A seagull once changed my life.
True story. Sara Rubin here, remembering a time about 20 years ago when I had a summer job working at the Hudson River Park in New York City. A big part of our work was managing a free catch-and-release fishing program; anyone could borrow a rod and try their hand at proving wildlife abounds even in the urban waterway.
Then one day, a kid inadvertently hooked a seagull—wrong place, wrong time. We reeled in the bird, wrapped it in a towel and I called Animal Control. The person who answered the phone seemed surprised I would call about a seagull, and said something like: We respond to cats and dogs and the occasional tiger (perhaps a reference to this story). We do not respond to seagulls.
It certainly doesn’t help that seagulls are viewed by many humans as a nuisance. But given that we humans are a deadly nuisance to birds and other wildlife, perhaps it should change our sense of responsibility to them.
This collision of humans doing activities deadly to animals in animals’ habitat is perhaps most obvious on roadways. We even have a special word for roadkill. So it should not be terribly surprising that seagulls at this time of year are becoming roadkill in large numbers on the Monterey Peninsula.
Western gulls, the most common species of seagull here, normally nest on rocky islands offshore. Buildings (made by humans) are a convenient coastal nesting place, so we find them all over rooftops. Young western gulls are able to fly at about 45 days old, says Amanda Preece of the Monterey Audubon Society, but they are able to glide earlier, so they might find themselves stumbling around on the ground, naively, walking on sidewalks and streets below. They’re about the same size as adults, but gray instead of white in color.
In most cases, those that are getting run over—and if you’ve been on coastal roads lately, you’ve probably observed the widespread bloodbath—are just a few days away from being able to fly. (Preece counted 16 dead gull chicks on Del Monte Boulevard between Tioga Avenue and Canyon Del Rey Boulevard last weekend. “It's devastating,” she adds.)
Preece’s simple suggestions: Pay attention and slow down. “The simple act with these seagulls is, people just need to slow down and think, ‘That’s an animal and I shouldn’t just mow it down. It deserves to live.’”
Preece has volunteered and worked at the SPCA Monterey County’s Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, and recommends calling them at 264-5427 if you see an injured bird or other wild animal.
In our world—unlike the one where I grew up and tried and failed to get help for a seagull, or the agricultural area where Preece grew up and injured wildlife was understood as “that’s just nature”—there is an organized effort and motivation to step in. Given that many of these injuries are indeed our fault, it seems only fair that we step in to intervene.
As for my failed seagull intervention some decades past—I decided in that moment that environmental education was not the career path for me, and here I am.