Summer tourist season has officially begun – you can tell by the glazed look in the eyes of all us locals as we repeatedly count off the days until Labor Day in our heads, or by the helpful hand gestures we offer the vacationers slowly driving around our formerly quiet, free-flowing roads. And bird people like me can tell we are on the cusp of summer because I’ve already gotten that classic question from the seasonal visitors, “where are all the gulls and shorebirds?”
People picture the Cape’s beaches covered in gulls and maybe even terns and shorebirds, likely because their past visits were later in summer. As a result, someone arriving in June or even early July will be struck by how birdless the beaches are. Other than the few that breed here, like Piping Plovers, Willets, and American Oystercatchers, the shorebirds are still in the Arctic where most of them breed.
And right now, most of the gulls and terns are tucked away in breeding colonies on uninhabited offshore islands like Monomoy in Chatham, Bird and Ram Islands in Buzzards Bay, Penikese, and Muskeget. If you’re here for the week, and you miss the gulls for some reason, there is one Herring Gull colony that is a little more accessible than those uninhabited offshore islands – it’s the rooftops of the Hyannis mall district.
A few weeks back I was heading to a barber shop in Hyannis – I insist on having my seven remaining hairs professionally groomed. As I walked to the building, I saw a couple of Herring Gulls grabbing some dead grass and other stuff from a parking lot island, then flying off to the roof of the adjacent Stop and Shop. Being the sharp avian detective that I am, I deduced that they were building nests on that roof. I was vaguely aware that this was a thing, partly because there are always so many gulls at the mall, and partly because of the crazy predator sounds the malls play on the roofs to keep them away.
But here’s the thing – while the state wildlife biologists survey traditional nesting colonies on islands either annually or every few years, and have determined from that data that Herring Gulls are declining as nesting birds in Massachusetts, they don’t count the ones of the roofs. We attribute the apparent decline to the capping of all the old landfills and the decline of commercial fishing, both of which provided rich food subsidies to nesting Herring and Great Black-backed Gulls. But I’m starting to wonder if the missing gulls are just all nesting at the mall and no one is paying attention.
Up in Maine, some folks studied the rooftop nesting Herring Gulls in Portland and compared their nesting biology with a natural and long-studied colony on Appledore Island. It turned out the rooftop gulls had higher chick survival because there were no Great Black-backed Gulls, the primary predator on the nesting islands. And while you might assume the mall gulls were eating French fries and cigarette butts, it tuned out their diets were very natural - a mix of various sea creatures and insects - and essentially identical to that of the island nesters.
So the next non-beach day we get, take a tip from the weekly renters and head straight to Hyannis en masse. But don’t go to that crowded movie theater or shop, instead, set up a lawn chair in a parking lot, bring your own popcorn, and enjoy the free show that is the rooftop nesting gulls of Hyannis.
