Fuzz, page 20
* To be sure it was the predator-suggestiveness of the piss smell that was potentially repelling the birds, rather than its foreignness, the team also tested vials containing something just foreign: Febreze Extra Strength Fabric Refresher. Science is here to tell you that starlings feel the same way about Febreze Extra Strength Fabric Refresher as they do about raccoon piss. Neither smell made a bit of difference.
† The NWRC’s Sandusky branch was formed through the lobbying efforts of a group of corn farmers who incorporated themselves in 1965 as the Bye Bye Blackbird Association. The name did not play as well on Capitol Hill as it had in rural Ohio, and in 1967 the Bye Bye Blackbird Association shelved the snickering wit and became the Ohio Coordinating Committee for the Control of Depredating Birds.
‡ My favorite lethal reinforcement story involves Scarey Man, a scarecrow version of those floppy fan-inflated tubular attention-getters you see at strip malls. Unlike those things, Scarey Man also screams and is inflated only intermittently, bursting up like a jack-in-the-box. Birds start to habituate to Scarey Man in about a week, a 1991 USDA study found. Two of the researchers, Allen Stickley and Junior King, then tested whether lethal reinforcement could make Scarey Man scary longer. They’d dress up in a vinyl poncho and sit unmoving on the shore of a cormorant-plagued fish farm. When Scarey Man went off, the man would leap up alongside, “emit a high-pitched wail and bob up and down,” and then fire a shot at the cormorants. The log of hours spent “impersonating Scarey Man” resides in the NWRC archives, along with Stickley’s field notes. The birds seemed more entertained than scared. “March 1, 1992. 1456 hrs: Three birds came in and sat and watched me do my thing.” Junior got bored and began wandering away from his post and shooting random birds. “I reminded him that the object is to make birds think Scarey Man is shooting,” Stickley wrote, disgustedly. What is it with guys called Junior?
12
THE GULLS OF ST. PETER’S
The Vatican Tries a Laser
If you make a gull sufficiently nervous, it will vomit.* While unpleasant for biologists who need to handle them, the habit affords easy insight into what the birds have been eating. Here is a partial list of what a herring gull considers edible—that is, things that have been vomited in the general direction of Julie C. Ellis, senior research investigator at the University of Pennsylvania: bologna, ants, strawberry shortcake, a large mackerel, a whole hot dog, intact mice, squid, a used sanitary napkin, discarded lobster bait, Vienna sausages, an eider duckling, beetles, rotten chicken drumsticks, a rat, a paper muffin wrapper, a loaded diaper, and a plate’s worth of spaghetti marinara with mussels.
No gull has upchucked flowers at Julie Ellis. Gulls would eat the world but leave the plants. So when Dutch master florist Paul Deckers arranged three truckloads of blooms around the altar outside St. Peter’s Basilica on the eve of the pope’s 2017 Easter Mass, he did not worry about gulls.
And yet. “What we saw was not to believe.” When he’d left St. Peter’s Square the evening before, six thousand daffodils lined the wide, shallow steps to the outdoor altar. He returned at 6:00 a.m., mere hours before the crowd would be let into the square, to floral mayhem. Potted daffodils lying on their sides in the center aisle and helter-skelter on the steps. Potting soil on the chancel floor. Long-stemmed roses had been plucked from vases and strewn about, as though a diva ballerina had come through for a farewell performance sometime in the night.
Yet the blossoms weren’t eaten. It appeared to be an act of senseless vandalism, as much a mystery as the vinyl-pulling vultures of the Everglades or Dipanjan Naha’s cooker-smashing macaque. Why would a gull do this? Was there a biological motive? Are some species just dicks?
For answers I turned, via online meeting software, to Julie Ellis at her desk in the laundry room of her home. “The only thing I could imagine,” she said, “is that they were looking for worms in the soil.” Could be. But most of the ravaged daffodils I could see in the pictures Deckers sent were still in their pots. And the roses were cut flowers.
Fellow gull researcher Sarah Courchesne had joined the conversation, from her car in a parking lot in Maine. Sarah studies herring and great black-backed gulls at Shoals Marine Laboratory on Maine’s Appledore Island. “What do you think, Sarah?” said Julie. “Sarah? Looks like she’s trying to get the sound to work.”
