One expert said that gulls that are talented at stealing food have probably taken years to perfect their technique. Measuring a gull, right, on Appledore Island, Me.Here are three good things about gulls:
They are devoted parents.
Males share child care equally with
females. That includes sitting on the
eggs during incubation.
And they have figured out a way — ac-
tually many ways — to survive in a
harsh and unforgiving world. Some eat
clams, some eat fish, some are attracted
to landfills.
Of course, a few will divebomb you at
the beach or boardwalk to steal a French
fry, or the cheese on your cracker or an
entire slice of pizza.
The beach pirate approach to survival
is where humans and gulls clash. And
the outcry from humans is almost as
loud and outraged as the cries of the
gulls themselves. Several recent news
articles have chronicled the predations
of gulls and some possible remedies.
Ocean City, N.J., is bringing in hawks,
and some scientists have suggested
staring directly at gulls to fend them off.
Though that is hard to do when the birds
sneak up behind you as you are putting
cheese on a cracker.
There are some reports of more seri-
ous trouble. In England, a woman said a
gull carried off her Chihuahua, and in
Russia a pilot was hailed as a hero for
safely landing his plane after a collision
with a flock of gulls. In the New York
area, thousands of birds, including gulls,
have been killed in the decade since the
Miracle on the Hudson crash to clear the
skies for airplanes, without an apparent
reduction in bird strikes.
But it’s at the beach where tempers
flare most predictably. And in times like
these, with heightened human-gull ten-
sions, very little has been written about
the gulls’ point of view.
Who speaks for the gulls? Admittedly,
gulls have quite a strong voice of their
own, it’s just that it’s pretty unintelligi-
ble to most of us.
An ornithologist would seem to be the
obvious choice. They like birds. I called
Christopher Elphick at the University of
Connecticut.He spends a lot of time studying spar-
rows, but he has a soft spot for gulls.
“They’ve found a way to succeed in
the world,” he said. “So much biodiver-
sity is suffering and disappearing and
being lost. A part of me wants to just cel-
ebrate the fact that there are some or-
ganisms that can adapt and do well.”
There are more than 100 species of
gulls worldwide, and they are doing
well, by and large.
Some live nowhere near the sea,
which makes birders and ornithologists
allergic to the common term sea gull, al-
though renegade friends of common lan-
guage have called this attitude “bird-
splaining.”
A few, like the Ivory gull in the Arctic,
which is near threatened, and the black-
billed gull in New Zealand, which is en-
dangered, are in trouble, but most are
not.
The gulls that people are most likely
to encounter on Northeastern United
States beaches in August are herring
gulls, great black-backed gulls, ring-
billed gulls and laughing gulls. Some of
their populations are declining, but that
is probably because they reached his-
toric highs in the 20th century.
Before that time, some of those gulls
were not found in New York or New Jer-
sey. Herring gulls were first spotted
nesting on Long Island in 1931, for in-
stance.
They began to spread in the 1960s and
peaked in the ’80s.
Dr. Elphick said, and ornithologists
and birders speculate, that the closing of
open landfills like Fresh Kills on Staten
Island in New York City may have some-
thing to do with the drop in numbers
since then. “There’s many a birder, espe-
cially those who’ve been around for 20 to
30 years, who will complain about the
closing of landfills and how it’s removed
their best places to go watch gulls,” he
said
Dr. Sarah J. Courchesne has been part
of a summer gull research program at
the Shoals Marine Laboratory on Apple-
dore Island, Me., since 2008.
She admits that the herring gulls andblack-backed gulls there do not always
take kindly to visitors. But these are
breeding colonies, and the researchers
take young birds off the nest, examine
them and put identification bands on
them.
“This is like somebody walked into
your house in the night and picked upyour child and tried to walk off with
them,” she said. “You would be
alarmed.”
As are the gulls. So much so that the
volunteers wear bike helmets and some-
times ponchos.
“Some gulls are just kind of psycho
and others are really chill,” she said.
Some birds sit quietly on a nest and al-
low themselves to be lifted off by volun-
teers who check the babies.
And the same variation occurs in howany given gull makes a living. Thou-
sands and thousands forage for clams,
follow fishing boats and shop at the local
landfills.
“We have gulls that are never seen on
beaches, and we know that because we
have GPS loggers on them and they just
never go near people,” Dr. Courchesne
said. “They are 100 percent out at sea
fishing for their own food.”
“I can’t deny that there are gulls that
are stealing food,” she added. “And I
can’t deny they are really good at it.”
But the thieves are specialists. And to
give credit where it is due, they have
worked at their trade. “If you’re dealing
with a gull that is really talented at steal-
ing food,” Dr. Courchesne said, “that gull
has perfected the technique, possibly
over the course of years.”
Also, the behavior that bothers hu-
mans so much begins with humans
themselves.
