Endless Thread - The Internet's Most Hated Bird

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Gulls are not beloved creatures. Consult social media, where they are deemed relentless, dirty pests who steal our food and crowd our beaches. As one TikTok user puts it, "Seagulls are the worst animals to ever exist." Such hatred overlooks truths about this intelligent, charismatic animal, and it is masking a big problem: While gulls may seem like they are everywhere, many species are dying. Endless Thread goes on a journey to reconsider the seagull. You can learn more and see photos of the gulls of Appledore here. Credits: This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The hosts are Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. It was edited by managing producer, Samata Joshi.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. I can only imagine that you are Noah. Hey, how are you?

Ben and Amory, I, Dean Russell, want to take you on a unique tour of where I live. Your new apartment where you apparently live with a new roommate named Noah. It's so easy to... spot burghers and birding professors of various stripes when you go to meet them. They always have pine-ox and are usually looking at a bird. Simple equipment. It is one of the hottest days of the summer in the city of Portland, Maine. Eight in the morning, I'm pouring sweat, and instead of seeking shade, I'm going climbing,

roof climbing. So you just, do you call ahead of time or do you... It depends on the building. Okay. This is the police station, so I imagine a call ahead. No. No. The man I'm following into a police station to summit its roof is wearing shorts, a ball cap, and these impressive binoculars.

He looks vaguely like the younger, more athletic brother of Nicholas Cage, if you can kind of picture of that. Nicholas is offended, but okay. His name is Noah Perlet. Hey, good morning. My name is Noah. I'm downstairs in lobby. Noah is charming. He kind of has to be

because he has to talk his way onto the roofs of countless buildings in Portland. At the police station, he stands before this sergeant pleading his case, and the sergeant kind of just shrugs. Sure, I'll show you where the roof is. It's up this thin, rusty letter. Yeah, I'll wait here.

I'm not a fan of hikes. I'm with the sergeant. I follow Noah up this rickety ladder and onto a hot blacktop roof, five stories up with this sheer ledge and very loud mechanical equipment. And why have you and Noah taken this terrifying journey? Let's look for chicks. Looking for chicks from the rooftop seems like creep behavior, but, you know, maybe it's fine. I don't know.

These chicks are herring gull chicks, little speckled puffballs, otherwise known as baby seagulls. Noah Perlitt is a wildlife biologist at the University of New England, and we are catching and banding gull chicks in Portland, something he has been doing for more than a decade. Its heart is going like crazy. Yeah, we can do this one first to get it out of here. And when you say banding, what do you mean? Is this like little tags on their feet? These are like ankle bracelets to help keep track of Portland's gull population, which is huge. Other cities have pigeons.

Portland has gulls. For years, they have been nesting on roofs, in building vents, on ledges, behind generators. There's a colony described as the mothership on top of the art museum. Gulls are all over. And many people, not big. fans? The building across the street is sort of my nemesis building, he'd say, I guess. The building manager hates the birds for understandable reasons. They cause damage to the building. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he, I think he doesn't like us either. Now, you two are reasonable people,

animal fans, as far as I know, Amory, a vegan. How would you both describe your thoughts on seagulls? They're survivors, man. They will come for your food and you've got to be careful, but they're just out there trying to make it like the rest of us. I respect any animal that is as serious about taking sandwiches out of people's hands as I am. Well, I bring us here today because many people, especially people online, loathe these birds. These are, to them, noisy, trash-eating, dirty pests that raise opinions. Like, Amory, here's one post. Okay.

This is in R-slash-Main, Reddit's main community. It reads PSA, please don't feed the Sky Rats. It's really not that cute. Oh. Ben, I got another one for you. Okay. This is on Are No Stupid Questions

Is it illegal to punch a seagull? No. Wow, I mean it rhymes, but why would you want to null a goal? Come on. Other posts include Is it okay to punch a seagull if it's trying to swoop you? Or how to troll seagulls?

