As thick as thieves

From piracy to hijacking and mugging, Nature abounds with all sorts of bad and condemnable behaviour, but some species have a real knack for stealing, as Ian Morton discovers

- Ian Morton

WITHIN seconds of my American grandson Tom buying an ice cream on Lyme Regis seafront in Dorset, he was buffeted around the head by wings and his vanilla scoop vanished from its cone. We all laughed and told him it had been a ‘great British seaside experience’. Tom laughed, too—but, in truth, he had become another victim of the sort of opportunist theft that afflicts many a beach and promenade, for gulls are notoriously bold exponents of the natural practice known as kleptoparasitism. In layman’s terms, this means hanging around with the certainty of stealing a meal and it sustains a broad spectrum of taxa, from seaborne scroungers to buccaneering bugs.

However, it’s the birds that we most readily identify. Gulls do not need holidaymakers and carelessly managed fast food to trigger their thieving instinct. Many naturalists have recorded their ruthless interception of puffins returning from underwater forays miles out to sea with beaks full of sand eels. Although they scavenge any food that they can find, our coastal gulls are known to specialise in harassing the colourful little birds until they release their catch before they can take refuge in their burrows. Incidentally, the puffins, known around parts of the Severn estuary as Lundy birds or sea parrots, could well do without this, as their UK numbers—and the sand eels on which they rely—are falling.

Gulls, nonetheless, can themselves become victims. The most blatantly piratical seabird in Britain, found mostly on the coast and islands of northern Scotland, is the skua. Nearly all its food is seized from other birds and