GULLS IN TROMSØ, N.NORWAY
Peter Meyer has these days in EBN reported on a recent visit to Tromsø, and he there also wrote a little on the gulls in town. It may be of some interest to give a more general picture of which species of gulls we have here at 70*N in N.Norway, and when we can see them.
In summer the ‘house gull’ in most of the town is the Common Gull (Mew Gull, Larus canus), a really common bird everywhere in town, especially in the outer parts, nesting on roofs, balconies, in gardens etc, and making an unholy racket day and night (Summer nights here are, as you may realize, almost as light as day, because of our two months of midnight sun—never mind that summer 2010 has done its best to damage this picture: it has been our wettest and greyest summer ever). These gulls also concentrate at places where people eat, and have become adept at stealing sausages etc from unwary tourists, thataway creating the so-called ‘gull problem’ that the local newspapers and radio every summer want me to comment on. Signs some places warning people not to leave edibles around, and not to feed the gulls have helped quite a bit, by the way.
Some Common Gulls nest also in loose colonies and a famous one, mixed with Arctic terns, is situated around Prestvannet, the little lake on top of our island, surrounded by marshy areas, where the town people go for Sunday walks and to feed the many ducks (Mallards and Tufted Ducks), often fighting a losing fights against the gulls who rob most of the bread scattered out—there are also several pairs of Red-throated Loons on this small lake, but they of course stay aloof from these activities, although they clearly have become much less shy this last decade.
A few gulls nest in trees, and one pair has both this and last summer nested on top of a large (and occupied!) magpie nest five meters up in a spruceclose to my home. Last year the young jumped out too early; this year I have not seen young at all (the bad weather?). Around this time, early August, the Common Gulls leave most of suburbia, and concentrate on the shores and the places where much food is to be had in town; and a few months hence, they disappear altogether and stay the winter in the countries around the North Sea.
In the town centre, where there are lots of large buildings with flat roofs, also Herring and Great Black-backed Gulls nest commonly, and these last few years the Herring Gulls seem to increase their areas, at least in our neighbourhood. Last year I could hear for the first time the melodious long calls of Herring Gulls from our house, and a pair held territory, but did not nest, on a house some ten houses away. And this ‘summer’ there are least three pairs, they have ousted the Common Gulls from the neighbour’s roof, and these days I see large already flying young all over the neighbourhood. These large gulls stay in Tromsø all winter too—-although the individuals concerned are probably not the same ones: ours fly south, and others from the Kola Peninsula take their place in winter—, but by then they behave more like ‘sea gulls’, and stay mostly in the intertidal, and on the sounds, where they kleptoparasitize the large flocks of sea ducks, mostly Common Eiders, but also scoters, Long-tailed ducks and King Eiders. In winter we also have ‘white gulls’ here and there, mostly Glaucous Gulls, with a few Iceland Gulls , but there are never many—they are much more common further north, on the Finnmark coast. (The Ivory Gull is a real rarity also here, and Sabine Gulls one can see only out at sea, during migration.)
Black-headed Gulls are uncommon in Tromsø town, although a few may turn up now and then, most commonly in winter. There are no nesting colonies close to town, and the nearest larger one, on a lake some 100km inland, was for some reason totally deserted when I was there in June. Two years ago pair of Little Gulls kept a territory for some weeks at Prestvannet, and we hoped for a new nesting bird for the town— Little Gulls are inland breeders; they are regular in N. Finland, and also nest several places in inland Finnmark and Troms—, but the birds disappeared again after two weeks.
Finally we have two species of real ‘sea gulls’, the Lesser Black-backed Gull and the Kittiwake. The former, in N-Norway represented by the nominal subspecies fuscus—in an earlier paper characterized by me as ‘a gull with tern-like feeding behaviour’—, has steadily decreased as a nesting bird in our area, and I rarely see them close to town nowadays—they are not interested in the scavenging activities of the other large gulls. These last years representatives of the southern Norwegian subspecies intermedius—much less black on the mantle— seem to penetrate also N.Norway to a certain degree—these intermedius gulls, just like the graelssii gulls of Britain and Iceland, are much less averse to scavenging in its different forms, and their populations are doing well; I have not seen any of them inside Tromsø toiwn as yet, though..
The Kittiwake, finally, is a real seabird, and I still have never seen a single one here in town, although they are quite regular on the outer coast and the fishing villages there
As you can see, we have a rich and varied avifauna of gulls around here, which may come as a surprise for e.g. Australians, who have to do with only Silver Gulls for most of the continent.
Wim Vader, Tromsø Museum N-9037 Tromsø, Norway
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