We've had their fish now they want our chips.

Every year there's at least one correspondent to our local paper that wants something done about the herring gulls that have chosen to nest in town rather than on the cliffs. Being primarily scavengers their population has tended to follow the availability of food. Once they could get healthy pickings by following the herring fleet. To quote the gnomic Eric Cantona - who spoke considerably more sense than his supposedly baffled audience might care to admit - "When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea" 

Overfishing in the North Sea means that even those gulls that go out and catch their own have been having a hard time and, given the amount of food waste we produce, it should come as little surprise that the gull populations that scavenge inland have been doing rather better than their maritime cousins. Indeed, it's thought that when the UK introduced its Clean Air Act in 1956 - to address the major health issues associated with air pollution from coal fires in London and other major cities - the inland gull population got a boost when the incineration of food waste was banned and more tasty morsels found their way onto landfill sites.

Now for the past few years we've had a pair of gulls nesting on our chimney. As you can see from the picture taken by a neighbour (Chris Phillips) the anti nesting spikes haven't deterred the gulls and simply seem to have made their nest more stable.

"Seems these gulls have taken no notice of the spikes on your chimney"

It's true that they sometimes make a bit of noise and true also that when the chicks do eventually leave the nest the parents become very defensive and will swoop down on anyone who appears to pose a threat - often defecating as they do so - but I can't help admiring their intelligence and their mastery of the air. They only have one or two chicks a year but given that they can live for over 30 years this would probably be just about enough to maintain a healthy population if overfishing hadn't meant that their primary source of food hadn't been in shorter and shorter supply.

In 2007 Scarborough's home based football team collapsed under the burden of unpaid debts. When they were a minor force to be reckoned with, spending a few seasons in England's 4th division and entertaining the might of Arsenal and Chelsea in cup competitions, the stadium was sponsored by McCains who have a frozen chip factory in the town. Indeed in homage to Manchester United's "Theatre of Dreams" the ground became known as the "Theatre of Chips". The team itself had long been known as "The Seagulls" and the club mascot was a volunteer dressed up in a seagull costume carrying a big foam rubber chip - known by some less enlightened crowd members as "that fucking duck".

Given the number of fish and chip shops in the town, and the number of visitors and residents who are careless with where they put their leftovers, we should be the amongst the last people on the planet to complain about the gulls. After all, we've had their fish and all they've got left now are our chips. 

Herring gull eating chips