“Everybody who goes to the beach
and gets aggravated by a gull has previ-
ous humans to thank for it,” Dr. Courch-
esne said. You may not have given the
gulls food, but somebody else did, andgulls are fast learners. At nearby
beaches on the Maine mainland, she
said, “You’ll see people drive up to the
beach and they’ll just dump an entire
container of French fries out their win-
dow so the gulls come.”
Dr. Elphick agreed. “We’re slobs,” he
said. “If we didn’t leave food lying
around, they wouldn’t be doing what
they’re doing.”
Dr. Courchesne, a veterinarian,
teaches biology at Northern Essex Com-
munity College as well as being one of
the leaders of the gull program at Apple-
dore. (Her students often volunteer for
the gull program.) She came to gulls
partly because she loved birds, and even
in veterinary school she knew she would
not be treating pets. “I don’t like dogs,”
she said.
She often hears from the public, since
a major part of the research at Apple-
dore involves banding young gulls and
getting reports about where they turn
up.
She tries to turn correspondents into
gull admirers or, at least, gull tolerators.
“People say, so here’s a bird, it tried tosteal my sandwich. It has a band on it so
I guess you want to hear about it,” she
said.
“We’ll tell them the whole history.
Some of these birds are 12 to 15 years
old.” She tells them how many offspring
they have and what devoted parents
they are, and how the “mother” that
they saw may well have been a male
helping his young.
Late August is “high time for har-
assment,” she said, because the young
have fledged and their adult parents
take them to foraging spots, which in-
clude beaches and boardwalks, to find
food and to teach them the ropes. The
gulls, like the humans, bring their whole
families. “They’re being so pushy for
food because they’re such committed
parents,” she said.
“I have really come to love them,” she
said.
What does she recommend that the
public do about gulls?
“I would recommend to people that
they spend some time just bird watch-
ing,” Dr. Courchesne said. “Sit back and
watch what they do.”Raucous and annoying, yes. But gulls have their virtues.
PETER PARKS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES SARAH COURCHESNEBY JAMES GORMAN“We have gulls that are never
seen on beaches, and we know
that because we have GPS
loggers on them.”..
10 | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITIONscience
The faces are haunting. About 8,
years ago, over a period of perhaps 200
years, artists who lived in Lepenski Vir,
a settlement on the banks of the Danube,
carved about 100 sandstone boulders
with faces and abstract designs. The
faces are simple, with wide round eyes,
stylized noses and down-turned open
mouths. They do not look happy.
I imagine these stone heads posing an
existential question, something like the
one my son startled us with when we
told him that he had to go to play group,
even if he didn’t want to. He was 3, and
as the loss of freedom struck him, he
wailed: “How did this happen to me?”
Archaeologists say the heads seem to
be a mixture of human and fish features.
Some designs look like fish skeletons.
The gorges and pools in this part of the
Danube were long a home to sturgeon
and other large fish that sustained hu-
man life. Perhaps a fishing people imag-
ined their souls migrating into fish after
death.
Many of these sculptures were kept in
strange trapezoidal dwellings, with
hard limestone floors. In some cases the
dead lay buried under the homes. So the
sculptures might have represented an-
cestors. I take this as consistent with my
interpretation. You die, and suddenly
you’re a sturgeon.
Lepenski Vir — Vir means whirlpool
in Serbian — was first inhabited more
than 12,000 years ago and off and on
over thousands of years. Archaeologists
excavated it from 1965 to 1970, when
most of the site was flooded during the
building of the first of two dams on the
Danube.
But I first came upon the museum and
reconstruction of the site in Serbia only
a few months ago as a tourist. I was
stunned by the sculptures and the mys-
tery of the site’s past. It sits across the
river from a mountain cliff on the Roma-
nian side of the river, and the trapezoidal
homes echo the shape of the cliff. There
are other sites of similar age, a few of
them with boulder sculptures, on either
side of the Danube in this area, now
known as the Iron Gates. But only Lep-
enski Vir has boulders with faces.
I called Dusan Boric, an archaeologist
who has studied the site extensively, to
find out more. Dr. Boric, a fellow at Co-
lumbia University’s Italian Academy for
Advanced Studies, said Lepenski Vir is
more important than ever for research.
Studies of ancient DNA that trace pat-
terns of human migration into Europe,
chemical analyses of bones and pottery
and continuing archaeological studies of
burial practices place the site at the very
moment when farmers from the Middle
East began to migrate into Southeast-
ern Europe and met the hunters and
gatherers who lived there at the time.
Researchers still debate the precise
dating of different settlements at Lepen-
ski Vir and nearby sites, but they agreeon the essential fact that the sites cap-
ture a record of the meeting and mixing
of two cultures and peoples.
