The Management of Nuisance Urban Gulls by Deployment of Egg Substitutes by Simon Moon

How do you control increasing numbers of urban gulls effectively, humanly and within budget? This was the question I asked myself and it would appear from a small scale trial the previous year that imitation eggs were the answer, but would they work in a large scale urban deployment? With no available research on imitation eggs and very little information on urban gulls, I decided to use the opportunity of Taunton Deane Borough Council's gull control programme to study the use of these plastic eggs to establish if they did indeed work and produce an MSc dissertation on the subject.

Throughout the summer 2007, the town centre breeding gull population of Taunton, Somerset, was subjected to an egg replacement programme whereby real eggs were replaced with imitations. The gulls whose eggs had been replaced were monitored every three weeks from May to August and the gulls incubated the imitation eggs for at least twice as long as they normally would and sometimes even longer. Furthermore, once the nest was abandoned, the gulls did not return during the season.

In practice, this meant that the gulls spent the summer months sat on top of buildings and nuisance behaviour normally associated with the breeding season was reduced. Noise levels had decreased and the aggressive attacks that can be experienced when young chicks are present did not materialise within the treated areas.

This control method is humane in the eyes of the public - in that the Council was being proactive and controlling the gulls in treated areas but not in a harmful way, is relatively inexpensive (especially in the current economic climate) compared with falconry, oiling etc. and the eggs can be re-used the following year. Finally, this method actually works as I have proven in my dissertation. I am now building on this work to improve this method of gull control in the form of PhD and researching the larger public health impacts of urban gulls.