Going, gone
Dominic Prince
By now, the gluttons among us should be wolfing down gulls' eggs. Merchants in Leadenhall Market in the City have for years done a roaring trade in this gastronomic delicacy, whose season begins in mid-April. Smart butchers, fishmongers and food stores the same. Snazzy country houses are usually inundated with weekend guests clutching them as gifts for the hostess. The bars at White's, the Turf, Boodle's and virtually every other London club, including the House of Lords, groan under the weight of them. This year, though, things will be different. There's a dearth of eggs, and it is a mystery to all involved.
The price of eggs has gone up this season. Be prepared to pay a lot more than the usual £1.50 to £2 per egg: perhaps more like £3 or even £4 — nobody really knows. The fact is there has been a disastrous decline in the gull population at certain places in the country in the past two to three years.
Bemersyde, an estate in the Borders, is owned by Earl Haig. the son of Field Marshal Haig. Its fantastic gullery has been producing eggs for hundreds of years. The eggs have been 'picked' for as long as anyone can remember, but now there are no more to collect, because the gulls have fled. Gull numbers have dropped from 12,000 breeding pairs to just 500 in two years. This is the third year that the eggs have not been harvested, and the drop in population is baffling the Earl, his gamekeeper and the Scottish Wildlife Trust.
Earl Haig used to harvest more than 10,000 gulls' eggs annually, between midApril and the end of May. The Earl grieves for the gulls that used to colonise his estate. The harvesting of eggs is strictly controlled by Defra, which issues licences across the country. But now the income from the gullery, an important part of the rural economy, has dried up. The Bemersyde estate was one of the largest suppliers of the delicacy in the country. There was another advantage to picking the eggs; it served to control the gull population effectively.
Earl Haig says, 'This is the third year of no production and it is very upsetting indeed. I am in touch with the Scottish Wildlife Trust and we have put out mink traps, but we aren't convinced that mink is the reason. The only thing I can think is that buzzards have attacked, because we have a very large amount of them up here. Inquiries will go on, but we are not hopeful. There have been gulls on the gullery here at Bemersyde for hundreds of years. They have been here for my entire lifetime and I am now 86. It is a very sad and distressing situation.'
Gamekeeper Ian Farr is just as baffled. 'I am dubious whether it is mink. I have been here for 17 years and have only seen mink very rarely. We are just hoping that the gulls will start to rebuild their nests, but I am very concerned, because there was a well-established gullery at Ravenglass in Cumbria and then one year the gulls just didn't return. Perhaps the conditions had changed — who knows? They just refused to lay, and all cleared off.'
At Bemersyde the eggs used to be picked from a rowing boat in the swamp that serves as the gullery. The pickers use a long bamboo cane with a lady's stocking stretched over a wire frame at the end, a little like a child's fishing net. In the recent past, more than 10,000 eggs could be harvested in just three weeks. Having once spent an afternoon picking the eggs at Bemersyde, I can attest to the pleasures of harvesting the crop, checking for bad or broken eggs in a bucket of cold water, and soon after sitting down to feast. Surprisingly, the gulls make no objection to their eggs being pilfered and helpfully lay another immediately afterwards. The gullery at Bemersyde has been successfully managed in this fashion for as long as anyone can remember.
In the south, Robin Pleydell-Bouverie is experiencing the same problems. He is the half-brother of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and lives on the Beaulieu estate, where there has been a gullery for as long as anyone can remember. 'We used to have a huge number of gulls; the place is known locally as Gull Island, and there were tens of thousands of the birds living there. But now they have simply disappeared, and, although we have our theories, we cannot be sure why.'
Pleydell-Bouverie's theory puts the blame on over-regulation by Defra, which is itself advised by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). 'As long as you don't take all the eggs in a nest, gulls will just keep laying. Take the eggs in ones and twos and they'll lay another. We used to pick eggs until the end of May, but now our licence expires at the end of April, around the time that the main laying of the season starts. The spring tides start in midMay and they engulf Gull Island, floating all the eggs off. I am sure it is because Defra has shortened our licence that we have lost our gulls.' Nobody has access to the spit where the gulls used to flock, so human involvement has been ruled out.
As you might expect, the RSPB is rather censorious about egg-picking. A spokesman told me, 'We are rather disapproving of the practice, because it happens through tradition by default and we question whether picking eggs from sea birds is a good thing.' This is despite the fact that most local authorities will destroy gulls' eggs on health grounds. Gulls are viewed by many as vermin and a menace — so why be so soppy about the eggs?
For Steve Downey, a wholesaler from Bristol, gulls' eggs are a big part of his living. 'Last year we sold 18,000 eggs in a short period of time. We sell to White's, Brooks's, the House of Lords, Wiltons and the Gavroche. This year ... who knows? It will be very much down on previous years.'
Of course, most people will not be much upset about rising gulls' egg prices. The man on the street couldn't give a fig for the man in St James's; but there is a wider point here that should concern everyone. Does the Environment Agency in the newly reformed Defra grasp the logic in the rural tradition — or is it seen, as the RSPB man said, as 'tradition by default'?
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