Submitted and written by George Mapp for CBES Shoreline
Growing up on the Eastern Shore, one of my most vivid memories of early spring is gulls laughing and swarming around tractors plowing a field. On a recent kayak trip out of Oyster, it was good to see and hear them once again.
According to a 2019 article in the Daily Press, they haven’t been doing so well. Virginia bird counts taken every 5 years to reveal a marked decline: 45,000 nesting pairs of laughing gulls in 1993; 17,000 in 2018 (as reported in March 2020 ShoreLine). Herring gulls have fared worse: from 9,000 to 2,000. Scientists attribute this to reduced marsh habitat from sea level rise.
Virginia Institute of Marine Science researcher Matt Kirwan says that the state has lost about 20% of its seaside marshes on the Eastern Shore since 1870, eroded by waves or buried as the barrier islands migrate. Gulls prefer to nest in high-elevation marshes – the most vulnerable areas.
“It’s been catastrophic,” notes William and Mary scientist Bryan Watts. “Everybody thinks of sea-level rise as something off in the distance. It’s not. It’s been happening here. For 25 years, we’ve seen this huge decline. Clapper rails, seaside sparrows, salt marsh sparrows, marsh wrens, willets – there’s a larger list of species that are experiencing the same drowning due to sea-level rise than the laughing gulls are.”
Laughing gulls breed in Virginia and winter in Central America. Gulls were some of the pesky birds in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror movie The Birds, and some people regard their swarms with disdain. However, we should be grateful for them – according to Watts, laughing gulls are “the ones going into the agricultural fields eating pest insects. They’re the ones you see flying above the crops feeding on insects. They’re the ones above the forest canopy feeding on insects.”
Source: Dietrich T. 2019. The Morning Call – Gone gull: Laughing gulls in Virginia are ravaged by sea-level rise. https://www.dailypress.com/ news/dp-nws-laughing-gulls-gone-20190709-story.html