Gulls Dreaming by Ann Lingard

‘Grubby seagulls.’The words are engraved on a pale slab on Maryport pier, in serifed, italic script. Why ‘grubby’? There are gulls perched on the metal posts that edge the quay. There are gulls pecking amongst the pebbles and wrack along the muddy margins of the estuary. But they aren’t grubby – coastal gulls are clean, whether Greater Black-backed, Herring Gulls juvenile or adult, Black-headed or Common.

William Mitchell (1823-1900), ‘Mitchell of Maryport’ [1], is especially well-known for his maritime paintings. Although ships are the focus, the scenes are crammed with tiny but perfect details. There are patient horses, snarling or smiling dogs, and floating cows; children with hoops, old men leaning against walls and chatting, young men on the edge of the pier, legs dangling over the water as they fish, oblivious to the racket around them. And of course there are the gulls, mere hints of white and black, but clearly seen to be squabbling over detritus in the water; resting on flotsam or the stern of a dinghy; flying in low to check out the fishermen’s catch. These are sparkling and un-grubby gulls, doing what gulls do, added almost as afterthoughts, but essential to the truth of the scene.

When I grew up in Cornwall, in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, it was rare to see gulls inland. When they did gather on the fields, my parents would always say, ‘Must be a storm at sea.’ Gulls would also appear at ploughing-time, to forage in the newly-exposed soil. But it has become usual now to find gulls way inland, apparently just as at home in towns and cities as on the coast. They have been lured by rubbish tips, by fields sprayed with slurry, and plentiful urban nesting-sites on rooftops and chimneys. Even far from the coast, in Oxfordshire, gulls gather on the reservoirs around the city. Their habits have become ‘grubby’.

Worse, they spread bacterial diseases like Salmonella in their faeces, which can enter the water supply. In the 1980s my colleague Pat Monaghan, and her research team at the University of Glasgow’s then Zoology Department, looked at ways of protecting the city’s water from roosting and defecating gulls: the most effective deterrent was to broadcast recordings of the birds screaming in distress as though they were being attacked. Out for a run around the reservoirs at Milngavie, I was occasionally shocked out of my mindless pounding by those harsh, panicked calls. In the early days of the experiment, gulls would lift off from the banks and the water, but it became apparent that, with time, they grew accustomed to their invisible compatriot ‘crying wolf’.

My own interest in gulls as conveyors of disease started early, linked to my growing enthusiasm for parasitology, or more specifically helminthology, the study of parasitic worms. My undergraduate summer project was on the prevalence of the larvae of parasitic worms in winkles, Littorina littorea, on the shore, and their pathological effect on the snails. When infected snails were dissected, dozens, sometimes hundreds, of larvae spilled out into the dish: pale and almost transparent or tinted orange with carotenoids, depending on the species. There were sausage-shaped redia larvae, filled to bursting with the next, dispersive larval stage, the cercariae. And there were cercariae ready to leave, oval-bodied with tails, those of the colourless Cryptocotyle lingua with its black eye-spots easily distinguished from the carrot-coloured Himasthla secunda. When ready, they would burst out of the snail and swim away to find a new ‘host’, usually a rockpool fish, on which to encyst – and wait. For parasitic worms, life-cycles are complicated matters, games of chance [2] – so the more offspring they can produce, the more likely they will succeed to propagate their species; and if this means waiting, semi-dormant, to be eaten by a suitable host, so be it. So a gull, paddling in the shallows, catches and eats a small fish, and the parasite encysted in the fish’s skin is stimulated by the warmth and digestive juices in the gull’s gut to grow and develop into an adult worm. When fertilised, the worm’s eggs pass out in the gull’s faeces and hatch, and these miracidia larvae swim around until they find a snail. Even now, I note where gulls are congregating on intertidal rocks and, where possible, I go to check for Littorina. I look for unusually large winkles – the parasite larvae often cause gigantism – and pull the snail quickly off the rock, trying to catch sight of its foot before it is hidden beneath the shield-like operculum; if the foot is orange-brown instead of white, the winkle is almost sure to be infected. But gulls, and humans, can eat parasitised winkles without fear, for the larvae still need that next stage, the encystment on a fish, to become infective.

Surprisingly, for Herring Gulls seem ubiquitous, we are warned that the numbers of several species of gull are in decline [3]; Herring Gulls have now been joined on the Red List by Greater Black-backs. Common Gulls are not at all common. One likely reason is the change in management of council rubbish tips – formerly an easy source of food – which have been covered over for years. Another suggestion is that it might also be due to the reduction in fish waste thrown out from trawlers, due to the quota system. (The increase in predation on chip and pasty-eating tourists doesn’t seem to be slowing the rate of decline.)  Figures for the effect of the continuing H5N1 Avian Influenza epidemic, which has killed thousands of sea-birds including skuas, gannets, guillemots and barnacle geese, indicate that gulls have been hit hard too.

