Control of Black backed gulls

[Bruce McKinlay]

 This is an email string from within DOC about gull control.

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From:    Sarah King 

G'day,

Has anyone worked with blackbacked gulls? 
I'm looking at doing some work monitoring them to see how much of a threat they are to the local NZ dotterels.  I'm interested in finding someone who knows quite a bit about their behaviour and ecology to see if my monitoring plan is of any use.
Also if anyone has done any banding of blackbacks i'd like to hear from you to see how much work this entails.

Cheers
Sarah

Sarah King
Protected Species Ranger
Rangitaiki Area
Bay of Plenty Conservancy
Te Papa Atawhai, Department of Conservation

Reply from Keith Owen

Hi Sarah,

We knocked over about 3300 birds off Matakana Island using alphachlorosole with bread cubes about a decade ago to reduce the impact on NNZD and VOC breeding. Scratch (Paul Jansen) also banded birds at local Tauranga tips with cohort colours in an effort to see where they came from. He also videod dotterel chicks being preyed upon by SBBG  and that gave us good reason to reduce numbers.This was part of that operation. An internal report was written at the time. In recent times there has been low scale removal of some birds, eggs, chicks at  Matakana to keep numbers down to a satisfactory level.
John Heaphy has details.

Cheers
Keith

[Leovb]

So, where is the report?
Would be nice to read it. Culling 3300 gulls is probably only working for the short-term, if at all.
Over in europe covering-up landfills has given better results in bringing gull-numbers down (Sorry
I've got no formal report on that). Basically what it comes down to is to let populations undergo their
number-limiting natural factors/vectors which keep their numbers in place. Hence keeping gulls away
from human-related foodsources is bound to have an effect on their numbers.