The evolutionary biologist Stephen Gould once described a gull’s wing as about as near as nature gets to perfection it being so well suited aerodynamically to it's purpose.
Big thanks go to ©Debbie Geraghty who kindly donated this week’s magnificent gull image from Cornwall.
If you are one of the many kind people who have already signed, shared or supported this petition; thank you. Your comments are heartening. Let’s stop the deaths and injuries to birds that rooftop bird deterrent mesh netting and metal spikes cause.
I started this petition after seeing a dead Herring Gull seemingly killed by bird deterrent spikes on a rooftop. Herring Gulls are not the only rooftop birds affected by the bird deterrents. For example Kittiwakes are red listed. The Lesser Black-backed Gull is also on the amber list and swallows and swifts may now be declining. Rooftop birds like gulls, pigeons, birds of prey, crows, swifts and swallows are all vulnerable to being injured or killed by the netting & spikes.
Please sign and share this petition or spare a few minutes to email a politician (Action 2. below).
To help maintain life-giving biodiversity, please help get cruelty designed out from these rooftop measures. In the face of the climate and biodiversity crises let’s encourage change in favour of nature, climate and against animal cruelty.
Please take 2 simple actions to help stop the cruelty – and to help save a seagull, pigeon, swallow or swift.
Action 1: Please sign and share the petition wherever you live using the link below. Why not consider supporting? Or email the petition link to a friend who cares? Hashtags are below if you are into using them.
Action 2: Please copy and paste and then email the letter text below to your local politician or prioritize sending one to George Eustice.
#NoToBirdSpikes #BanBirdNetting #ReduceBirdDeterrents #TwitterNatureCommunity #Biodiversity #GullsAreGreat #ClimateAction #PigeonsDeserveBetter #Nature
Make a bigger difference to stop the cruelty. Email the letter text below to George Eustice, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK Government EMAIL: george.eustice.mp@parliament.uk
or if you prefer your local councillor, MP, MS or MSP to get them on board.
Remember to change who you address it to, sign it at the bottom and include your address. Contact details of local representatives can be found here.
If in Wales: the Minister responsible for this environmental issue is now Lee Waters MS, Deputy Minister of Climate Change Correspondence.lee.waters@gov.wales
Scotland: Michael Matheson, MSP for Falkirk West, Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero, Energy and Transport.
Here is the suggested text for the letter to copy and paste...
Dear Rt Hon George Eustice MP,
I am writing to ask you to speak up for rooftop birds and urban wildlife. In the face of the climate and biodiversity crises I would like to ask you to make a commitment to review and reduce the use cruel bird deterrent measures on buildings.
As someone who speaks for me in Government I am alarmed that many birds are injured or killed as a result of the cruel deterrent measures on rooftops in the UK. Measures range from metal bird spike strips to particularly cruel bird mesh netting. Despite current controls to ensure ‘humane’ control of birds causing ‘nuisance’, there is evidence birds are killed or die lingering and painful deaths.
Birds affected by these measures include red or amber listed gull species and turtle doves, birds of prey, and declining species like swallows and swifts.
Faced with the climate and biodiversity crises, it is timely to better understand and reassess our relationship with urban nature species including rooftop and common birds, reconsidering how they are treated in our towns. The definition of bird nuisance could be better nuanced so inappropriate use of bird deterrents and bird deaths and injuries are designed out. The general public can be encouraged to value and respect urban nature more welcome rather than denigrate some wildlife in our towns and cities. Since the use of bird deterrents crosses many areas of administration it would be helpful to focus on stamping out cruelty and species loss by acting across agencies rather than simply focusing on reducing bird nuisance.
Can I ask you to commit to a new vision for our diverse rooftop bird species by considering the following:
Review and more finely nuance the use of bird deterrent measures.
Review licensing and monitoring of pest control operators to make available ethical licences so cruelty is minimised.
Increased funding and better procedures to ensure appropriate urban and rural wildlife crime reporting and successful prosecution in the UK.
National and local education campaigns and funding streams to welcome wildlife to our rooftops and buildings and to conserve and create habitat for them.
Redefine what constitutes bird nuisance in the age of climate change and biodiversity loss.
Call for data to be collected from animal hospitals/vets/roofers/builders/pest controllers on frequency and nature of injuries caused by bird deterrents with follow up research and recommendations to reduce bird deaths and injuries.
Define and ban the inappropriate use of bird netting and ensure deterrent measures chosen do not cause harm.
Consider meeting with the petition organiser, Patrick Driscall to discuss potential positive solutions forward.
The recent report from the IPCC and IPBES made clear ‘- every local nature-based biodiversity solution in our cities and towns matters as they accumulate together on a global scale’. Changing public and industry behaviours on how we treat our urban wildlife can help mitigate the interrelated crises of biodiversity and climate change. It will also importantly help accelerate collective action by the community.