Or if someone killed a seagull, would it be a civil or criminal offense? That last one was written by someone who has already killed the seagull, and they just want to know how much trouble they're going to get in with the state. Gull hate is all over Reddit, and it's all over TikTok and YouTube

and really like everywhere else online. Seagulls are the worst animals to ever exist. They are the assholes of the aviary community. They are relentless. If anyone else hates seagulls, let me know because I always take my food And they really pissed me off. I f-gates seagull so much.

They're so annoying. No, you aren't getting any food from me. Go find food for yourself. Wow, today I learned that Batman hates seagulls. But here's something that does not come up very much online, or anywhere, really. While it may feel like gulls are everywhere, crowding the beaches and, like, stealing our food and nesting in our cities and screaming in our ears, gulls are actually dying. Their populations are crashing all over the world.

People such as Noah are trying to stop it by spreading the word. They are trying to get gull haters to convert and to care. I'm always curious to hear people's reactions, both to them declining. And then sort of secondary to that, I always ask them, you know, would their experience be different? if goals were absent. Would it make any difference to them? Would they notice it?

Would it be better? Would it be worse? I'm Amory Seagelson. I'm Benetton Livingston's Siegel sandwich, Johnson. And you're listening to Endless Thread. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR Gullery. Today, producer Dean Dumpster Dive Russell brings us A change my view appreciation for the internet's most hated bird. Ben and Amory, are you ready for another trip?

Yeah, let's go. Where are we gone? Gold Town, USA. Well, I think we all know why people hate gulls. To fully understand them, though, to appreciate them, we have to leave the hate behind. We have to leave the city. We have to leave the World Wide Web. We have to see gulls in their natural habits. And that is where we are going.

To the beach. To the beach. Seven miles off the coast of Southern Maine, just north of the New Hampshire state line, is this little island in the Isle of Shoals called Appledore. I had heard about this volunteer research group, which has been studying Gulls on Appledore Island for 20 years. It operates mostly on donations only because, as many researchers I spoke with told me, me, grant money for gulls, not a lot of it.

So I called this rag-tag volunteer crew, and they said, come on out, we'll put you to work. We're walking on a path where gulls are just like freaking everywhere. I have never seen so many gulls in my entire life. It is nesting season. All these gulls are incubating eggs, occupied nests all around this half square mile island, They are on the paths, near rocky cliffs, in granite crags, under the buildings where we sleep, they're everywhere. Studying Gauls, though less popular today, has a long history in science. This guy, Nico Tinbergen, won the Nobel Prize for establishing the study of ethology, basically animal behavior.

He built his ideas by studying Gauls in the early 20th. century. He actually studied them while locked up in a Nazi camp. So we can actually thank this guy, Nico Tinbergen, and his gulls for showing us that animals are complex, thinking, feeling, beings just like us. And while gulls fell out of fashion in the science world, some researchers are still carrying the torch. Can you tell me what's on your name tag? Oh yes, Sarah Corchane, gull apologist. Dr. Sarah Korshane is a wildlife veterinarian by training, a professor of environmental science at Massachusetts Bay Community College,

and she co-leads the Gulls of Appledore Project. We've come up alongside some of these birds. I mean, I've been coming out here for 16 years, and some of these birds have been here as long, so we just develop a lot of affection for them and a lot of respect. 16 years, how long do these seagulls live? Well, there are 50-some species of gulls, but the ones the Appledore team studies the most

can live for 30 years. They're called Great Blackback gulls, named for their jet black mantle and wing feathers. They also have a very cool, distinctive red ring around each eye. So this is not the goal that I'm picturing, the, like, classic beach goal, right? You're probably thinking of a herringo. They have gray feathers, they're smaller, but they look very similar.

And you are in New England, so you're definitely seeing at least some great blackback gulls. One of our big focuses is kind of developing family histories and looking at the same individuals three years. This is Dill and Titmus, another gull apologist. So tagging the individuals, tagging their nests, gives us the ability to keep track of those records. Nice nass. Gulls, you may like to know, are not these mindless fry snatchers. They have personalities and family dynamics. After Appledore Gauls fledged and spend four years of adolescents wandering as far as Texas and Mexico,

many of them return to Appledore to raise their own families. They even nest near their relatives to form these little neighborhoods. It's cute. And it's also intimidating because like Noah Perlitt, we are banding gulls. Unlike Noah, we are banding fully grown adult blackback gulls. And got to admit, I am not prepared for how intense this is going to be. Why are we wearing helmets? We are wearing helmets because the gulls have a tendency to swoop when they're feeling defensive.

