Battle of the birds

Dive-bombing seagulls are heading inland. And here's why

- By Esther Addley

"They're a menace," said Jenny Riley, shooting a wary glance at the seagulls whirling above her beach hut near the pier in Lowestoft, Suffolk, as she sheltered from the hot afternoon sun with her friend, Angela Forster.

The two women have each had a hut on this stretch of powdery white sand for decades, and often eat sandwiches or fish and chips there but, as in many places on Britain's coast, it can be a perilous pastime.

"The birds are really vicious," said Riley. "If you're eating anything, you more or less have to go in to the hut or they'll take it from your hand."

"This is the worst summer I have known for seagulls, and I've lived my whole life in this place," she added.

Her friend agreed. "The mess and the smell in our town now is dreadful." Is there anything they would like to see happen? "Cull them," said Forster. "Although I wouldn't like to see them go completely - after all, they are the seaside."

Their sense of decades-long decline in a town whose fishing industry has almost vanished since the 1960s is perhaps not a surprise - but when it comes to the seagull numbers, the women are not wrong.

Local experts estimate the town's herring gull numbers at 10,000, or 15% of the human population, though the numbers are hard to calculate. Lowestoft's more visible bird problem, however, is its kittiwakes, another gull species whose population has grown from a single breeding pair in the 1950s to more than 1,000 nests today, splodged messily on to window sills and architraves and shopfronts throughout the town centre and leaving anyone passing underneath at risk of a foul-smelling guano splat.