarer these days when we are overrun with a preponderance of secondary sources but fewer works like this one that blends primary and secondary sources in advancing a topical survey.
This book presents an engaging seminar on gulls.
I learned that gulls were nearly wiped out. As with beavers, Western fashion was to blame. Demand for plumage to decorate ladies' hats led to widespread slaughter of birds -- many millions per season, year after year -- for feathers that were widely marketed, especially during the Gilded Age of the late 1800s.
In noticing and abhorring such decimation, it took multiple spurts of local organization by passionate, moneyed individuals to agitate on behalf of another species in the advocacy of state laws protecting birds, federal protections, paying individuals not to kill them and educate their neighbors, and distributed organizations to educate and enforce bans and laws. All this, set against considerable economic demand where people could shoot and sell gulls and make more than they could in other trades. Indeed, this asymmetrical grassroots organization is the origin of the Audubon societies.
I learned one man serving as a an Audubon warden (Guy Bradley) was even shot and killed in Florida trying to arrest a plume hunter with dead herons in his possession (the man, Smith, was not convicted but whose neighbors later burned down his house). "Bradley's body drifted for a day in a small boat along the shore until local boys, made curious by circling vultures, altered such authorities as there were in southern Florida during that lawless time" (104).
I learned about evolutionary biologist Niko Tinbergen, who was renowned the world over for his patient research observing gull behaviors and how learned and innate behaviors combine to play into the great dramas of ecological balance and counterbalance -- what is too often glossed over as "biodiversity."
I (re)learned about the great auk, a flightless North American bird driven to extinction by European slaughter, used for food or bait. "Whole colonies, so the story goes, were sometimes marched across planks like little regiments, onto ships where the crewmen could more conveniently kill and preserve them. The last great auk was bludgeoned to death by fishermen on the volcanic island of Eldey, off Iceland, in 1844" (64).
I learned about William Dutcher. "He was one of those inspired amateurs -- well-read, genuinely interested in natural history -- who fight the battles that the professionals in government are often unwilling or unable to undertake" (81). Dutcher was active organizing and paying local wardens to protect gulls against gunners in the Northeast. He kept on being a thorn in people's side, fighting for the cause.
I learned a disturbing amount about aircraft bird strikes. "If the architects who designed Logan [Boston's airport] had set out instead to design a gull sanctuary, they couldn't have done a better job," Graham, Jr. quotes William Drury, Massachusetts Audubon Society's research director, contracted by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service with money from the Federal Aviation Administration after a fatal aircraft crash killed 62 people in 1960 (139).
I learned the average age of gulls was 15 years and that they take years to mature.
I learned about gull sex. "Sex is merely functional among animals, we are sometimes told;" Graham, Jr. writes, "but Black-headed Gulls go right on copulating after their eggs have hatched. Mounting his mate, flapping his wings vigorously and uttering a loud, deep note in his ecstasy, the male gull indulges himself in what Vladmir Nabokov has called 'that routine rhythm which shakes the world'" (56).
With its mix of conservation and ecological disruption narratives, natural field observation, interspecies population analyses, history and policy, and vignettes of real people, we learn about gulls -- often considered a pest species (one made so by their successful opportunism in the food and habitat resources created by our dumps and our sewage outfalls and our fishing). We might sometimes even elide (consciously or unconsciously) gulls in our own view of "nature" in our cities and surrounds. This book focuses attention onto a very interesting but lesser considered species too often hidden in plain sight.
After a spirited if multifaceted account, Graham, Jr. concludes somewhat pessimistically: "We [humans and gulls] are contemporaries in a sense, riding the runaway vehicle that is the modern industrial world. In life and adventure the gull has had many human admirers. Now our own shortcomings have brought us into a degrading conflict with this beautiful and resourceful creature. If the bald eagle is the symbol of our country's grandeur, the Herring Gull may come to stand for something far less noble in our national character" (169).
Note: this was a hardcover book, not the Kindle Edition.
Mainly Herring Gulls (often colloquially, if inaptly, called "seagulls"). But the book discusses many species of birds, and how the proliferation of gulls themselves has pressured other bird species and transforms their own habitat surroundings.