Sarah’s mouth moved silently and then her face froze and then at last words came through. “Well, that was a tense moment. Was it a form of grass-pulling, Julie?”
“I thought of that,” Julie said. “Maybe.” In breeding colonies, gulls use their beaks to pull up tufts of grass as a territorial display. “Displaced aggression” is the term Sarah used. Like punching the wall instead of someone’s face? Yes, Julie said, though gulls do the latter sort of thing, too. At breeding colonies, herring gulls will sometimes peck to death another gull’s chick should it blunder into their territory. And then they, or another gull, may eat it. I read all about this in “Cannibalism in Herring Gulls,” an article by Jasper Parsons, who watched a lot of it go down on Scotland’s Isle of May. I showed off my new vocabulary word: kronism, the eating of one’s offspring. They also do that.
Based on Sarah’s observations, reports of herring gull cannibalism are overblown. “There are sizable numbers of times when they kill the neighbor’s baby but don’t eat it. Or they don’t even kill it. Just peck at it.”
“You know,” Julie chimed in, “maybe blind the neighbor’s baby, leave it lying there as it slowly dies. It’s lovely, really.”
Still, neither Julie nor Sarah would say that gulls, as a species, are dickish.† While 20 to 30 percent of herring gull chicks that wander away from their nest are attacked, a similar number, one study showed, are adopted by a neighbor who feeds and protects them. As with humans, as with bears, a few individuals are responsible for the bulk of the species’ churlish (to us) behavior. Of the 329 herring gull chicks cannibalized during the 1968 Isle of May breeding season, 167 were eaten by just four cannibals. According to Parsons, one out of 250 herring gull pairs practices cannibalism. It has nothing to do with food shortages, he found. It just seemed to be what they liked to eat best.
Gulls have evolved a generalist’s bill and a thick gizzard that withstands and regurgitates shell fragments (and baby gull beaks and diaper linings), so they can pretty much eat what they want. Individual gulls are as different as individual humans. Some keep to the shore and fish for their living. Some hit the landfills. Still others commute into the cities, where they eat pavement fries and hot dog leavings (and, one study suggests, get coronary artery disease). A few eat their neighbors’ children, and a few are hunters, nabbing flickers and songbirds on the wing. Sarah recently saw a great crested flycatcher in someone’s vomit. “Although,” she added, “having been through the esophageal chute both forward and in reverse, it was more of an okay crested flycatcher.”
There is, or there was, a hunter gull that hung around St. Peter’s Square, site of the aforementioned floral vandalism. We know this because the bird was caught on camera in 2014. You can watch it in slow-motion as it swoops in, beak first and irony ablaze, to nail the white “peace dove” that Pope Francis had just released. Every January the pope appears on a balcony with children from a Catholic youth group to read a message of peace and release a dove. The dove survived, but the tradition did not. In later years, a helium-filled balloon in the shape of a dove was released.
Julie and Sarah wish you to know that gulls have a “more endearing side,” which we would see if we spent time in their breeding colonies. Gulls are devoted parents, and that includes the males, who stick around to help raise the chicks. This is not typical for birds. More typical is the starling, whose nest behaviors were observed a century ago by naturalist F. H. Herrick and described in his Home Life of Wild Birds: “In the space of four hours … [t]he female brooded her young over an hour, fed them twenty-nine times, and cleaned the nest thirteen times. The male made eleven visits”—whether he fed his chicks or just sat around and got in the way is not made clear—“attending to sanitary matters but twice.”
Gulls are community-oriented, provided the community is their own. When a gull sights what it perceives to be a predator, it warns the rest of the colony. The frequency of its alarm calls communicates the intruder’s approximate location, and others rush to harass it.‡ This of course contributes to their dickish reputations, because the intruder, in coastal resort towns, is often a tourist who has unknowingly wandered too close to a nest. “Pensioner Left with Blood Pouring Down Her Face After Seagull Attack,” says the British ITV website, sensationalism pouring from its headline writer. (The accompanying photograph shows only a small patch of dried blood on the crown of the woman’s head.)