And because of how much they weigh and the height that they'll tend to drop from, They have the ability to give you a concussion. Yes, most of this small crew of gull apologists have been hit. Many of them have bled. I've seen it. Some have cried. One was even rushed to a hospital by boat one year. How big are these gulls if they're giving concussions? They are the largest known gull, sometimes mistaken for eagles, and what John James Audubon once called the tyrant goal.

The tyrant goal. Picture a hefty housecat or a bowling ball with a wingspan longer than Amory is tall. Which is very large, I will say. You're looking at at least five feet. Amory Baggins Severson is a tyrant goal. Watch out. These gulls are serially monogamous and are really good parents. The kind of parents who may be a little too.

protective, but you know it's coming from a good place. And this, you know, being here on this island, this is something most people who hate gulls never really get to see. They don't get to see this sort of loving, weird, protective aggression. Just as you might not like to see gulls eyeing your sandwich, these gulls don't like to see us in their nesting season. With this in mind, I ask for a safety tutorial. Mary Elizabeth Everett is another co-lead for this project.

She's Sarah's sister. Mary Elizabeth is like, yeah, there are probably a couple things you should know. Like, for instance, you should watch out for their degrees of warning calls. Yeah, so there's like the Kek-Kek. There's the Mew. The long call. They generally, we'll do the long call. There you go.

There it is. That was the big one? That's the big one that's like, no, it doesn't really have a name. But it's just this one where they're like, they just can't take it anymore. And they have to, like, really let you know they want you. And so, Amarine Ben, do you feel ready to go ban some giant gulls? Let's ban these gulls, baby. All right, that's the better attitude.

I was going to say, no, I do not. But here we go. We'll get to it in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew.

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Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. All right. How do we ban these seagulls? Give them some drumsticks. Give that guy a headband. We're talking about different bands.

but I'm just going to push past that. I'm going to say a little background before we get to the banding because you should know why we are here to do this. Great blackback gulls are common in New England and Canada over to Greenland and Europe, but for the last three decades, their numbers have dropped by half. Wow. Is that the same for other seagulls?

Because that's just one species, but there's, what do you say? say like 50? Yeah. And it's true. Not all gulls are in decline, but like herring gulls, the most dumpster adjacent species, they've declined by more than two-thirds in North America since the 60s. There are die-offs hitting gray gulls and like sooty gulls and ivory gulls and relic

gulls and Mediterranean gulls and California gulls. Lots of gulls, essentially. They're not doing well. If you don't like gulls, sounds like a sweet deal. Maybe. but scientists are also starting to realize that gulls are what they call an indicator species. Like, when other animals start to disappear, it's often because they have a certain niche. Like, for instance, monarch butterflies need milkweed to survive.

The milkweed goes, and the monarchs go with them. Gulls are very different. It varies a bit by species, but for the most part, they will eat just about anything and more. They are very adaptable. So they should be resilient. If they're dying, it's a signal of much broader problems for all of us. In other words, they are the canaries on our coastlines. Hmm.

