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A long-running lethal gull control program at the Robin Hood Bay landfill aims to mitigate risks for aircraft landing at St. John’s International Airport, but critics say it’s the wrong approach.
Ian Jones, a marine bird biologist at Memorial University, said he’s been concerned about the number of seagulls at the landfill for years.
“You’ve got a large landfill with tens of thousands of gulls that’s within a few kilometres of the approach flight paths of a major international airport,” he said in an interview with The St. John’s Morning Show. “I see that as a potential threat to safety. It’s a public concern.”
Jones said the city’s wildlife management plan, which involved the killing of 11,632 gulls from 2013-2024, isn’t doing enough to curb that safety threat.
“Your protocol is not going to work if you have tens of thousands of gulls and your protocol allows you to shoot a few hundred of them. You’re not controlling the the overall gull population, and you’re obviously not changing the behaviour of the gulls because they’re just doing the same thing that they’ve always been doing.”
This is Newfoundland and Labrador22:06Why St. John’s is killing seagulls by the thousand
Seagulls are a fact of life in St. John’s. But near an airport, seagulls can be dangerous. And that’s why the city is killing them — by the thousand. On this episode, we tell you about the St. John’s gull cull and how it leads back to what we throw in the trash.
In an email, City of St. John’s spokesperson Jackie O’Brien said the city hasn’t done a census of the gull population at the landfill since 2003, when a survey showed that up to 25,000 gulls could be at the landfill at once.
O’Brien said Transport Canada requires the city to maintain the wildlife management plan, which also includes non-lethal deterrents, such as noise cannons. O’Brien declined an interview request.
CBC News asked Transport Canada if the agency has done any monitoring of gull populations to determine if the city’s lethal control program has been effective. In an email, spokesperson Hicham Ayoun said the department conducts regular inspections and “oversight activities” to ensure airports comply with requirements.
Ayoun didn’t specifically say if the department has done any monitoring of gull populations in St. John’s.
However, one researcher says the St. John’s gull population is on the rise.
Gulls: big, smart and opportunistic
According to St. John’s International Airport spokesperson Ryan Howell, the airport has recorded 108 bird strikes since 2019. That number includes all bird species, not just gulls.
Sean Baynton, a member of the board of directors for the Bird Strike Association of Canada, said gulls account for about 20 to 25 per cent of bird strikes in Canada. Baynton said gulls are big and tend to flock together — meaning a strike could “potentially be catastrophic.”
Baynton said gulls are also smart, opportunistic and good at exploiting different ecosystems.
“That makes them difficult to trap, or difficult to manage because gulls are very quick to learn sort of the limitations of your management ability,” he said.
A wildlife management plan at Newfoundland and Labrador’s largest landfill is drawing criticism. Thousands of gulls have been killed due to Transport Canada’s concerns over the dump’s proximity to the St. John’s airport, and the hazard that gulls pose to aircraft. But some experts disagree with the approach. The CBC’s Darrell Roberts reports.
In Jones’ view, the gulls aren’t the problem.
“The way that the dump is managed is the problem,” he said. “You’re putting out huge quantities of food and it’s attracting the gulls, and then you’re referring to the gulls as being the problem.”
According to a 2020 report, 30 per cent of waste in St. John’s is organic — primarily food waste — and it mostly goes straight into the landfill.
Jones believes the solution is to relocate the landfill entirely, which he said would solve the gull problem and the ongoing issue of waste drifting from the landfill into the nearby Atlantic Ocean.
The city’s wildlife management plan also recommends diverting organics from the landfill in order to cut off the gulls’ food source.
A case for composting
Though the City of St. John’s doesn’t mandate composting, some individuals and businesses choose to do it anyway.
Viviana Ramírez-Luna runs the Newfoundland and Labrador Composting Co-operative, which supports grassroots composting initiatives across the province. She wants to one day see mandatory composting, where possible.
“My program is voluntary. It’s low-cost for people. But this cannot be the norm for composting programs of cities, municipalities, [and] towns that are already paying for waste collection, transportation, [and] landfilling,” she said.
The statement from the city said the cost and logistics of implementing such a program are significant, and it would need to be done at a regional or provincial level.
Ramírez-Luna acknowledges that implementing composting would be expensive, but she argues that doing nothing has a cost, too.
“They’re already paying for organics mismanagement. So, how [about] we divert that money from their budgets to properly manage organics through composting or other methods?”
Other provinces, such as Nova Scotia, have had mandatory composting in place for decades.
The provincial government has its own waste management strategy. A 2020 review of that strategy recommended the development of a new plan specifically to deal with organic waste. That recommendation included a goal of banning organics from the landfill within five years.
Sherri Breen, a spokesperson for the provincial department of Environment, Conservation and Climate Change, said in a statement that recommendation was from a report prepared for the previous administration.
“A provincewide waste diversion program for composting would require significant investment and new infrastructure. We will continue to examine ways to increase waste diversion in the province that are cost effective for residents and meet the needs of communities,” Breen said in the statement.
She said the city is welcome to contact the department to explore organics recycling solutions.
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