Part 1: “Seagulls” and Politics

I write today to dispel the myth of the “seagull”, whose brethren have been dubbed the “rats of the skies” and whose reputation for stealing hotdogs from the sandy hands of mustard-crusted sunburned children has deeply overshadowed its simple beauty and charm.

Behold, a California Gull, Larus californicus. 2012.

When envisioning a “seagull”, most people think of a swarm of big gray-and-white birds mobbing a snack bar at a crowded ocean beach or pillaging the dumpster in the beach’s parking lot. What many people fail to realize is that the mob of seemingly identical birds usually consists of multiple species of birds. Calling them all “seagulls” strips them of their individuality, lumps them into a mass of sameness, and perpetuates ignorance (no offense to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who is a genuine badass). There are over a hundred species of gulls worldwide and each of them is different. You wouldn’t casually say, “Hey mom, there are some dogs in the yard” and leave it at that when there are wolves, jackals, and domestic dogs on the lawn, would you? All three of those animals share a genus. The diversity of gulls expands beyond just the genus Larus, so when you call a Sabine’s Gull, Xema sabini, a “seagull”, it is like saying a Chimpanzee is just another human (who are in the same family, Hominidae, but not the same genus). Some folks would be pretty pissed about that. Needless to say, it is best to drop the “sea” and just go with “gull”; at least bird nerds will like you a lot better if you do.

A beautiful and unique Heerman's Gull, Larus heermanni, in a parking lot in San Francisco. Red bill and black feet!

Some gulls like civilization because we leave so much edible waste around and many gulls have become accustomed to the easy snag of a PB&J left on a picnic table or a recently dumped rack of ribs that may have hit the floor in the kitchen and couldn’t be served to the waiting customer. Gulls are adaptable. Their opportunistic behavior is often portrayed as lazy or greedy, but really it is just intelligent. Without our handouts or garbage dumps, these birds would survive just fine. They would forage like any other species of bird. Not all gulls live around or near the sea. They also live near freshwater swamps, estuaries, open tundra, lakes, and bays, among other places. Since we call them “seagulls” based on where they live, wouldn’t we call a gull that lived near Tomales Bay a bagel (baygull)? Sorry, bad joke.

For the past four summers, I have been extraordinarily fortunate to participate in a long-term study of the California Gull, Larus californicus, at Mono Lake. Learning about this particular species of gull in their natural habitat has opened my eyes to the remarkable and chaotic life of colony-nesting species. This particular colony of California Gulls has a rich history that intertwines with the human political history of this region. The story starts in Los Angeles, over three hundred miles south of Mono Lake.

Gulls on Pancake Islet, 2009.

At the turn of the century, the city of Los Angeles, looking to grow, wanted more water. They began searching far and wide to find it. Find it they did. They cunningly began to buy up water rights throughout the Owens Valley and up into the Mono Basin (how they went about doing this is a story for another day). In April 1941, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) began diverting water from Mono Lake’s tributary streams. Not just some water; almost all of it. Rush Creek dried up below LADWP’s Grant Lake Reservoir. The Mono Lake, already a saline terminal desert lake, began to evaporate. The lake level dropped over 40 feet, which doubled the salinity of the lake, causing the simple ecosystem to spiral to the brink of collapse.

This is where the gulls come in: Mono Lake hosts the second largest California Gull nesting colony known in the world. The largest colony is at the Great Salt Lake in Utah, which has upwards of 100,000 nesting California Gulls each summer (see, not all gulls live by the sea!). Mono Lake’s colony fluctuates but has averaged around 47,000 adults in the last 30 years. Historically, the gulls nested on Negit Island, a large rocky volcanic island where greasewood shrubs provided the gulls with shade. When the lake level dropped dramatically as a result of the water diversions, Negit became connected to the mainland, allowing predators like coyotes to saunter out and feast on the nesting gulls and their newborn chicks. Concerned scientists and conservation groups rallied to do something, anything, to prevent this destruction from happening, and in the spring of 1978 the National Guard tried to make a moat in the land bridge with dynamite. The resulting channel was ragged and thin, but it had to do. In the spring of 1979, they tried again, only this time the mud flew up into the air and fell back down exactly where it came from; a complete failure. According to John Hart, who wrote the now out-of-print environmental saga of Mono Lake called Storm Over Mono, “On May 27, researchers starting their annual gull census found coyote tracks, empty nests, and scattered shells…three-quarters of the gulls at Mono failed to nest at all that year” (88). That spring, many of the gulls scattered from Negit Island and found a newly emerged rocky archipelago east of Negit, now called the Negit Islets, and another few islets west of Paoha Island. These islets became the new home of Mono Lake’s California Gull colony.

Negit Island, where the gulls used to nest.

In 1983, the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, now PRBO Conservation Science, started a long-term study of the Mono Lake California Gull colony in conjunction with the Mono Lake Committee. Each year, researchers make three trips to the island during the summer. The first visit, in May, is a colony-wide Nest Count. Four to six researchers and/or volunteers count every nest on every islet in 3-4 days in sweep lines, marking the side of each nest with a dab of water soluble paint to avoid double counting and keeping track of numbers with handheld tally counters, casually called clickers. In July, researchers band a subset of chicks that were born within small chicken wire and PVC pipe plots with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services aluminum bands, each with its own unique 8-digit number, and a plastic color band. In late August or early September, researchers go back out to the now vacated islets and scour the rocky ground for dead banded chicks. This helps figure out how many of the banded chicks fledged and this number can be extrapolated to estimate the overall fledge-rate of the population, also known as the reproductive success of the population.

A researcher (Justin) bands a California Gull chick with a USFWS aluminum band. 2009.

This year is the beginning of the 30^th field season for the PRBO California Gull Project at Mono Lake. This length of a dataset is rare in the science world; many projects only go on for a few seasons, and all are funding dependent, which is becoming increasingly scarce as the government and state budgets are slashed and reprioritized (badly). This ongoing project has been monumental in gathering important ecological data as it pertains to the fluctuations in the lake level, brine shrimp productivity, and weather patterns. This data will be useful for years to come, in both scientific endeavors and political ones—it is, after all, one of the reasons Mono Lake was saved. The gull story is only one part of a long and complex process to help save Mono Lake from water diversions. To make a very long story short, a group of concerned citizens formed a non-profit called the Mono Lake Committee (MLC), who eventually gained enough support and momentum to sue the city of Los Angeles for damaging the lake’s ecosystem. After a 16-year court battle, the MLC won the lawsuit and LADWP was ordered to divert less water to allow the lake to rise just over 20 feet from the historic low. The MLC now focuses on education, restoration, and research to keep the lake ecosystem healthy and cared for.

The next blog post will detail my most recent adventure with the gull project: Nest Count!

Work Cited

Hart, John. Storm Over Mono: The Mono Lake Battle and the California Water Future. Berkeley: University of California, 1996. Print.