The Ballad of U10: How One Mischievous Bird Taught Me to Love Gulls Even More

 Audubon > News Read More 

One mid-September afternoon on a beach in northern Massachusetts, I witnessed a crime.

I was tempted to dip my toes in the still-warm sea, but I’m a birder, so I got distracted taking photos of gulls. One individual caught my eye: It had a metal band around one ankle and a plastic band around the other, put there by researchers to help study the species. Finding a banded bird is a lucky break. I knew that if I could make out the numbers stamped on the bands, I could contribute to science by reporting them to the U.S. Geological Survey’s Bird Banding Lab. Giddy, I zoomed in on the gull’s legs and started snapping.

My photos were timestamped with the exact moment of the misdeed.

On September 17, 2022, at 1:26 pm, the American Herring Gull with a leg band marked U10 yanked open a tote bag emblazoned with the word BEACH, pulled out a bag of goldfish crackers, and stabbed the package with its beak, scattering the salty snacks all over the sand. The bag’s owners yelled and ran over. Embarrassed, I lowered my camera and slunk away.

To many people, gulls are pests. They’re beach thieves and statue defilers, and they scream like they’re on a roller coaster they can never get off. But sometimes, as with humans, the best way to understand the whole is to choose an individual from the screeching hordes and get to know them. So, I talked to some people who know the gull U10 well. The more I did, the more I discovered the complexity, genius, and fragility of these oft-maligned seabirds. I also found that I’d picked the right subject: Some people think that U10 is the best gull in the world.

Gull Dinner

Every spring and summer, parts of a picturesque island called Appledore, located seven miles off the southern Maine coast, become a shrieking mass of gulls. These include Great Black-backed Gulls and American Herring Gulls, the latter of which were recently split into a separate species from their European cousins. Researchers from the Gulls of Appledore project have been studying them since 2004. When they banded U10 in 2014, he had already achieved the crisp plumage of an adult.  Since American Herring Gulls take four years to reach that stage, U10 is 15 years old at minimum. His kind can reach 30 or older; it’s possible that he has been stealing snacks for decades.

When U10 isn’t on Appledore, he hangs out on a popular beach at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge—the one where I witnessed his thievery. Over the years, tons of people have reported their sightings of U10. Most involve food. Someone saw him eating a clam the size of his head. He begged for Cheez-Its from a four-year-old who dubbed him a “very good friend.” All told, researchers have collected over 140 observations of U10 feeding—more than any other American Herring Gull from Appledore.He’s a boon to the science of gull diets, which is one reason why Mary Everett, the Gulls of Appledore project’s onetime coordinator, calls him her favorite.

To a gull hater, U10’s broad diet may demonstrate a lack of taste. But it suggests a level of genius, too, since harvesting each type of food requires specific skills. Some American Herring Gulls pick wild blueberries. Some do a funny shuffling dance to coax earthworms to the surface. Some snatch flying ants out of the air or drop clams from a great height to smash them open. Their cousins, the European Herring Gulls, hunt rabbits, use bread as bait to catch goldfish (not the cracker kind), or commute 40 miles every day to eat scraps at a potato chip factory.

Studies on European Herring Gulls show that thieving birds watch people’s faces and approach us faster when we’re looking away. They’ve learned to respond to our cries as they would to alarm calls from other gulls. They pay special attention to any food humans have handled—they seem to know we only touch the good stuff. One study found that European Herring Gulls were successful in about half of their attempts to pilfer from people, which was better than their success rate at stealing from many bird species.

But look: It’s not really fair to call a gull a thief. Like us, U10 is just trying to survive the Anthropocene.

Gull Talk 

Travel to Appledore Island during the nesting season and you’ll see a softer side of U10. Gulls tend to be monogamous, and U10 is particularly romantic; though many pairs separate when they’re not nesting, he and his long-term mate have been sighted hanging out in the off season.

Most American Herring Gulls nest in the same patch of open ground every year, where they’re vulnerable to weather and harassment from other gulls. U10 does things a bit differently. Appledore is home to the Shoals Marine Laboratory, a field station run by Cornell University and the University of New Hampshire, and U10 builds a solitary home in a hollow space under one of the laboratory’s classroom buildings. This makes him a favorite among the teachers and students.

Herring Gull parents are fiercely devoted; some, including U10, feed their kids for an extended period after they’ve left the nest. For the next four years, the young gulls go through what researcher Mary Everett calls their “backpacking-through-Europe” phase. Some wander as far as Texas and Mexico. Remarkably, most of them come back to breed on Appledore.

Life on Appledore can be messy. Gulls jostle to protect their space. One time, researchers watched as U10 got a taste of his own medicine. A Great Black-backed Gull called 2E2—another infamous thief—stole a meal from him. U10 responded by standing on a rock and screaming at 2E2 for five minutes.

That these prickly birds manage to nest together in colonies is a testament to their communication skills. Though gulls are famous for their screams—in Belgium, contestants in the annual European Championship of Gullscreeching wow judges with their most realistic squawks— American Herring Gulls do more than yell. They have a complex repertoire of calls and gestures whose meanings change depending on context. Their cousins the European Herring Gulls, whose communication patterns are better studied, make at least eight distinct calls, and possibly a dozen or more, combining them with gestures such as squatting, facing away, and furiously ripping up tufts of grass.

Gone Gull

As he struts up to a tote bag on the beach, U10 appears invulnerable. But he’s more fragile than he seems. After all, his species was once nearly wiped out of the country.

In the late 1800s, ladies wanted feathers on their hats and other accessories, and hunters slaughtered huge numbers of birds to satisfy the trend. Snowy Egrets, Great Egrets, and other elegant species fell victim to the grim harvest. This isn’t news to most bird enthusiasts—it’s how the modern bird conservation movement started—but few folks know that gulls were killed, too. Sometimes women walked around with entire dead gulls wrapped around their necks.

American Herring Gulls survived because caring people worked hard to protect them. But today U10’s kind are once again in decline, as are his larger neighbors the Great Black-backed Gulls. Nobody knows exactly why, but climate change, which is unleashing profound changes on our oceans, seems a likely factor. Gulls are also vulnerable to overfishing, industrial chemicals, oil spills, destruction of nesting grounds, entanglement in fishing equipment, and more. Avian influenza is a hazard, too; in 2022, U10’s long-term mate died, likely of bird flu. (He has since found love again.)

Meanwhile, the gulls themselves are doing their best to adapt in the fast-changing Anthropocene. In Maine, University of New England ornithologist Noah Perlut studies American Herring Gulls that have figured out how to nest on top of buildings. Rooftop-nesting gulls seem to produce as many surviving offspring as the Appledore birds, and they’ve figured out how to overcome unique challenges. Perlut once watched as a new hotel was built next to one of the buildings where the gulls nested. The developers, worried that gulls would start nesting on their new structure, festooned the roof with plastic owls, but the gulls decapitated every one of the faux raptors and some even incorporated the heads into their nests.

When I think about the challenges that U10 and his fellow gulls face every day, and the way he dives into them while full-throatedly screaming, I’m awed. As far as anyone knows, the best gull in the world is still alive and snacking. By now he’s likely made the flight out to Appledore and returned to his special nest under the classroom. He’ll produce another round of chicks and dote on his babies and shout at all injustices. So will his kids and his kids’ kids, so long as we let them.