Gell-Man, gulls and quarks
The shop, he claimed, became unusually hot last summer. Chocolate bars were beginning to melt on the shelves so he called an air conditioning company. A nest on the roof, they found, was partly blocking an air vent.
The defendant admitted the offence but Judge John O’Neill offered to strike out the charges if €500 were donated to Crumlin Children’s Hospital. Life is a funny old business; not that long ago, the herring gull was regarded as an obnoxious pest. Now a fine of €1,000 and a month’s imprisonment, can be imposed for harming one or interfering with a nest.
This large ‘seagull’ has light grey wings with black tips. The bill is yellow apart from a bright red spot. A humble scavenger, the bird has nonetheless the highest scientific and literary connections. In 1964, Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig proposed that protons and neutrons, the particles in the nucleus of the atom, are composed of six smaller entities, which can’t exist on their own but only in combination.
Gell-Mann, reading Finnegan’s Wake at the time, came across the phrase ‘three quarks for Muster Mark’. The three quarts, which Joyce’s Chapelizod publican was asked to serve, had become ‘quarks’, the calls the gulls made on the nearby Liffey. ‘The number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature’, said Gell-Mann; so gulls have named some of the fundamental particles of which everything is composed.
The bird is also the subject of a classic in another genre: The Herring Gull’s World, by Dutch Nobel prize-winner Niko Tinbergen, appeared in 1953.
Gulls, as a group, evolved as shore carrion feeders, the maritime equivalents of rats and vultures. With the expansion of sea fishing and whaling, they took to following boats, eating the offal thrown overboard. Large flocks gathered around ports; the herring gull’s plaintive mewing becoming a familiar fishing village sound. Then they moved onto town dumps.
Herring gulls nest on isolated islands and rocky promontories. Such habitat is in short supply and, as gull numbers soared, the birds ran out of breeding space; the first nests on buildings were recorded in the 1920s.
Squatting on dwellings was not a welcome development. Gulls are messy nesters; their droppings and discarded rotting food upset householders. Parents will swoop menacingly at anyone who approaches a nest, although they seldom actually strike an intruder. Flying from dumps to reservoirs at roosting time, they may contaminate water supplies with their dirty feet. They are also a hazard at airports. In 1983, an airliner almost crashed on take-off in Dublin, when birds were sucked into an engine. The pilots managed to turn the plane around and land safely, a miraculous feat but there is no evidence that the birds involved were gulls; the species was never identified.
The flight path of the runway, which is no longer used, required aircraft to fly over Ballealy tip, one of Dublin’s largest. The gulls frequenting the dump roosted and bred mainly on Lambay, 8km to the east. A census in 1984 found almost 22,000 pairs of gulls on the island. Poisoned bait was administered, and the operation being repeated, by 1987, only 5,000 pairs remained.
It was expected that gull numbers would recover and that further culls would be needed. However, numbers continued to fall. According to Oscar Merne of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, only 1,500 pairs remained in 1991.
There was a slight recovery in the mid-1990s, and then numbers fell again. Avian botulism is thought to be responsible for the continued mortality. Gulls pick up the pathogen clostridium botulinum while feeding at dumps. The bacterium, lodged in the gut, produces a toxic substance causing gradual paralysis of its host.
The collapse in numbers made nesting space available nonetheless, herring gulls continue to nest on buildings. Numbers have increased but the species is still red-listed by BirdWatch Ireland.
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