THE street cleaners were out early again this morning. Long before you or I had opened our eyes, they were out on the streets, picking up the discarded food from the day before.
While we were still peacefully dreaming, they were sorting out the rubbish that was overflowing from wheelie bins and street litter bins, the detritus from our daily lives that was lying in the gutter.
But I don’t mean council-paid waste operatives in high-viz jackets.
Quite the opposite. These refuse collectors need no protective clothing, receive no monthly wage and belong to no union.
They need no supervisors or work rotas to co-ordinate their work, each works as an individual and the waste they uncover is reward enough for their labours.
Who are they? The Herring Gull flocks in our coastal towns, of course.
Your average coastal Herring Gull has never had it so good. Opportunists, always with one eye open for rich pickings, these winged chancers are profiting from our untidiness.
Already doing very nicely thank you, running a protection racket on unsuspecting visitors eating open fish and chips along the promenade – give me a chip or I’ll take your whole fish! – the Herring Gull population is now benefiting from our local council’s latest great idea, namely to only collect our rubbish once every two weeks.
Where once upon a time our bins filled up but were emptied regularly once a week, the council in its wisdom has deemed it appropriate now to collect the regular rubbish fortnightly.
The inevitable result? Overflowing bins everywhere with an accumulation of rubbish on the ground all around.
In its defence, the council will claim it has supplied recycling bins for glass, paper and metal to take up the shortfall, which are emptied on alternate weeks.
With the greatest respect, these recycling bins are not much bigger than a waste-paper basket and about as much use for those of us living in communal buildings.
Granted, we should all be making an effort to reduce our personal production of refuse, and many of us are doing all we can but, councillors, please, do the maths.
A quart into a pint pot just will not go.
And the result is lying around the streets for all to see. Including Herring Gulls with sharp eyes, and even sharper bills.
As I write this, I’m watching an adventurous gull tearing open a black sack next to an overflowing wheelie bin and scattering its contents all over the pavement as it looks for scraps to eat.
Herring Gulls are designed to eat just that: fish, and plenty of it. But not in batter, and not with chips on the side.
You can’t blame the birds, they have a young family to think of right now.
My avian neighbours now have a family of three hungry chicks to feed. They look quite cute at this stage (see photo above), though perhaps only their parents would call them beautiful, but they’re growing fast and need a constant supply of food.
So what would any self-respecting caring parent do but seek out an easy food source and raid it regularly.
Why fly out to sea to look for food when breakfast is literally at your feet, in the gutter?
But what does this mean for them in the long term?
Apart from a risk of obesity from eating too many fatty products, there is the more real risk of swallowing something even more harmful – plastic wrapping for example which is totally indigestible, may stick in the gut and will ultimately kill the bird, possibly after long and painful suffering.
So what can we do? Apart from trying to reduce our waste output generally, think twice about discarding food without making sure it is well wrapped up, and never just drop it on the ground.
After all, Herring Gulls may be just the more appealing opportunists to benefit from our wastefulness – ones with four legs, whiskers and a long scaly tail won’t be far behind!