Where India has monkeys, it seems, we have gulls: bloodying old ladies, stealing snacks from tourists’ hands, boosting newspaper sales, vexing politicians. (“Seagull Attacks: David Cameron Calls for ‘Big Conversation’ About Issue” was the Guardian headline after a gull stormed a pet tortoise in Cornwall.) Gull researcher and College of the Atlantic professor John Anderson sees gull “attack” media hype all the time in the coastal town where he lives. “It’s absurd,” he said to me in an email. “Dogs barking and lunging at people are so NOT news, whereas a gull diving at you gets press.” Anderson throws some blame on The Birds. “Alfred Hitchcock has a lot to answer for.”
So let’s focus on gulls’ endearing qualities. I recently read a book about gulls by a former Audubon magazine editor. The book mentioned, and I then mentioned to Julie and Sarah, that gulls have a food-sharing call. How lovely is that?
“Hmm,” said Sarah. “The call I hear them make when they find food is the long call, which is territorial. I would bet they are staking a claim to the food they find, rather than inviting friends to dinner. So I must plant a flag in the gulls-are-dicks hypothesis on this one.”
But that’s a survival strategy. All of this is. It’s about keeping fed, protecting one’s progeny, escorting the genes to the next generation. It’s gulls being gulls and, unfortunately in some cases, trying to do it too close to people being people.
But messing with the pope’s roses is … who can say what that is? I better go see. Easter weekend is coming up, and this time the Vatican is prepared. Along with Paul Deckers and his team, they’ve flown in a “laser-operated scarecrow” and its creator, André Frijters. I keep hearing about lasers as an effective, seemingly benign bird-scaring method. Tom Seamans used one in the evenings at Fresh Kills. Staff at the Royal Palm Visitor Center tried one with the car-vandalizing vultures. Could keeping birds away be as cheap and easy as pointing to graphs on PowerPoint slides that no one understands?
Easter weekend at the Vatican is a joyful thrum of Catholic professionals. Nuns and priests jet in from all over, giving St. Peter’s Square the look of a college campus on commencement day: the flowing robes, the specialty headwear, the selfie sticks. A dozen or so gulls are here, too—cooling down in the fountain, watching the crowds from St. Peter’s marble haircut—but for now there’s no need for deterrence. Six assistant florists bustle around setting up the flowers.
André Frijters is meeting me at the security gate in an hour, around 5:00 p.m. He can’t begin his work until all the flowers are in place, because the laser beams must be set to reach every plant. I wander the souvenir stalls and pontifical tailor shops, the low and the high of Vatican shopping. I try, and fail, to talk my way past one of the Vatican Swiss Guards, partly because I’m bored, and partly because a man in ballooning striped knickers doesn’t seem all that imposing.
From behind a barricade, I watch Paul Deckers orchestrating the final adjustments. For most of my time here, he is a figure glimpsed at a distance, always in a hurry, striding through my field of vision in leather hiking books and a fanny pack (also leather). The night I arrived, he alit, briefly, to chat as I sat with André at the cafe in their hotel. He shared the story of the 2017 gull debacle and how he’d gone on Dutch television when he got back to the Netherlands to crowd-source a solution for future Vatican gigs.
Of the 250 or so people who responded, most had not thought through the singular exigencies of the scenario. From where I stand, I can practically see inside the pope’s bedroom. The residents of Vatican City don’t want to be kept up all night by “sirens with yelling sounds,” as one person suggested, or “bomb sounds.” They don’t want to attend Mass the next morning in a fog of “smelly odors.” And although an effigy could be seen to complement the Crucifixion iconography already on display at St. Peter’s, a dead gull suspended by pinioned feet was likewise not up for consideration. André wasn’t even sure an effigy would work at night. Gulls evolved as diurnal birds; though some have begun taking night shifts to raid Roman garbage bins, gull night vision may not be sufficiently acute to process the creepy particulars of an effigy. I wondered about RoBird, but apparently Nico Nijenhuis hadn’t been watching TV that day.
André telephoned Deckers the day after the televised plea and said to him: “I have been scaring birds for twenty-five years.” He owns the company Vogelverschrikker (Dutch for scarecrow). André suggested bringing in a LaserOp Automatic 200, a sort of monochrome laser light show. Lasers are silent, seemingly humane, and they can usually be counted on to unnerve gulls for at least a week. They’re mainly used in darkness or low light, when the beams are most visible. Wildlife Services, in the States, has used them to dissuade cormorants, gulls, and vultures from roosting on structures where someone doesn’t want them—and their droppings—togather.
