Plastic
owls, birds of prey and swapping eggs for dummy eggs among methods being used
Fiona Harvey Environment
correspondent
Mon 20
May 2019 18.50 BSTLast modified on Mon 20 May
2019 21.10 BST
It’s not
just your chips that are threatened by seagulls at the British seaside:
increasingly, the gull
menace is hitting taxpayers in their pockets too, as research
shows local councils are spending hundreds of thousands trying to control the
birds.
Waste
management practices are partly to blame, as less frequent collection of bins
gives the scavengers plenty of access to free meals, in turn encouraging them
into urban areas. The problem has escalated in the last 15 years, according to
Sarah Trotter, an assistant professor of law at the London School of Economics,
who has written two papers on the subject. The birds have been blamed
for attacking pets and people in towns all around the UK’s
coastline, and sometimes even inland.
Trotter
cites the example of Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland, which spent £263,000
between 2009 and 2016 on control measures for the gulls. Aberdeen spent £27,000
in 2015-16, down from nearly £90,000 a few years previously. Even less-affected
councils have been spending £10,000 a year, often with little to show for their
efforts. There are no publicly available national figures for how much is spent
on the problem, but a sample of several councils suggests the sums may run into
hundreds of thousands a year across the country, and in a few years can quickly
add up to a drain on scarce resources in seaside towns.
Perhaps
even worse is the disruption caused by the birds, and not only to tourism.
Trotter cites cases where gulls have caused delays to
postal deliveries and provoked residents into prowling the
streets with guns to kill the birds, and where droppings have caused a hazard
to pedestrians by making footpaths slippery. In one case in Aberdeen, a
particularly troublesome seagull was
described as being “the size of a large dog”.
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