Please put a stop to cruel bird deterrent measures and act to support this collective campaign.
Yours sincerely
(Your Signature)
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Free as a Bird?
Can we as human beings be truly free? Can gulls, how they live, and how we treat them; teach us something existential about how we collectively face our future? What is freedom and doesn’t it have costs and responsibilities beyond ourselves as individuals? Amongst all our many concerns today, where do other living beings and nature as a whole come into it all? How can we inspire ourselves to change and prioritize things fairly and for the better? So many questions right now. Its always been our way as humans to also seek answers…
’Cause I’m as free as a bird now.
And this bird you cannot change.’
Lyrics ©Universal Music Publishing Group
The above lines in the song ‘Free Bird’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd describe the breakup of a man’s relationship with his girlfriend and suggest the seeming impossibility of any potential for change by the man to continue the relationship. But maybe, man can be open to change faced by the climate change emergency and biodiversity crisis?
Just what exactly is a free bird? The nature of freedom has been high in the news agenda recently; be it with mask wearing, vaccine passports, policing, facial recognition technology, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Hong Kong and more. We seek the security of home and kin and so often live in fear of the ‘other’; our unknown. If we are so concerned about our own freedom why then do we so often in our societies stop or limit the freedom of others we know little of, not just humans; who we rightly think count a lot, but also our livestock, our pets and our wildlife.
In my last petition update I looked at why we denigrate or what I called ‘verminize’ our bigger birds and decide to deter them from safely landing or nesting on our rooftops. The actual nuisance rooftop birds cause is, in the grand scheme of things, negligible. The unspoken issue is perhaps that we fear them taking over space that we have claimed selfishly as all our very own. We may displace them forcing them to cohabit with us on our coastlines, which we then cover with industry, housing, hotels and parades but insist they must stay there or preferably fish in the sea and not enter our towns.
Now is surely the time to rethink and reframe how we live in this complex changing world of ours in a number of ways. One small way we can do so is by changing our perceptions of these larger and often common bird species that now share our urban spaces and quickly learn to reduce our use of cruel rooftop bird deterrents.
To help face the even bigger challenges of climate change and biodiversity we might want to take some inspiration from our amazing gulls and a little book written about one of them.
Gulls, I believe, can give us insights and lessons about ourselves and how we face our collective future in these uncertain times.
Whatever your reaction to gulls there can be few people who do not catch themselves marvelling at them at some time in their lives. Have you felt that strange, almost wistful attachment to them as they fly high in the sky above? Their complex, eerie and, to some, annoying calls draw you right in, catching your attention. Their call gets to us so much so, that; miraculously it seems the sound can stay imprinted in our memories and helps us relive childhood memories or some other association. In many cultures gulls have become symbols of freedom, of being carefree or signify endurance and adaptability. Across the Atlantic some Northwest Coast Tribes believe they have powers over storms and weather and their forms are sometimes carved on totem poles. There are even tribes with Seagull Clans. Closer to home in the UK they have become loved as football mascots for example at Brighton, Torquay. In Blackpool a team is named after them. Fishing folk are used to them following their boats or resting on migration and to some sailors they are a sign of land at last getting closer.
There is a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s film ‘The Birds’ where Tippi Hedren is mobbed in a phonebox as the birds including crows and gulls smash the glass and again later in a house when they get into a rooftop room. The town drunk is even heard saying ‘It’s the end of the world.’
This prophetic like film scene has, like the seaside calls of the gulls on the beach and in our coastal resorts become indelibly marked into our psyche. Gulls as they became part of our cities in the early 1900s joined the crow family and ravens as being from the ‘dark side’. They somehow in our imaginations became threatening, feathered portenders of doom and something from our worst nightmares. Maybe these perceptions of birds, though, only reflect our internal insecurity and lack of understanding about inner selves and our desire for a place called home?
If you grew up like me in the 1970s, you may remember the theme song from the Mary Taylor Moore show the lyrics of which speaks for a young woman coming to the city trying to make it in a male dominated world.
‘Love is all around, no need to waste it
You can have this town, why don’t you take it
You might just make it after all’
Copyright: Lyrics © Original Writer and Publisher
Just like the love in the song, gulls and wildlife are all around us too; even in our cities. What we so easily forget in our response to the wildlife in what we call ‘our’ homes, our towns and ‘our’ cities is that it often has arrived there often simply because we destroyed or occupied natural habitats elsewhere. We were the original invader.
I recently read a story about Capybaras, a species of rodent ‘invading’ an expensive enclave, Nordelta, north of Buenos Aires in Argentina. Apparently they have been turning over lawns, caused traffic accidents and bitten dogs. Progressive Peronists couldn’t resist painting them as the rodent vanguard of the class struggle since the exclusive community is in fact gated off. The reality is humans have taken over the rodents’ habitat as a pleasant place to live. The wealthy human residents want the nature but without the snakes, mosquitoes and capybaras. The new residents are paving paradise; taking away the absorbent nature of the wetlands and shifting the regular flooding of the wetlands into neighbouring poorer districts.