You don't read this book for the moral so much as for insight and details -- if you stick with it there is a lot to learn about the history of human interaction with gulls. It's the kind of book that is rarer these days when we are overrun with a preponderance of secondary sources but fewer works like this one that blends primary and secondary sources in advancing a topical survey.
This book presents an engaging seminar on gulls.
I learned that gulls were nearly wiped out. As with beavers, Western fashion was to blame. Demand for plumage to decorate ladies' hats led to widespread slaughter of birds -- many millions per season, year after year -- for feathers that were widely marketed, especially during the Gilded Age of the late 1800s.
In noticing and abhorring such decimation, it took multiple spurts of local organization by passionate, moneyed individuals to agitate on behalf of another species in the advocacy of state laws protecting birds, federal protections, paying individuals not to kill them and educate their neighbors, and distributed organizations to educate and enforce bans and laws. All this, set against considerable economic demand where people could shoot and sell gulls and make more than they could in other trades. Indeed, this asymmetrical grassroots organization is the origin of the Audubon societies.
I learned one man serving as a an Audubon warden (Guy Bradley) was even shot and killed in Florida trying to arrest a plume hunter with dead herons in his possession (the man, Smith, was not convicted but whose neighbors later burned down his house). "Bradley's body drifted for a day in a small boat along the shore until local boys, made curious by circling vultures, altered such authorities as there were in southern Florida during that lawless time" (104).
I learned about evolutionary biologist Niko Tinbergen, who was renowned the world over for his patient research observing gull behaviors and how learned and innate behaviors combine to play into the great dramas of ecological balance and counterbalance -- what is too often glossed over as "biodiversity."
I (re)learned about the great auk, a flightless North American bird driven to extinction by European slaughter, used for food or bait. "Whole colonies, so the story goes, were sometimes marched across planks like little regiments, onto ships where the crewmen could more conveniently kill and preserve them. The last great auk was bludgeoned to death by fishermen on the volcanic island of Eldey, off Iceland, in 1844" (64).
I learned about William Dutcher. "He was one of those inspired amateurs -- well-read, genuinely interested in natural history -- who fight the battles that the professionals in government are often unwilling or unable to undertake" (81). Dutcher was active organizing and paying local wardens to protect gulls against gunners in the Northeast. He kept on being a thorn in people's side, fighting for the cause.
I learned a disturbing amount about aircraft bird strikes. "If the architects who designed Logan [Boston's airport] had set out instead to design a gull sanctuary, they couldn't have done a better job," Graham, Jr. quotes William Drury, Massachusetts Audubon Society's research director, contracted by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service with money from the Federal Aviation Administration after a fatal aircraft crash killed 62 people in 1960 (139).
I learned the average age of gulls was 15 years and that they take years to mature.
I learned about gull sex. "Sex is merely functional among animals, we are sometimes told;" Graham, Jr. writes, "but Black-headed Gulls go right on copulating after their eggs have hatched. Mounting his mate, flapping his wings vigorously and uttering a loud, deep note in his ecstasy, the male gull indulges himself in what Vladmir Nabokov has called 'that routine rhythm which shakes the world'" (56).
With its mix of conservation and ecological disruption narratives, natural field observation, interspecies population analyses, history and policy, and vignettes of real people, we learn about gulls -- often considered a pest species (one made so by their successful opportunism in the food and habitat resources created by our dumps and our sewage outfalls and our fishing). We might sometimes even elide (consciously or unconsciously) gulls in our own view of "nature" in our cities and surrounds. This book focuses attention onto a very interesting but lesser considered species too often hidden in plain sight.
After a spirited if multifaceted account, Graham, Jr. concludes somewhat pessimistically: "We [humans and gulls] are contemporaries in a sense, riding the runaway vehicle that is the modern industrial world. In life and adventure the gull has had many human admirers. Now our own shortcomings have brought us into a degrading conflict with this beautiful and resourceful creature. If the bald eagle is the symbol of our country's grandeur, the Herring Gull may come to stand for something far less noble in our national character" (169).
Note: this was a hardcover book, not the Kindle Edition.
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