Gulls: A Social History

This is the story of those marvelously adaptable birds—the gulls—and the most destructive of animals: man.

Over the past 150 years man’s actions have thrown some species of gulls totally out of context with their world, yet they have managed not only to survive but, for better or worse, to multiply at a rate that matches man’s own.

Nature fitted the forty-four species of gulls to be efficient predators and scavengers, and for hundreds of years they lived the precarious existence of wild t...