Yesterday it was chasing gulls away from rubbish dumps.
Today it's chasing gulls' eggs for the gourmet tables of London's gentlemen's clubs and the better hotels and restaurants. It appears that while the British Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 made the taking of eggs from wild birds illegal, a few licences are still issued to those who have traditionally culled gulls' eggs for the table. In fact, the British Department of the Environment told The Daily Telegraph that in 1995 54,177 eggs were collected by 35 licensed persons.
It says they are about the size of those of a bantam (surely bigger) but greenish and black-speckled. The reporter Jonny Beardsall followed the course of a batch of eggs from an island in the Solent - between the Isle of Wightand the mainland - via the market to the Ritz Hotel. There they come as a first course and cost £3.50 each. Three is the usual portion, but a stockbroker appeared to be having five.
The two men who collected the eggs say they are doing a good deed for Nature, and that there isn't much money in it for them. For their three or four weeks of collecting the eggs (of the blackheaded gull), keep this colony busy, while the sandwich terns can get on with establishing their own breeding colony. They couldn't do this if the blackheaded gulls had already settled down on their own colony, for they would have become aggressive and driven the ferns away. So say the collectors, one of whom seems to have been at this for 47 years.
How do the eggs taste? Of seaweed? Fish? We are not told, though the stockbroker mentioned above is quoted: "Oooh, I just love `em, they're so rich," and he says that when he gives lunch to clients "they never fail to impress as so few people have ever tried them." Hard-boiled is the norm in restaurants, though the collector loves them boiled softish or scrambled or fried.
There is no such licensing in Ireland, the Wildlife Service tells us.