Of all the time I misspent during my misspent youth, having now reached the age of greater wisdom (or at least grayer hair), I now count much of it wasted if it was not spent looking at gulls. Like many naturalists who include birds in their studies, I am absolutely rubbish at identifying gulls. Unlike many naturalists who are similarly rubbish in the art, I was raised on on the north Oregon coast at the mouth of the Columbia River – a place where gulls are so ubiquitous one of the local schools long ago chose, and to the best of my knowledge continues to use, the “seagull” as its mascot. Gulls lined the rooftops and swooped along the town streets; they called from atop the lamp-posts and squabbled all around the cannery piers. And to make matters worse, my father was a commercial fisherman, and I was regularly on the deck of our family boat since I was eight years old. So when it comes to having the opportunity to get up close and personal with gulls, few can claim to have had, and inattentively squandered, as much opportunity to learn about them as I had.
Growing up in the English town of Hastings, Marianne Taylor had a similarly gull-rich childhood. However unlike my own wastrel self, she put her young years to productive naturalist use and paid the gulls of her town due attention. And even though she still claims not to be particularly accomplished in her gull identifying skills, I wager that this is simply an example of the classic British tendency to understate one’s accomplishments or circumstances (i.e., “It’s just a flesh wound”); otherwise it is quite difficult to understand how she could have written such an informative, thoughtful, and entertaining book as The Gull Next Door; a Portrait of a Misunderstood Bird.
Make no mistake about it – gulls are indeed misunderstood; often to the point of being thought malicious, malevolent, and any number of the other nasty qualities all too many people inappropriately ascribe to them. However as Ms. Taylor, drawing on her many years of observing, studying, and inquiring after their ways so well explains to her readers, most of the behaviors exhibited by gulls that we humans find so bothersome are simply examples of their superbly evolved adaptability to adapt. We are the ones who create the opportunities that inspire them to flock toward our settlements and activities – they would be foolish creatures indeed not to take full advantage of them.
While Ms. Taylor’s own interest in gulls began with and continues to be very much centered around that most classically gull-like of gulls, the Herring Gull, Larus argentatus, she covers all of Britain’s gull species – both resident as well as vagrant – with appropriate thoroughness, and gives at least reasonable mention to a large number of the other members of the world’s fifty-four total gull species within the family Laridae. This Herring Gull centrality works very well as it expands the range of the book well across all of Europe as well as North America, and with the taxonomy of the Herring Gull being still very much (as with many other gulls) in debate, this gull provides Ms. Taylor the opportunity to delve into some of the aspects of gulls that make them so dashedly difficult for birdwatchers and other interested naturalists to get and keep sorted.
As she well explains, many gull species readily hybridize, and these hybrids continue to breed (which in itself tells us that we don’t understand the taxonomy of these birds), producing a number of forms that are defiantly tricky to identify. Add to this the fact that different gull species mature over the course of species-specific numbers of years (two, three, or four) and have various age-related plumages that are generally bewildering mixes of white, brown, and grey dappling until they reach adulthood. Then mix in the rich and varied possibilities that hybridizing brings to the matter, and the potential for confusion and misidentification abounds. Indeed, so many hybrids are regularly identifiable that they have been given common names all their own – even nicknames!
Not surprisingly, as Ms. Taylor explains, this very potential for confusion arising from such tricky identification challenges is the very thing that motivates a select group of birdwatchers – the lariphiles – to devote remarkable amounts of attention and affection to gulls. To achieve genuine mastery of gull identification, one must memorize a myriad of field marks, and be both willing and able to mix and match them accordingly whenever a single defined set fails to fit a particular bird. It is a skill that taxes both the memory as well as the imagination, which – not surprisingly – makes those who possess the, as it were, gift of gulls, so widely respected in birdwatching and naturalist circles.
Of course, no one is by any means required to become such an expert in gulls, nor is imparting the necessity or knowledge of becoming one the purpose of this book. At its heart, The Gull Next Door is an introduction to, an invitation if you will, to become better acquainted with a family of birds that is, for many of us, a familiar but commonly ignored fellow creature. It offers us an opportunity to see what has long been present all around us while effectively – unless it does something we find irksome or inconvenient – unseen, and as such becomes very much, as the book’s title so rightly declares, misunderstood.
Such misunderstandings have led to a number of unfortunate accusations as well as actions where humans and gulls most closely mix. Each year, British tabloids, during what is appropriately called “the silly season,” break out the war headlines proclaiming the evils of marauding, chip-filching, chihuahua-murdering “seagulls,” causing panic in civic councils and increased sales of newspapers. Having once been the victim of an aerial ambush by a Herring Gull in Warnemünde, Germany, I can readily attest to their ability to snag foodstuffs from an unattended table or even an inattentive hand. However I must also give, in addition to the back of two fingers that I did at the time, the bird that snagged the fish right off the top of my chips a tip of my hat for having learned that by staying near that particular seaside promenade while people were about put one in ready position to purloin plentiful numbers of gulp-size portions of deliciously deep-fried cod.
It is this very ability to learn and adapt that should, as Ms. Taylor so well explains, inspire in us an appreciation, even an admiration, for our local gulls. While not understood to be as intelligent as ravens and many other corvids, our local Laridae make up for what they may lack in relative intelligence with extraordinary perseverance. They may not possess quite the creativity of a raven in not only using but actually creating a tool with which to accomplish a task, but they’ll enthusiastically work with what they already have “ready-to-beak,” as it were, to accomplish their goals – sometimes to our own irritation, and in regard to the Rock Dove population in New York City, at least occasionally to a very much mortal and decidedly grisly end.
I very much hope The Gull Next Door will find its way onto the reading tables of not only birdwatchers and naturalists, but of all who are willing to take the time to expand their understanding of what is one of the most often nearby non-human species all around the world. Be we ever so far from the seashore, gulls are often just a car park, sports field, rubbish tip, or rooftop away from us. They are well-represented members of the circle of wildlife that have come to know us and our unsustainable ways as the source of a very sustainable livelihood for themselves. Just as with all our neighbors, we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to learn more about them and their ways so as not to fall prey to our own misunderstandings and prejudices, much to the detriment of us both.
Title: The Gull Next Door: A Portrait of a Misunderstood Bird
Author: Marianne Taylor, with a foreword by David Lindo
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Imprint: Wild Nature Press
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 192 pp., with 17 b/w illus.
ISBN: 9780691210865
Published: October 2020
In accordance with Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255, it is disclosed that the copy of the book read in order to produce this review was provided gratis to the reviewer by the publisher.
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