Landfill by Tim Dee

I am not familiar with this author, but this is not his first book that looks at the effect of man on the world around him in general, and more specifically on birds. He highlights gulls as the bird of choice, and the ubiquitous nature of this particular shore bird makes it a good subject. This is a treatise about the damage that people wreck upon the animals around us--which reminds me of the documentary All That Breathes, which is about 2 brothers in Delhi who rescue Black Kites, birds that can drop from the sky due to poor air quality. In addition to that, the urban kites eat human discard food and have different metabolisms than their rural brethren. Gulls have become increasingly familiar in our towns and cities. They are infiltrating our urban worlds, and as their behavior evolves, so does our view of them. Scavenging discarded fast food from gutters, snatching chips from tourists’ fingers, picking over rubbish dumps for food waste, gulls are not highly valued. These gulls are less healthy than gulls that feed at sea--no surprise, but fast food is not good for people and it also is not good for gulls either. The author documents his experience reading about, watching, and actively banding and studying gulls. It is not all gulls as victims--they have also become emboldened to go directly to the source, grabbing food directly from people before they discard them. Dee’s book is a wonderfully thoughtful and gently ironic meditation on “gull-life and gulling-life”, as well as our changing relationship with nature in the Anthropocene.