Joe Bennett: We've got sea gulls on the run

A close-up of the black-billed gull with chicks. PHOTO/DOC

Shakespeare called them mews. The French call them mouettes. Most people call them sea gulls. Properly they're just gulls.

But it doesn't much matter what we call them. Thirty million years they've been mewing on the wind, and now in clean-and-green-land we've started killing them off. You've got to be impressed.

We've been around as a species for fifty thousand years, which is little more than an evolutionary minute or two, but we've performed such wonders. While other beasties have just swanned about in their niche, we've set about dominating everywhere we can. As a result we're uniquely responsible, right now, for the greatest mass extinction since the last one, which happened about 60 million years ago and was caused by catastrophic climate change.

We've dealt to or are dealing to fish and frogs and birds and mammals, everything indeed that breathes and hopes to share this little planet with us. And now we've got gulls on the run. Gulls!

Brilliant things, gulls, brilliant. I live in a port. I still see plenty.

This morning down by the wharf a black-backed gull was touring a spot where men fish. It sought discarded guts, bait, anything carbon-based. It walked on huge webbed feet, reptilian feet. Birds are the dinosaurs' unacknowledged heirs.

Black-backed gulls are hefty. Meaty body, huge wings, a scanning eye and a bill like a pruning hook, yellow as butter and tipped with red. If they turned on us they could do damage. They ought to, but won't. Instead they scavenge. They're as omnivorous as labradors.

When the gull saw my dog it flopped on to the water where it sat and bobbed and watched as the dog toured the same spot on the shoreline, scavenging too. Giving up on its scavenge, the bird took to the third element, the one it's best at, the air. Gulls are the most easeful and masterly of fliers.

Heavy hard flaps to lift it from the water then it caught the breeze and rose with no apparent effort, circled me and the dog from thirty feet above, its head swivelling slowly, peering down upon us in what seemed disdain for mere terrestrials. Then it rowed through the air to a massive gas tank, swung into the wind, turned its wings till it was all but stationary and dropped on to the guard rail as lightly and softly as thistledown. A glory to watch.

But the best for me is a valley where I often walk the dog, a steep-sided valley that funnels the wind off the sea and often there'll be a gull in the funnel and the dog and I can climb to be level with it, us on the steep scrub bank, labouring, panting, the bird just riding the air. And I'll stand there breathing and leaning on my stick to admire the creature. It expends no energy, its feet tucked under, its body as sleek and fine as a yacht's hull, no, sleeker, finer, because more flexible, more fluid, and shrouded in a hundred thousand rippling feathers of a white so utter it aches the eye. It just lies on the sky and flexes with it. What do we ever do that's as lovely as that? And every gull can do it. Every one of them goes from egg to aerobat in just a few weeks.

The black-backed gull's a global bird, and its number remain strong for now. But the two explicitly local gulls, the red-billed gull and the black-billed gull, are in steep decline. The red-billed gull's the screamer gull, the raucous mobber of fish and chips, forever creeping nearer to the edge of the table. A wave of the hand and the beast and its brothers leap in the air and cackle with horror. Their numbers have halved in recent years, halved from numerous to far fewer. The reasons are many - but in the end there's only the one. Without us they'd be thriving.

Ditto the black-billed gull, quieter and slimmer and less of a scavenger, more often inland, it breeds on the braided rivers especially down south. And its numbers have plunged. Though still quite common its conservation status is officially critical.

When Shakespeare writes of mews - and the name comes from the noise they make, that plaintive cry on the wind - a footnote explains that a mew is a gull. A hundred years from now there will probably need to be another footnote, explaining what a gull was.