The laser beam is green, a color some birds are thought to see better than we do. There’s a theory, set forth on some manufacturers’ websites, that the lasers work because these birds perceive the beam as a solid green rod slicing through the air and coming at them. (I wonder whose theory this is and how many Star Wars movies this person has seen. I checked: no “lightsaber” references in the product copy. If anything, they call it “the stick effect.”) Some species—pigeons, for instance, and starlings—either don’t see it this way or aren’t fazed.
At five sharp, André shows up and walks with me to the altar. Tomorrow eighty thousand Catholics and tourists will come to hear the pope say Mass and take communion from a roving platoon of priests, but for now we look out on an audience of gray plastic chairs. André has brought two LaserOp Automatic 200s. One would suffice, but this is, you know, the Vatican. He wants to be sure. The lasers are housed in a boxy white structure that, out in a farm field, might be mistaken for stacked beehives. Here, at the foot of the altar at St. Peter’s Square, they look like, I don’t know, Ikea baptismal fonts?
André and I attempt conversation over the noise of a cleanup crew with a leaf blower. “How did you get into bird-scaring!” I’m yelling.
He leans in toward the side of my head. “Well, I was a farmer myself!”
The possibility hadn’t occurred to me. André looks like a farmer the way Paul Deckers looks like a florist. He, too, is wearing leather—in his case, a lived-in black jacket. His hair and his stubble are buzzed to the same length. His jeans sit low on his hips and while they are not tight, they are for sure not farmer jeans.
André grew lettuce. “Iceberg and little gems!” The leaf blower shuts off in the middle of this. “Little gems!” comes out like a sports cheer.
A salad-loving menagerie went after his lettuces. Hares, crows, wood pigeons. “The wood pigeons would eat the hearts. I couldn’t get them away with the gas bangers.” (A gas banger, or propane cannon, is a pyrotechnics device left out in a field and set to fire at intervals.) “You can put netting on top of the crops, but it’s expensive and a lot of work to keep it up. The crows would pull up the plants because they’d think there’s a worm underneath.” I ask André whether that might be what the gulls were doing with the daffodils. He says he thinks the damage was done out of curiosity: “The gull thinks, There is something different, maybe I can eat it. So I try it first.”
André likes birds. He mentions their helpful consumption of insect pests. “The birds were here before the farmers,” he adds. “The farmer comes along and opens a restaurant and the birds are coming to eat, and that’s generally how it goes.”
Like the senator from chapter 8, André undertook the most effective strategy of all. He changed careers. One day, while he was still a farmer, André was on the phone with the manufacturer of Scarey Man, the noise-making, intermittently inflating pop-up bird deterrent. “He said to me, ‘You know, I don’t have an importer in Holland. Would you like that?’ ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I like that.’ ” André became the Scarey Man man for the Netherlands. Customers would often ask for a cheaper product, and soon he began stocking pyrotechnics, hawk kites, effigies. “Everything you can buy in the world about bird-scaring, we had it in the warehouse.” For a while he kept up the farm. “Between the scaring and the lettuce, it was too much.” He went with the scaring. The hours are better, and the money. As with a gold rush, so with farming: the people who make the most reliable living are the ones who sell the supplies to everyone else.
André gets up to walk the perimeter of the floral display, squatting every few feet to sight the laser and note any points it might miss. I tag along with my notepad, interrupting his focus and bumbling into his sight lines.
“I’m just going to follow you around.”
“I see that.”
From somewhere beyond the square, a clamor of whoops and cheers coalesces and crescendos. It’s a red-carpet sound—the A-list star pulling up and then stepping from the limo. “It’s him,” André says. “Francis. He’s a rock star.”
Hundreds of nuns are in town this week. I’ve seen nuns with green habits, pink habits. Bad habits! Nuns vaping, nuns cutting in line. Right now, nuns are running, laughing, elbows pumping and veils flying. The security gates on the north side of St. Peter’s Square just opened, and a group from the front of the line are rushing for front-row seats at whatever services Pope Francis is about to hold inside the basilica. As they race behind the outdoor altar, a gull on a pole-mounted speaker takes flight. Two on the cobblestones follow.