And so if the gulls are disappearing, why? What's getting them? That's what the gulls of Appledore crew is trying to understand. But the process of catching these giant birds is... You're about to not like me very much. It's the first full day of a five-day-gay-gave-day... gullathon. I'm with Dylan and another team member charged with catching these great blackback gulls. Uh, Dylan, can I come with you? Okay. Ben and Amory, if you had to catch a seagull,

what would you do? I'd probably put, um, like a Cheeto in my hand. Mm. Mm. Hmm. Two Cheetos. Three Cheetos? As many Cheetos as it takes. Ben? Swoopable sandwich. A large, large beach towel. And cat-like reflexes. So I was shocked by the actual process of doing this. And for context, banding songbirds is, like, cute and elegant and almost effortless. For gulls, it feels a lot more Elmer fud. Dylan's carrying sort of an iron trap with metal wiring around it. It's like a cube that much like,

like a cartoon. They're going to prop up on a stick. We are on a rocky shoreline. The birds are nested all around us and they are going bananas, as you can very well hear. One team member is holding up a broom handle with a spray bottle on the end so that the swooping birds go for the bottle instead of us. And as I say there, Dylan is putting a wire mesh box over a gull nest and propping it up on a stick. This is our, you know, very thoughtful trap. They walk away and we all hide and we wait for a bird to go under the propped-up box.

I got close. Gulls are very smart and there are some Moby-Dicks among the Appledore birds, ones that just kind of refuse to be caught. But after about five minutes, the birds quiet down and we see this, one gull in question. She eyes her nest, her three dotted olive eggs, and the trap over the nest.

Wharily, she walks under the propped-up box, and she sits. Dylan holds a string attached to the prop stick, and they are ready to pull. When she's finished rumbaing, we consider that she's pretty settled. What do you call it, Roomba? Roomba, yes. Oh, like the dance. Little shimmy. And so we're gonna, are we ready with a bag?

We're ready with the bag. Oh. That trap is not closed, both ways. We rush over the bird and get up close. The gull's beak is brilliant yellow with this vermilion dot on the bottom bill. It reminds me of someone who's like only applied lipstick to their bottom lip. And the beak is sharp. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Oh, oh. We put a sort of pillowcase over the gull to safely contain her, and then run her over to the other team. I'll call them the medical team. Everyone gets very quiet, and the project leaders, Sarah and Mary Elizabeth, do a rapid fire physical. How many alcoholic drinks would you say you've had each week?

But we don't want to roll them. So I need them flat on his back. So can you keep one hand over here and then one there? There's the wing rule. Oh, it's behind the phone. Masked and already covered in gull fluids somehow. They measure the beak, the wings, the weight, they draw blood, they swab the gulls upstairs, and the gulls downstairs.

Where is your cloaca? How many times you say that in the day? And they give the bird two ankle bands, a metal federal band in a black plastic gulls of apple door band, with a unique name of sorts. of sorts. And we're going to do 7KT. And then finally, Miss 7KT

is free to go. We have successfully banded one bird. That is quite a song and dance to get one bird banded. This is one of how many are they trying to do? As many as possible

in five days. Wow. I know you're not torturing the birds, but why are you torturing the birds? Uh, fair. I might say briefly abduct. Once the bird is caught, it takes maybe 10 minutes to get the band on. But yes, I asked Sarah a similar question, why do this? First and foremost, if we're going to handle a bird, we have to get bands on it. So that's kind of number one. Kind of next in priority is the blood we're drawing, which is for a whole series of things about avian influenza.

Avian influenza, aka bird flu. You may have seen a lot of news about the latest big flu. Chickens dead, farmers, sick, and also gulls. So a couple years ago, 2022, we had a pretty serious outbreak. A deadly strain of bird flu came to the United States two years ago, likely from Europe via a great blackback gull, actually. And it hit Appledore hard. It started a little like this year with a bunch of healthy birds that then... Did you see them die off? rapidly sick, and one of the characteristic signs of avian fluids, it tends to be neurological. So you'll see these birds that are kind of staggering around, they're walking in circles,

they try to take off and they can only kind of stagger fly for a couple of feet and then they land again. And then a lot of them were just dying on their own after an episode of that. This team of gull apologists has been working with UMass, Boston, to try to answer questions about how the virus spreads, how it mutates, which birds it affects. There is a lot we don't know about bird flu. The gulls of Appledore are helping us understand. Sarah's big worry, though, is that this year will bring another die-off. Man, this area used to be so heavy with these.

