Why are herring gulls protected

Like all wild birds, seagulls and their eggs and nests are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act In Scotland and Northern Ireland, it is also illegal to prevent birds from accessing their nest and, in Northern Ireland, it is illegal to disturb any nesting bird. Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, a wild bird is defined as any bird of a species which is resident in or is a visitor to the European Territory of any member state in a wild state.

So seagulls fall under this definition and are therefore protected. MORE : Seagulls work out school break times to target kids for food. Follow Metro across our social channels, on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram. Poppy Logo. Many applicants will want to urgently act upon their licences, especially now that the bird breeding season is upon us, and I want to thank them for their patience. This work has taken longer than we originally anticipated, for the reasons explained below.

We have to date received almost applications, around three quarters of which arrived with us in March, many of these after the gull application deadline of 15 March. A significant number of these applications did not include all the required information and have taken additional time to go back to applicants to ask for this necessary information.

We have brought more people into the licensing team to increase our capacity to address this unexpected additional workload. We have also been working with stakeholder groups to test that the conditions in the licences, for example on avoiding disturbance to other protect species such as raptors, will be clear and workable for users. For the named gull species in particular, we need to ensure there is adequate information on large numbers of applications, and then assess them together.

This is because we must undertake an assessment of cumulative impacts on conservation status before we issue these licences. In addition, where any applications are on protected sites, such as Special Protection Areas SPAs , we need to ensure that we have the information we need in order to be certain there will be no adverse effects on those sites.

We continue to work hard on completing the technical assessments for these licence applications and have started issuing decisions to applicants. A reduction in the availability of discards from fisheries is also suggested, which explains their migration to becoming urban scavengers instead.

Clearly they are not. Removing the endangered status from urban gulls cannot come too soon for city residents woken up at 5 a. Text settings. Useful links. More from The Spectator. About us.