Little gulls take a shine to Ireland

SMALL things are easily overlooked.

A little gull quartered the breakers off the limestone pavement between Malahide and Portmarnock last week. It cavorted with some of its black-headed cousins and I almost failed to notice it.

Seeing a little gull wouldn’t make a twitcher’s heart beat faster, but this is a bird you don’t see that often. Gulls, the scavengers of the bird world, are generally despised, but the little gull is special.

Ornithologically challenged readers please note; this gull is not ‘little’ as in ‘baby’; it’s a species in its own right. Indeed it’s sufficiently distinctive to have a genus all to itself.

About the size of a mistle thrush, this gull is conspicuously smaller that the black-headed ones you find almost everywhere on the Irish coast. Both species wear dark balaclavas in summer. These shrink to a smudge behind the eye in the autumn but the rounded wing-tips of the little gull are white, the undersides of the wings being conspicuously black. The plumages of immature ones can be confusing but other species are usually present for size comparison. Little gulls hunt the way terns do, flying slowly into the wind above the waves and dipping to the surface to snatch up small fish and crustaceans.

This bird has the distinction of being the smallest of the world’s 51 gull species. It can turn up anywhere along the coast but, strangely, it has taken a shine to the Irish Sea.

The Wicklow coast is particularly favoured. While most little gulls simply pass us by, some cease their wandering when they reach our shores and sit out the winter on the waters between Ireland and Wales. Galway Bay also attracts them. The numbers coming here began to increase in the middle of the last century. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds estimates that between 400 and 800 spend the winter off Britain and Ireland. Similar numbers continue their southward migration, some travelling as far as the west coast of Africa. On Christmas Eve 1974, between five and ten thousand little gulls gathered at St. Brieuc’s Bay in Brittany. A few birds stay here for the summer. There have been unsuccessful nesting attempts in Britain.

Although there are colonies in the Baltic and the Netherlands, this is fundamentally a Siberian bird. Little gulls travel inland along the Ob and Ural rivers each spring. Marshes lakes and ponds are the breeding locations of choice. Gulls find their partners when they reach the colonies, although older ones seem to arrive already paired. They are usually two or three years old when breeding for the first time. Little gulls often nest in the company of more aggressive species.

At the end of the season adults and young disperse along the great rivers of Europe and Asia, reaching the coast. Some travel to the Black and Caspian seas. They turn up in the Mediterranean and visit Indian and Chinese shores. Birds ringed as chicks in the Baltic have been found here and a few of the 500 birds ringed in Britain and Ireland were recorded in Finland and Poland. It’s thought that some Russian-bred little gulls travel via the Baltic to the North Sea and the west coast of Europe, although ringing has not confirmed this.

But what attracts little gulls to the Irish Sea? Perhaps it bears some resemblance to the Baltic, which presumably is one of the little gull’s favourite haunt. Both are inland seas, sheltered from the fierce gales of the North Atlantic and their cool nutrient-rich waters offer abundant food. But theBaltic is so low in salt that it is more like a vast inland lake than a sea. Up to a few decades ago it froze in winter, forcing the gulls to move westwards. Irish Sea temperatures remain relatively high in winter so the bird has no such problems here.

If you live on the coast, look out for a tiny gull, driven to the shore by gales.