It took a few thousand years for agri-
culture to spread to all of Europe. Per-
manent settlements were created, and
the population itself changed with this
migration and others that followed. This
transition from a hunting and gathering
culture to a farming culture is the
change from the Mesolithic Age to the
Neolithic for archaeologists.
Lepenski Vir offers a snapshot of thatprocess at its very beginning. David
Reich of Harvard, an expert in ancient
human DNA and human migration, has
drawn DNA from bones at Lepenski Vir.
“It is a mother lode of material,” Dr.
Reich said.
In a recent paper, he and other scien-
tists reported new findings about the
“genomic history of southeastern Eu-
rope.” As part of that study they drew
DNA from four individuals at Lepenski
Vir. Two were identifiable as Middle
Eastern farmers. And studies of thechemistry of their bones show that they
had not grown up at Lepenski Vir, but
were migrants from elsewhere. Another
had a mixed hunter-gatherer/farmer
heritage and had eaten a diet of fish. An-
other had hunter-gatherer heritage.
The dating of the skeletons showed a
range. The one with mixed heritage was
from 6070 B.C., or about 8,000 years ago.
The farmers were dated as 6200-
B.C. And the hunter-gatherer was prob-
ably earlier than the others.
The DNA of this ancient population ofhunter-gatherers contributes only a
small fraction of European ancestry to-
day, Dr. Reich said. Europeans now rep-
resent a mixture of genetic contribu-
tions from waves of migrants. The site,
he said, is a key landmark in the “lost
landscape of human variation.”
In some other areas, archaeologists
and ancient DNA experts have not al-
ways seen eye-to-eye, but here, Dr. Bo-
ric said, the new techniques have been a
great boon. With ancient DNA analysis,
he said, “What we are getting is an in-credibly powerful tool for understand-
ing what went on in the past.”
I asked Dr. Reich if he experienced the
same emotional jolt from DNA findings
that I get from the sculptures. “I do,” he
said. “It’s a little bit like being a trained
musician. You’re able to hear things the
untrained person wouldn’t.”
Another indication of the merging of
two cultures is a change in burial prac-
tices. Throughout Europe, the Mesolith-
ic foragers laid a body down stretched
out. The migrant farmers from the Mid-
dle East brought another way of treat-
ing death, setting the body in a crouched
or fetal position.
Both practices are found at Lepenski
Vir. And when the burial practices are
combined with DNA profiles, the picture
is richer still. Some of the dead of Middle
Eastern heritage are buried in the way
of the foragers. And others of foraging
heritage are buried in the way of the
farmers.
The farmers also brought their ani-
mals. There are bones from at least one
dog, which may someday help illumi-
nate the muddled picture of dog domes-
tication, which now seems to have oc-
curred separately in Asia and Europe.
And then there are the pigs.
Laurent Frantz of Queen Mary Uni-
versity of London, Greger Larson of the
University of Oxford and many other re-
searchers just this month published an
exhaustive study of the introduction of
Middle Eastern pigs, originally domes-
ticated in Anatolia, into Europe. They
looked at ancient and modern DNA of
wild and domestic pigs, including speci-
mens from the Iron Gates sites.
What they found was that the farmers
brought their pigs with them, but that
over 3,000 years, those pigs interbred
with European wild boars. Today, the
DNA of those original pigs is lost. The
farmers from the Middle East brought
the cultural practice of keeping and
breeding pigs, which survived, although
the original pig genome did not.
Dr. Frantz said, “The first 2,000 years
of domestication that takes place in Ana-
tolia left almost no trace in the modern
genome of domestic pigs.”
As to the faces, fishing was important
on the Danube before farmers came and
continued long afterward. Pottery that
was used for cooking grains elsewhere
in Europe was used for preparation of
fish at Lepenski Vir. And the strange
faces appear nowhere else. There are
about 100 such sculptures at Lepenski
Vir. In neighboring settlements, also of
fishing people, also where farmers came
and met and married foragers, there are
sculptures with designs like those on the
Lepenski Vir stone heads, but none of
the nearby sculptures have faces.
The farmers did not bring them with
them. The hunter-gatherers did not
make them before the farmers came.
They did not spread to the rest of Eu-
rope.
I have on my desk now replicas of two
of the heads that I picked up at the mu-
seum at Lepenski Vir. I look at them and
I feel a muddled kinship to the artists,
the departed souls, the sturgeon.
I too would like to know the answer to
what I believe is their question.
How did this happen to me?
But I tell them what I told my son. I
have absolutely no idea.Haunting faces at a prehistoric crossroad
LEPENSKI VIR, SERBIADanube rock sculptures
date to the period when
farmers entered the regionBY JAMES GORMANMICKEY MYSTIQUE, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Sculptures from 6300-5900 B.C. on display at the Museum Lepenski Vir on the banks of the Danube in Serbia. The unusual figures seem to share features with fish.RELEASED
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