It's amazing what I can find to distract me from my studies. This time is was a bunch of southern black-backed gulls circling over the hospital and its helipad.
Coincidentally there was an item in the local paper yesterday about the nuisance that these big gulls are causing at the Green Island rubbish tip / landfill. The city council has got permission to poison the gulls. Apparently the poison is spread on bread, gulls and other non-target species, eat the bait and keel over with hypothermia. Non-target species - mostly red-billed and black-billed gulls - are then revived by warming. The hope is that black-backed gulls will stop visiting the tip when they see their colleagues keeling over. So too, I suspect will the other gulls.
On closer inspection a man on the roof could be just discerned, he looked to be cleaning something, perhaps he'd disturbed the gulls. There again if the gulls were a more or less permanent feature of the hospital roof, I wouldn't have been so distracted by them. Hope they don't become a permanent feature, it would be bad news for both gulls and helicopters!