Gulls are intelligent, like crows, and can work out ways of accessing food – pasty-grabbing aside. They prise mussels off rocks and then head for an area of smooth hard ground – a tarmac road, a car park, the stony surface of a pier – and fly high and release the shellfish. If the two valves of the shell do not break apart or crack, the gull will fly down, pick up the mussel, and repeat the trick until it’s able to extract the soft edible contents with its hooked yellow beak. Recently, when looking down into the clear water of Loch Shieldaig, I was delighted to see the pale orange globes of several sea-urchins, Echinus esculentis, half-hidden amongst the gently-swaying wrack. There had been a full moon a couple of nights previously, and the spring tides had a large rise and fall: at low water, urchins were clearly visible across the bay, attached to the side of the rocky reef where the seals hauled out. On the following day, as the tide dropped, I watched a herring gull paddling intently by the reef, its head cocked to one side. Then it took off and rose almost vertically before plummeting, head first, into the water – emerging with an urchin held awkwardly in its beak. Weighed down by the cumbersome object, it flew towards the shore and then rose again to drop its prey down onto the shingle. For the next half-hour it ripped at the shattered urchin, pulling out long streamers of innards; walking round its feast, peering, pecking, gulping.

Less successful was the attempt of two adult herring gulls to steal a half-loaf of stale bread from our bird-table. Gulls, mostly herring gulls, regularly fly over our small-holding in North-west Cumbria, usually above the tree-tops, yet constantly checking out our field and the rookery for opportune snacks. Surprisingly, unlike their furious response to the buzzards, the rooks pay them no attention and, in twenty-odd years I have never seen a gull take a rookling or descend to ground level, even though they scavenge on the adjacent slurry-sprayed pastures. But that lump of bread was clearly irresistible. One gull had landed on the roof of the barn across the yard; another flew low to make a preliminary recce. The bird-table was close to a tall yew, and was attached to metal railings that were topped with curlicued spikes. Over and over, the gulls took turns in trying to drop down then level out and angle their flight to avoid the hazards; over and over they failed, returning to the roof to fidget, heads tilting, eyeing up the problem. It took them more than twenty minutes to admit defeat. I admit to disappointment too, because I was looking forward to seeing how they dealt with that awkward shape.

On a still day the air over our field climbs upwards in an organised spiral, invisible to humans. On the flat plane of the ground we cannot feel it, but up there, coasting slowly, a single gull senses the stirring. She spreads her wings, tilting them to capture the full power of the lift; with the smallest of adjustments, she relaxes into the thermal, allowing herself to be carried upwards, in ever-rising loops. No other gulls had been present, none in view. But within minutes, they appear, singly or in groups, edging their way into the current; rising, stiff-winged, and quietly. There has been no calling, no vocal communication – yet, somehow, distant gulls have seen one of their kind allowing herself to be carried upwards, in a space where they can all play. And so they fly in to become part of that silent spiral, playing with the air, allowing it to lift them effortlessly, without moving their wings. It is easy to imagine that they might close their eyes, embraced by this three-dimensional world. But soon the thermal tilts and carries them sideways; the current falters. The gulls’ dreams are broken, and the birds angle their wrists and fly away, singly and in groups.

To see gulls overhead, and to watch their observant flight; to hear them calling: this always makes me happy and invokes a sense of longing, perhaps because it takes me back to my childhood near the Cornish coast. Henry Wismayer, reviewing Keltner’s book on ‘awe’ and what it means [4], notes that ‘one recurring motif  … is that it precipitates ‘”ego death,” the dissolution of the self.’ I clearly remember that the first time I experienced an overwhelming feeling of awe (although I would not then have called it that) was when I was about seven years old, and looking down on the Looe estuary in the slanting pink light of dusk, taking in that whole picture of the water, the fishing-boats and houses, the tree-lined hills, and telling my father that I wanted to be ‘broken up and scattered in little pieces’ (the dissolution of self) so as to be part of that scene – like the gulls beating out towards the sea, their wings glinting.

How can one recover that sense of awe in today’s frenetic world of short attention-spans and clamouring discourse?  Can I, as a writer and a former practising scientist, step outside the need to observe and to comment and to explain? Wismayer again: ‘The tension between awe and science could never be fully reconciled because, in the end, ambiguity was awe’s operating principle.’ Perhaps the suspension of disbelief and the suppression of ‘ego’ has become too hard.

Another day, another pier: gulls are dotted along the tiered railings like crotchets on a stave, snoozing, perhaps dreaming. As the pilot boat putters past them, nosing through the waves, the birds raise their heads and flex their wings – and then peel off over the Solway, calling to each other the notes of that tune.

***

Ann Lingard is a novelist, non-fiction writer and former research scientist who has lived within sight of the Solway Firth for more than 20 years. She writes about the Solway at Solway Shorewalker. Read more about her book The Fresh and the Salt, the Story of the Solway here, and for her short stories, projects and other work see here.

Photographs courtesy of the author.

[1] Floating cows and snarling dogs: William Mitchell of Maryport https://solwayshorewalker.co.uk/2023/12/07/floating-cows-and-snarling-dogs-william-mitchell-of-maryport/

[2] ‘Games of chance: the parasite’s roulette wheel’, Ann Lingard & Rebecca Nassauer , shortlisted in the Wellcome Trust’s SciArt2000 competition

[3] Richard Gregory (September 2024) Seabirds: 40% of species in trouble. The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/seabirds-40-of-uk-species-in-trouble-bird-flu-climate-change-and-overfishing-to-blame-236451

[4] Henry Wismayer (January 2023) Finding awe amid everyday splendor. Noema magazine, https://www.noemamag.com/finding-awe-amid-everday-splendor/