A good jacket with a hood is essential, so long as it is one you don’t care about very much. Also a long stick to hold up like an umbrella. The stick will not keep the gulls from raining poop down on your head, unfortunately, but it should keep them from actually hitting your head, and possibly drawing blood.
“It could get real loud real quick,” says Scott Pearson, a biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. He looks around at the assembled census takers: Fawn Wagner, the refuge manager from the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe; Kari Williamson, a biologist with the Tribe; Peter Hodum, a biology professor from the University of Puget Sound; and Tom Good, a biologist with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Pearson looks over his shoulder where some glaucous-winged gulls are milling nervously about and nattering. “And good to see they’re already watching us.”
It is early July and we are on Violet Spit, an extension from the western face of Protection Island, off the northern coast of the Olympic Peninsula. The island, a national wildlife refuge, is perhaps best known for hosting one of the largest colonies of rhinoceros auklets in North America; and the auklets definitely attract the most research attention. But several other birds breed here, too: pigeon guillemots, tufted puffins, and, the focus today, glaucous-winged gulls.
Glaucous-winged gulls are the most common large gull in Washington, and Protection Island hosts their largest colony, with thousands of pairs. That’s the assumption, at least. No one has counted the gulls here in nearly a decade; their numbers have been sort of assumed stable. Pearson wonders if they actually are. To find out how best to assess this, he consulted with Jim Hayward, a biologist from Andrews University in southwestern Michigan, near the border with Indiana. Hayward studied the gulls here for decades before he retired. He sent along one of his sample datasheets and instructions: simply make a tick for every nest with zero, one, two, or three eggs. Easy.
Except not. Hundreds of gulls have taken to the air, screaming and diving on us. “Let’s spread out,” Pearson says. “We’ll count in ten-meter lanes.” He takes the lane closest to the water, where gulls nest in greatest concentration. The rest of us array ourselves. Since I am on the lane farthest away, I hold a sheaf of small orange pin flags that I will use to mark the boundary where I have counted, so when we swing back, we will not double-count nests. Williamson and Hodum track our tallies.
We all start a slow trudge forward, eyes on the ground, scanning for nests. Those of us that have sticks hold them over our heads. I can feel the gulls’ wings as they sweep over my head, feel the flecks of their guano speckle my coat and pants; I can smell it, too. But I keep my eyes on the ground.
Gull nests are fairly rudimentary: a mound of dried seaweed or other vegetation, with a small, padded cup for the eggs. They are also well camouflaged; no one wants to step on something inadvertently. People call out contents. “Two eggs!” Pearson yells, and I see Williamson make a mark. “One egg!” Good yells, waving the stick over his head. “Two eggs,” Wagner yells, and Hodum makes a mark.
There are fewer nests in my assigned lane, but I see them from time to time: a nest with two eggs, the eggs oblong and brownish and speckled, a nest with three eggs, a nest with one. Then Good says, “Here’s one with a chick.” That brings everyone to a quick halt. Williamson writes a new category on her datasheet: two eggs / one chick.
But soon folks have found every possible combination, from three eggs to one egg and two chicks to one egg and one chick and one egg to three chicks. The chicks themselves can be hard to see, being small and speckled, and good at concealing themselves in dappled shadow. They hide not only from us; gulls will attack and sometimes eat unrelated chicks. They will also eat each other’s eggs. (“No honor among gulls,” Pearson has said.)
For something to be hated for its ubiquity, it must maintain that ubiquitousness, and gulls are not.
Gulls in general hold a diminished position among the ranks of marine birds. This is due in part to their somewhat vulgar ubiquity, or at least the perception of it: they are broadly scorned for being so good at taking advantage of the world that humans have made. “Nowadays gulls are trash birds, the subnatural inhabitants of drossscapes,” the British ornithologist Tim Dee has written in his book, Landfill. “Their coming among us has lowered their sea-bird status. Today they are seen as déclassé and mongrelizing in their habits.”
But for something to be hated for its ubiquity, it must maintain that ubiquitousness, and gulls are not. All over the world, their populations generally thrived through the 1960s and 1970s thanks to various human subsidies, like garbage or fisheries waste. But recent reforms—the covering of landfills, for instance, or rules regulating how fisheries waste is discarded—have dented their population growth. Changing ocean conditions also play a role, as species like black-legged kittiwakes decline at former strongholds in northern Europe as their preferred prey disappears. As Dee writes later in Landfill, “There has been a gull moment and it is coming to an end.”
"tall grass and eagle predation appear to be carrying out a pincer movement which may be forcing the gulls into suboptimal nesting habitat and driving the decline of the gull colony.” – David Cowles
At Protection Island, the most immediate and obvious threat to the gulls is not a lack of garbage or fishery discards, but the recovery of another once-rare bird: the bald eagle. Dozens now hang around Protection Island, preying on the different seabirds that breed here. We see them perched atop the bluffs at regular intervals, like sentries. Sometimes one or two will fly over the gull colony, causing all the gulls to take to the air to drive them off.
Jim Hayward’s old surveys illustrate the eagles’ marked ecological effects: in the 1980s and 1990s, in the absence of eagles, the number of gulls breeding at Protection Island increased by 50%. Then the eagles returned, aided by federal recovery efforts. The number of nests in the gull colony soon declined to about half of its historical high. Additionally, as invasive tall grasses have have spread across the island, the gulls are abandoning former nesting habitat. “Together,” wrote David Cowles, one of Hayward’s collaborators, in Northwestern Naturalist, “the tall grass and eagle predation appear to be carrying out a pincer movement which may be forcing the gulls into suboptimal nesting habitat and driving the decline of the gull colony.”
We make our way through the heart of the colony, calling out the numbers of eggs, chicks, the occasional empty nest. Then we check the fringes with tall grasses, where there are a few nests, and then the north side of Violet Spit, where there are almost no nests. When we are finished, we gather back where we started. All of us are a little harried, ears ringing from the ceaseless gull cries, clothes dotted with their guano. But we have counted every nest we could find, and we assume we found almost all of them, a tally of more than 1000 nests. [Editor's note: While the data is still preliminary, that number is down from the count of 2,512 nests reported on the island in 2016.] Hodum collects the datasheets. They are filled with tick marks under headings of all possible configurations of eggs and chicks. He glances over at Pearson. “Scott, your head,” he says.
Pearson smiles ruefully. “Yeah, one got me pretty good,” he says. He taps gingerly at the top of his head, and then looks at his fingertips. They are tinged red.