Gull at Chair Cove, Nr Treyarnon

There’s No Such bird as a Seagull?

It’s a term you’ve used a million times before, but … there’s no such bird. There’s not even such a family of birds. The term “seagull” is a colloquialism used to refer to a group of generally white-gray-and-black birds that are found (commonly, but not only) near coastal waters

Sea gulls……. get a lot of bad press in the UK. Many people despise them for their tendancy to hang around our towns and cities in the hunt for food. But what many don’t know is that there is no such thing as a ‘sea gull’, instead many different species live in the UK.

There are 50 species of gulls in the world, in Britain we have six species of commonly occurring breeding gulls:

• herring gulls
• lesser black-backed gulls
• great black-backed gulls
• black-headed gulls
• common gulls
• kittiwakes