Habitats on High: Gull Research Amidst Portland, Maine's Skyline

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]One of the key [music] functions of understanding conservation biology is how do we keep common species common?

[00:00:05][music] This is a fundamental thing that we teach students here at UNE. In 2010, I came into a Portland to visit my wife.

[00:00:14][music] I looked outside her window and there was a herring gull nesting on the ledge. My first thought was, "So why didn't you tell me about this? This is so cool." And then I just started thinking about why is it nesting on a rooftop [music] in Portland rather than on any of the 3,000 islands that we have here on the [music] coast of Maine. So we started the project in 2011 with students to try to identify the causes and consequences of [music] rooftop nesting. And for all the chicks that we monitored, we put two bands on their legs. One metal [music] numbered band and then one large colored plastic band that had three letters on it. You can see very easily with with binoculars or cell phone. [music] And I did that for the first two years looking at reproductive success in nests. And we found remarkably that there [music] was no cost in terms of reproduction to nesting on rooftops. And now the project really focuses [music] on where do these birds go when they leave Maine? And then once they become [music] adults in their fifth year, do they come back to Portland and choose to nest [music] on rooftops or do they go out and nest on islands? And we found [music] over the last couple of years these birds are absolutely deciding rooftops are a good place to be. This is important work because [music] believe it or not, even though gulls seem to be everywhere, in the Gulf of Maine they're in a very rapid [music] and steep decline. And that's something that you should always be concerned about and try to understand why. And so our future work [music] is going to try to look at what's driving these declines.