In June, 1985, I invited my friend and mentor, Roger Tory Peterson, to be keynote speaker at a symposium Ainslie Willock and I arranged in conjunction with the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) – the first time the federal agency had shared costs with an animal protection organization! Roger was arguably about the best known naturalist in the world at that time. His presence guaranteed media attention.
We did this because there was tremendous pressure to take away the protection from the ring-billed gull. The federal Environment Minster at the time, Suzanne Blais-Grenier, favored the idea. The world’s largest colony of ring-bills was in Toronto and many municipal politicians were adamantly anti-gull. But, biologists in Blais-Grenier’s own government were on our side, hence the co-operation with CWS in funding the symposium with a list of expert speakers from all sides of the controversy.
Peterson kindly accepted our request to come and focus attention on the bird and attract media. He was given a tour of the colony, met the public, and spoke at the symposium, warning us that just because the species was abundant locally, it should not be taken for granted.
We won. The protection was never removed and Blais-Grenier was turfed – replaced, in fact, by arguably the best environment minister we’ve ever had, Thomas McMillan.
That was then, nearly 33 years ago.
Roger Tory Peterson, who died in 1996, was prescient. Last week, I attended a meeting with two of the three person team CWS has assigned to address situations where birds protected under the Migratory Birds Convention Act come into conflict with people.
The ring-billed gull is still such a species, but things have changed. The gulls have learned to nest on flat, expansive gravel rooftops, such as shopping malls, factories, and warehouses, where they cause all manner of concern. But, on the other hand, since the population peaked around 1989, it has decreased by nearly forty percent! No longer are local papers filled with gull complaints, and demands to kill them, each summer.
And yet, ring-billed gulls, and their larger cousins, the herring gulls, still are cause for concern, accounting for a significant number of permits issued by CWS to exercise some manner of control because of the damage they do, up to and including lethal control as a last resort. And, people want them off those flat rooftops, where they can cause expensive damage.
Oddly, the vast majority of complaints are clustered in the Greater Toronto Area and in the far smaller city of Thunder Bay, about 860 miles away, but not other urban regions of various sizes and locations. No one knows why.
Now, we have this weird dilemma where there are both too many – and too few – ring-billed gulls, and we are not sure why there is that decline, or whether or not the species may become endangered at some point. But, we will continue to monitor them, as Roger Tory Peterson would have wanted.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry