Lancashire town invaded by up to 3,000 seagulls – despite being 30 miles from sea - video Dailymotion

Lancashire Post

A town has been invaded by an ‘apocalyptic’ swarm of up to 3,000 seagulls – despite being 30 miles from the nearest coast.  The scavenging winged terrors have flocked to a landfill site in Hyndburn, where locals likened the scenes to those in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 horror movie The Birds.  Shocking video shows the huge numbers of seagulls flocking overhead with local houses, cars and gardens now being bombarded by bird poo.  Fed-up residents say they arrive first thing in the morning and stay until late at night - with some even fearing their presence is devaluing the value of properties in the area.

Transcript

00:00I'm Gary Hough and I live in Accrington in Lancashire. I've lived here for eight years.

00:06We've recently been plagued with pests. By that I mean seagulls, flies.

00:12This is all coming from a local landfill site that comes under Lancashire County Council's control.

00:20The site operators, Suez, basically fill in a new cell of landfill waste

00:26and the waste comes from multiple different boroughs around Lancashire.

00:30What we've started to see is, probably since October last year,

00:35was a rise in the number of seagulls that were starting to come over the houses.

00:40The volumes of gulls has just become significant. I mean, it's just incredible.

00:48If I was to say there was 2,000 to 3,000 gulls in the air at one time,

00:53especially when they're turning over the landfill site,

00:57at its peak, when you look up into the sky above our houses, you see thousands of seagulls.

01:03The best way I can describe it is if you see one of those desert films where you see a plague of locusts

01:09that just comes swooping in, it's a sight to behold, it really is.

01:13The gulls themselves are bringing in a number of different problems.

01:16I mean, the first is bird poop. It's pooping on people's cars,

01:21they're pooping on people's homes and driveways, they're pooping on washing.

01:26You can't sit out in your garden because of the poop.

01:29They're dropping food waste. We've had chicken bones.

01:32One of the residents recently put a massive slab of meat which had hit the kitchen window

01:39and it was lying in the back garden.

01:42Now, obviously, residents have got children, you've got animals,

01:46and dropping this kind of waste is pretty distressing, as you can imagine.

01:51Well, it's affecting people in the community in a number of ways, really.

01:54The first is when the weather's good, as it has been recently,

01:57you can't have barbecues, constantly having to wash the vehicles.

02:01We're coming into school holiday season now, children playing out is affected.

02:05Some parents can't let their children out, they're worried about the impact of the gulls.

02:09They're worried about the gulls maybe coming down and starting to attack them.

02:12The children in the playgrounds with food waste, for example, or food in their hands.

02:16We have a landfill site that is being filled with attractive food waste

02:21and for gulls, who are now nesting in the area as a result of this

02:25and breeding in huge numbers, that food waste is accessible.

02:32It's accessible because the site operators, sewers, as far as we can see,

02:37whilst they're working to try and minimise the disruption on the residents,

02:41it's what they tell us, we can visually see that in the evenings in particular,

02:47those piles of food waste aren't being covered up.

02:51The birds are just feeding on it, and it's seven days a week.

02:54We were told by sewers, or I was told by sewers,

02:57that they believe that it's because, post-Covid, the gulls are coming inland.

03:04Well, that's nonsense. It really is.

03:07Because we've lived here, let's just say, eight years,

03:10all through Covid, we didn't see any gull activity.

03:13During Covid, or even immediately after it, it's only this last eight months

03:18that we started to see this infestation gathering momentum.

03:23So I set up a community group on Facebook to try and coordinate and centralise everything

03:28to get people not only aware of the situation,

03:32but to gather people's thoughts and views and videos and photographs

03:36to really give us some sort of evidence that we can go to sewers

03:40and the Environment Agency and Lancashire County Council

03:43to clearly demonstrate that this is having a massive impact.

03:46The campaign group that I set up on Facebook is called Tips Over the Edge,

03:51and within four weeks we went from two members to just over 650 and counting.

04:02Thanks for watching!

Lancashire town invaded by up to 3,000 seagulls – despite being 30 miles from sea

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