The hotel website said
that I could have a room on their Business Floor for an extra £5 a night, and
that here I would have one of their quieter rooms. So given that I had an
important meeting the following morning, I decided to book one of these rooms, hoping
perhaps for a slightly swankier experience. Instead I just got a slightly
longer journey in the hotel lift to the sixth floor, where the rooms were quieter
by dint of being further from the bustling streets of Birmingham city centre
below.
As with many of these
modern business hotels the rooms towards the top of the building can get very warm,
as heat from the lower floors rises through the building. As I entered my room
I saw that the cleaner had thoughtfully closed the curtains and left the window
ajar to try and keep the temperature down in the room on what was a hot and
sunny June day.
I’m a fan of natural
light and fresh air, so having dumped my bag on the floor the first thing I did
was pull open the curtains to let some daylight into the room and to take in
the view of Birmingham’s city skyline. Immediately
I picked up on an insistent piping call and looked down onto the flat roof of a
neighbouring building, here a gull chick stood covered in a dirty
grey coat of downy feathers with its neck stretched forwards calling to its
parents for food. As I scanned the surrounding rooftops and airspace I could
see half a dozen adult Lesser Black Backed Gulls, either perched on rooftops or
wheeling in the sky above them. The chicks calling worked and I watched as an
adult dropped in to land next to it to feed it.
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| iphone wildlife photography, Lesser Black Backed Gull and chick |
My ears having picked
up on the begging calls of the young gulls now started to tune into the other
big city sounds that I hand initially tuned out, the shouts of youths six
floors down on the city streets, a police siren and Tanoy announcements from a
nearby train station. Below me a city of a million people was going about its
business, but up here amongst the roof tops there was a touch of the seaside as
an Urban Gull colony went about its business.
For these “seagulls”
the city rooftops act in much the same way as a place to nest as offshore
islands do, they are safe and secure places free of ground predators and close
to a source of food for the adult birds and their young.
As relatively recently
as the late 1960’s Lesser Black Backed Gulls were still mainly a coastal
species, but already a few pioneers were nesting in cities such as Bristol and
it may well be that the birds I was enjoying watching from my high rise hotel
room in Birmingham were descendants of these pioneer gulls that had followed
the river Severn inland from town to town, eventually making their home in Birmingham
with its abundance of safe rooftops to nest upon and a plentiful supply of food
in the form of the waste that that we generate in our cities. So important are cities
now for Lesser Black Backed Gulls that by 2000 a fifth of the UK population could
be found nesting in Urban areas. More info here.
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| My Business Floor view of Birmingham |
Not everyone welcomes
the presence of these large gulls in their neighbourhood and a closer
inspection of the surrounding rooftops showed spikes and netting presumably put
in place to deter gulls and pigeons from taking up residence. But for me it was
a pleasure to be able to take a step back from the big city and my preparations
for the following day’s work and for a few moments enjoy a ringside view of my
very own gull colony going about its timeless business.
