Landfill

Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene
By Tim Dee
Chelsea Green Publishing Company, March, 2019

“Landfill” is a type of book I often enjoy reading—one that takes a seemingly ordinary or narrow subject and explores it from a range of angles, usually including some personal anecdotes and some historical information. Examples of this are “Cod” and “Salt” by Mark Kurlansky and “On Trails” by Robert Moor.

I didn’t enjoy “Landfill” as much as those other books, although Dee knows how to turn a phrase and I enjoyed some chapters quite a lot.

It’s important to note that “Landfill” isn’t very much about landfills –and while its subtitle “Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene” is a somewhat more accurate description, the book isn’t very much about trash picking, either.

I had to look up “Anthropocene,” which means “relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment”—and while that’s a central theme of the book, it’s mostly a book about gull watching. That’s not a hobby for everyone, including me, although I did warm to the topic when Dee described finding tagged birds that had come from places like Iceland or even the western hemisphere to his home country of England.

As for the Anthropocene theme, large numbers of gulls have taken to living among the humans in England and eating from local landfills – something Dee seems conflicted about.

Writing about his hometown of Bristol, he says “Bristol, it seems to me, has got something it deserved. The city that brought the Atlantic to Britain – slaves, sugar and tobacco – has drawn seabirds into its heart. The gulls are canny opportunists and worthy embodiments of the spirit of the place. And people hate them for it.”

Considering that gulls make noise and defecate, there are some gulls that have the distinction of being considered both a public nuisance and an endangered species, Dee notes. He also notes that ecological concerns are prompting authorities in England and other countries to prohibit edible refuse in landfills – something that poses a major threat to the gulls.

He doesn’t explore either of those topics in much detail, though, instead devoting many pages to how the scientific community keeps redefining gull species – a topic that left me cold.

Nevertheless, there were some compelling details in the book that I won’t soon forget:

• There is a type of gull that flies 100 miles an hour.

• Even though gulls have taken to nesting on English rooftops, they still like to sleep on the water and will fly out to a lake or water park at night for some shuteye.

• A century or so ago, there was a man who vandalized bird artifacts in England’s Natural History Museum by changing tags on bird remains or moving them to the wrong storage drawer, disrupting scientific research to this day (a form of malicious mischief akin to today’s Zoom bombing and that some of us might have thought was unique to our time).

A research ecologist who wrote her PhD on gulls and who was interviewed for the book summed up my feelings when she said, “The idea of species isn’t that important to me. I am more interested in ecology and behavior… Things are happening to the gulls’ environment and the birds are adapting to these human changes; this is interesting.”

Reviewed by Joan Engebretson, who, when not writing, spends time cooking and gardening in Chicago.