Gulls and pigeons once occupied only coastal cliffs and rocky outcrops. As humans built cities and occupied rapidly developing coastal areas they were either forced or chose to change their behaviour and so ‘invaded’ the cities. Just like us they have learnt to live in populous expanding communities on roofs of industrial warehouses, office and houses away from natural marine food sources. They also feel safer from predators like foxes. While we have supermarket food deliveries bringing fresh produce from far and wide, gulls clear our discarded chips and fast food, raid uncovered seafront bins, take advantage to rip open bags on bin day and plunder landfill sites or are fed by kind well meaning residents. They are simply take advantage of our wastefulness. They get hounded for taking a free lunch (or ice cream!) when it is us who laid waste to their habitat and created new, though often less nutritious, ready meals to leave on our streets.
Can we now change our gut reaction to these urban birds? They have innovatively found a way to succeed in the world just like Mary Tyler Moore did, the pioneers of the Wild West did or indeed the later 80s yuppies. These birds are fast, intelligent, inquisitive and socially complex and able to acclimatize themselves to a wide variety of habitats. I read that potentially the earliest rooftop nesting Herring Gull was in Cornwall on a water mill in the early 1900s. Hardly Wall Street but hey! The media touted ‘seagull city invasion’ has matched our own as the industrial revolution and modern day city development ate up the bird's own living spaces and created new food and accommodation opportunities.
Again back in the 70s; (why does it suddenly feel glamourous to go back to that decade?) a best-selling children’s book ‘Johnathan Livingston Seagull’ written by Richard Bach came out. The author Bach had been in the American air force and had a fascination with flight and flying. He was moved to write a story about a gull finding it’s way in the world. It became one of the earliest self-help books and became popular with adults too. Though it may now seem a little out of date and perhaps naïve to some, Bach was trying to teach us some helpful lessons.
‘The only true law is that which leads to freedom’ Johnathan said ‘There is no other.’
In Bristol a study has been ongoing to study the way urban living gulls are able to take advantage of the complex air flows between buildings in cities to reduce the cost of their flight in bird energy expenditure yet manage to and optimise control whilst navigating sudden extremes of turbulence. This may be used for development of Unmanned Air Vehicles of similar size to gulls. Perhaps though, before we are ready to have parcels delivered by eco drones in our cityscapes we may first need to learn to be kinder to our urban birds to give them their freedom too.
The Radio 4 Desert Island Discs signature tune features the sound of herring gulls calling over gently crashing waves evoking an island space of both isolation and contemplation. Perhaps as we consider our potential demise we need to contemplate who we share our space with, learn some gull-like cohabitation and community building skills and do away with those cruel rooftop bird deterrents.
Back to Richard Bach’s book to reflect on the ‘verminization’ of our urban nature and the way forward for all that are ‘othered’…
‘Johnathan sighed ‘The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you the devil or they call you god.'
Maybe the reality for our urban gulls though isn’t quite so simple? A study made on gulls in St Ives in Cornwall indicated some birds did not give up catching marine fare. Of the four town gulls carefully tracked over a period, some went some distances out to sea or more medium distances to regular food sources on farm sites. Others chose to travel much shorter distances to benefit from food scraps in town. Some still roosted on the sea while others took advantage of rooftops. Highly adaptable clearly.
And… again from ‘Johnathan Livingston Seagull’
‘Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.’
We already know we are causing climate change and biodiversity loss. We must now seek a deeper understanding of both our interrelationship with nature and the relations between our very own communities to navigate ahead.
‘He spoke of very simple things – that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form.’
And finally… conveniently quoting jazz singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone who in her performance of ‘I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free’ at the 1976 Montreaux Jazz Festival, just over halfway through the song sings...
‘Johnathan Livingston Seagull ain’t got nothing on me!’
Over to you?
Why not learn to live side by side with urban nature? Make space for the big birds too. Our cities and homes can become a place FOR nature rather than WITHOUT nature.
Together we can leave a functioning planet behind for our children. Let’s include the squawking gulls, cooing pigeons and other common birds of our rooftops too. Please sign and share the petition. Thank you.
Be a Rooftop Bird Activist
Ramp up the pressure by emailing your political representatives.
Join the Facebook group: Rooftop Bird Club
If you have photographic evidence of injury or death to birds caused by bird deterrents please consider sharing photos with the petition link on social media with your reaction and the relevant hashtags. If you are on Twitter do DM me at @joboxer12 or via Messenger.
Any helpful ideas, research or contacts please DM at @joboxer12 or at the Rooftop Bird Club.
Let’s go for big free bird gold! Keep this petition soaring!