Nature Notes: Silver Gulls - The Misunderstood Coastal Neighbours

It’s easy to overlook a bird you see every day.

Easier still to dismiss it.

Silver Gulls - the default “seagulls” of Geraldton’s beaches - are perhaps the most misjudged creatures along the foreshore. They’re treated like scavengers of chip packets, noisy opportunists, background noise for picnics and shoreline walks.But spend a little time watching them, really watching them, and a different bird emerges.

BirdLife Australia describes the Silver Gull (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae) as an intelligent, adaptable coastal species with complex vocal communication and surprisingly strong family bonds. They are opportunists, yes - but that’s part of their ecological role. In natural systems, before humans made convenience food part of the landscape, Silver Gulls cleaned carrion, consumed marine scraps, and helped recycle nutrients along the tideline.

Today on the Geraldton foreshore, the wind carried that soft, hollow gull-call across the water. A pair stood on the jetty railing, shifting their weight in perfect sync as the swell moved below. One was an adult - bright red bill, clean white body, black wingtips. The other was a mottled juvenile, feathers still in that brown-streaked adolescent stage.

The adult tilted its head, watching the juvenile with something close to patience. When a small wave washed up a tangle of seaweed, both birds flew down to it immediately - not for chips, but for the small amphipods and sandhoppers hiding in the fronds. The adult pulled apart the clump delicately. The juvenile stayed close, imitating each move half a second later.

A lesson.

A mirror.

A language.

Silver Gulls are attentive parents. BirdLife notes that adults not only feed their chicks but guard them fiercely, defend nest sites, and teach fledglings where to find food. They communicate in a whole grammar of calls - bubbling, piping, sharp warning cries - each telling another gull something specific about food, danger, or space.

And they are far better cleaners of the coastline than most people realise. From fish scraps left by cormorants to the occasional dead mullet washed ashore, they keep the edge of the ocean tidy in ways we rarely credit them for. In ecological terms, they’re recyclers, reducing potential disease sources and returning nutrients to the system.

Watching them today - adults slicing through the wind, juveniles learning how to read the beach - I felt that familiar shift that happens with many so-called “common” species: the moment when you realise you’ve underestimated someone simply because they were always there.

Every coastline has its charismatic species: ospreys, dolphins, whales. But the Silver Gull is a different kind of presence - one built on adaptability, intelligence, and the quiet work of surviving alongside us.

They are neighbours, not nuisances.

Indicators, not intrusions.

A part of this place as surely as the tide itself.

All you have to do is look long enough to see it.