seagulls – BIG

Last October, I was out on our dock when I noticed three seagulls, one flying and shrieking, and two others harassing two loons in the water. Every time they dove, the seagulls would do a flap-jump type of lift and then settle beside the loons when they emerged. I have never seen this before. Were they fighting over the same food?—Trudy O’Brien, Lake Newboro, Ont.

Bingo! Well, probably bingo. “This sounds like a feeding issue of some sort,” says Kathy Jones, the volunteer manager of the Birds Canada Canadian Lakes Loon Survey. “Both species eat fish.” Beyond that, “I can’t say for sure what was happening,” she says. “Perhaps the loons were on a particularly good raft of fish and the gulls wanted to use it? Perhaps the loons had wandered into the gull’s feeding territory? Perhaps both species were fishing on their own, but loons and gulls just don’t do well in the same space?”

Cottage Q&A: Loons attacking ducks

Maybe, except, “I would think gulls fishing on their own are more efficient than them trying to steal food from loons,” says Jones. Loons scarf. A loon could probably easily gobble down a catch before a gull could snatch it away. Then again, gulls are known for stealing food from other gulls, from other birds, even from people. (Try eating French fries on a beach filled with gulls.)

This article was originally published in the September/October 2022 issue of Cottage Life.

We have a bald rock island a little ways from our cottage where we take our fish guts. The seagulls eat it up as soon as we leave it. However, our neighbours have started leaving their fruits, vegetables, and eggshells on the island too. Do birds eat this?—Diane Robinson, French River, Ont.

Herring gulls or ring-billed gulls, a.k.a. seagulls, “will eat just about anything,” says Doug Tozer of Birds Canada. Fish guts, vegetables, french fries, energy bars, garbage, dead mice…bring it on. “But it’s best that they not come to rely on human food sources,” says Tozer. (Not even your discarded fish innards. Sorry.)

“If they do, then large numbers of gulls might start to frequent a particular area when they otherwise wouldn’t,” he says. The birds could become nuisance wildlife. That’s annoying for the cottagers on the lake and ultimately not great for the gulls either. Plus, unlike seed-eating birds at bird feeders, “we don’t have good data on the health and survivorship of individual gulls that frequently feed on human leftovers
compared to their normal, natural food,” says Tozer.

You can’t control what your neighbours do, but as for your fish guts, you’re better off dropping them overboard in deep water, well away from shore, says Tozer. “This is often considered best practice for disposal.”

This article was originally published in the March/April 2022 issue of Cottage Life magazine.