It's wild. That's wild to hear you say that because it feels. Like I is? Yeah. One problem with talking about gull die-offs is that no one really has a good idea of how many gulls is the right amount of gulls. Like in the early 20th century, their populations actually spiked as more open-air landfills were created and more fishermen were tossing bycatch, like, aka leftovers that unintentionally fed the gulls. In the 1980s and 90s, that changed. Landfills were covered and fisheries faced more restrictions.

Goal populations fell. Some would say they actually corrected. But then they kept going down. They are still going down. Yeah, there's just cool areas where like there's just not birds anymore. Like just broad swaths of like, you know, there'll be a little cove. And if you don't have that kind of prior sense of the island, you look at it and you're like, oh, I guess gulls don't like this area. And when I first started here, that entire area was just dotted with little gullheads.

Other than bird flu, why are these populations going down? Do we know? It's a good question with many not uncomplicated answers. Mary Elizabeth, the project co-lead, says that sometimes it's an acute problem, like one year a red-tide algal bloom, poisoned the shellfish the birds eat, and paralyzed them. I can't remember how many burns that were that died, but it was, I think, 20 adult birds. And normally in a breeding season, we have, like, one or two adults that dies, if that. There is climate change. The Gulf of Maine is warming 99% faster than the rest of the ocean.

That can make algal blooms more common, and it's also messing with the mackerel and other fish the gulls eat, pushing them farther north and into deeper waters. Plus, there's overfishing. Great blackbacks, like other gulls, can eat just about anything, but they tend to prefer these marine foods. Even herring gulls, they might only be after your sandwiches because the food they typically eat is harder to find. The birds are also affected by human products, like fishing equipment.

There was this one gall that had a fish hook and line lodged in their throat. As much as Sarah tried, she couldn't, get it out without hurting the bird more. Birds also get caught in fishing nets every day, and they've been found with bellies full of plastic. What about how we started this story, the gull hate? Gull hate can be complicated, and many would argue warranted. For instance, as we're surveying the island, we reach a bluff that looks out over the rest of the Isle of Shoals. Star Island, White Island, C.V. Island.

So do gulls nest on all these islands? So they are removed from Star in terms of nesting because of the hotel and all that. Oh, yeah. And they are removed from... Yep. And then they're removed from White and Sevy as well because of the turns.

Yep. Yep. Removed meaning killed? Yeah. To answer a Reddit question from the top of this story, it is usually illegal to harm and kill a seagull in the United States because of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Fun fact, gulls were a big reason the act was created because people used to hunt gulls for their plumage

in the 1700s and 1800s. Today, the federal government will issue permits to kill gulls for various reasons, such as destruction of property. Wow, that seems so broad. Yes, and another reason much more complicated is that gulls, are predators. Like bald eagles and other raptors, certain individual gulls have a knack for hunting

puffins and turns, which are two very beloved birds also in decline. So to help preserve one bird, the federal government will kill another bird. For those reasons from 2012 to 2019, the Department of Agriculture authorized the take of 130,000 gulls and several hundred thousand eggs. They shoot the adults and oil the eggs, which asphyxiate the embryos. Then there is the other type of gull hate, the one that proliferates online. Brantley, why are you egging on the seagulls? I don't really like seagulls that much. I don't want to punch one. Punch one. You ever give Alka-Seltzer to a seagull and see if they exploded? A New Jersey man was arrested this week after ripping a head off a seagull when it tried to steal his daughter's fries. Online gulls are a joke, violence

against them a punchline. And I think an important question to ask is, why do we feel like it's okay to harass and harm certain animals and not others? Say it one more time for the people in the back, Dean. So not suggesting people go Rambo on Gauls, or even New Jersey on Gauls. Like I see what you're saying. These are living creatures,

but what do we lose if we lose gulls? What are we missing? if we miss gulls from our world. I don't know if we'll entirely lose gulls, but if the populations keep dropping, what we'll see is another role in the wild unfilled. Herring gulls are predators, great blackbacks are apex predators.

You risk upsetting a coastal ecosystem. The other thing we may lose is personality. In some places, such as Maine and especially the UK, Gauls are moving inland because it's harder to survive on an island. In Maine, the island populations are getting smaller. The urban populations are doing well. That's why it seems like there are so many gulls. And this urban population, it tends to be bolder.

They are more comfortable around humans. So what we may lose are the birds that prefer to be out on the islands, the birds that aren't as bold, the shire birds. It's like human neurodiversity. We've got that in gulls, too. Some of that neurodiversity has been lost, and now that species has kind of gotten, like, niche adapted to urban living. And the ones that were just more equipped to just stay wild, out on the cliffs,

they're gone now. Sarah Korshane relates the plight of the gull to that of the passenger pigeon. The passenger pigeon was maybe the most abundant bird in North America, possibly the world. They were ecosystem engineers. And then European Americans aggressively hunted them and fractured their habitats. Their numbers fell slowly until the late 1800s when suddenly they crashed. The last wild passenger pigeon was shot in Ohio in 1900.

The last in captivity died 14 years later. Sarah says no one was paying attention, and she worries about the same for the gulls. These birds are largely ignored. So their declines kind of go without notice, and it can get very, very bad before anybody sort of registers. You know, there are just a lot fewer of those birds we used to see. And I think, at least for our project, it's like for a lot of these other species that are in decline, there's just other people doing that work. So we just kind of see it as like, these are our local birds.

We want to help protect them. And they just aren't really, people don't pay attention. So this is the last night. and I just went for a walk. I headed up on the south side of the island where all of a sudden, my gulls just disappear. It's weird.

There's no nests here. It's just the sound of the water and a bell. Okay, Dean, you've convinced me, I am now Team Gull. What can we do to help the gulls? So maybe whoever's listening, maybe they still hate gulls, I don't know. But if I've changed your view just a tiny bit, yes, there are things you can do.

The first is just to pay attention. Try to look at gulls as fellow creatures when you go to the beach. Watch what they do, see how they interact, get to know them beyond the sort of villains of your french fries. Secondly, don't feed them. Just like you wouldn't feed a bear, you don't. don't want to habituate them to human food any more than they already are. So in other words, protect the Cheetos and the sandwiches to protect the goals. Indeed. Protect your food, please. Thirdly, get involved, however you see fit, in curbing climate change.

The faster the world warms, the more damage we will see to the environment and especially marine ecosystems. Yes, please do. Give an ounce of a damn and hopefully more than that. Yeah, and like, don't be a guy in New Jersey. That's the other thing I would say. Guys in New Jersey, you can reach Ben at Ben, but... So lastly, I'll just say that I recently learned that the summer outbreak of flu that everyone was worried about, it never came to pass. The gulls had a good summer. Hot gull summer.

That was good. And I had a good summer too, you know, amid the gulls of Portland doing their thing, raising their families, singing their songs. They are pretty funny creatures to watch, and I really recommend anyone do it anytime. Just try to keep your distance. Oh, Jesus.

Endless thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by me, Dean Russell, and hosted by Tyrant Gull Amory Seavertson and Sandwich Snatcher Ben Brock Johnson. Mix, sound design, and gull jams by Emily Jankowski, editing by Samata Joshi, the rest of our team is Grace Tatter and Paul Vicus. Special thanks to the many gull apologists

who put up with me and put me up on Appledore Island, including Dr. Sarah Korshane, Mary Elizabeth Everett, Dr. Kristen Covino. Also, Jonathan Dane, Maddie Elms, Sean Maddie, Shaly, Shailie, Dylan Titmus, Melba Torres Sosa, and really everyone else at Shoals Marine Lab. Angelus Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and the shadow of a gull mere moments before you lose consciousness. If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or another story from the internet you want us to tell,

hit us up, Angelus Thread at WBUR.org. I was going to try to do a gull sound, but there's going to be so much gull sound that And my goal. My goal imitate. That was pretty good. That was pretty good. Emery, the great reveal of this episode is that I have done all the tape heard so far in this episode. Playing the role of goal.

Yeah, can you do one more, but we need to descend a little more desperate? Okay, now one post sandwich. I could do this all day.