By Mark Aronson
Hidden behind the blue canvas-draped fence that shields the open pit along Church Street between Frontage Road and Crown, a new immigrant community has taken up squatter’s rights.
Living on the hilly dunes of sand gravel strewn with litter and rocks, a sizable colony of Herring Gulls — Larus Argentatus, for those who prefer a Latin nomenclature — has set up camp.
It’s as if the wreckers who took down what once was Malley’s and is not yet the new downtown campus of Gateway Community College knew exactly what they were doing. Their handiwork created New Haven’s most exclusive beach property.
Sunken 15 feet below street level, protected from view and afforded privacy by the blue fence, is a series of perfectly rolling sandy dunes and flats, gray rocks for hiding, and a portico to provide shade on hot summer days. Numerous construction pilings and fence posts serve as pier-like seats.
Truly, the only thing missing from this beach is the lapping water of Long Island Sound, though numerous puddles of accumulated rain water currently abound.
The birds arrived unnoticed earlier this spring. Seizing their opportunity, and doing what
birds often do, given a prime nesting area proximate to ample food, they put down roots and nested. Today the morning racket was audible as the colony woke to feed, preen, and tend their young.
The colony now numbers some 80 birds, about two-thirds of which are adults. Once hatched, this bird specie requires four years to mature, and each age group sports a different plumage.
Scanning the street property, one quickly sees the population is divided into three groups; breeding plumage adults, recently fledged juveniles and dirty looking, downy plumed, recently hatched chicks.
The adults sport a bright white head, white body and silver-gray wings (hence the Latin name argentatus). Their bill is yellow with a bright reddish orange spot on the lower mandible, and their legs and feet are pink. Within weeks of hatching the chicks turn from a sandy brown color that helps camouflage them amongst the gritty sand on this construction site, to a rich slate gray.
Once they are able to fly the young depart the breeding grounds, they head out to forage for themselves on the New Haven Green or perhaps down to Long Wharf, where they can supplement their downtown diet of cast-off doughnuts and French fries with fresh fish, clams, sea worms or perhaps an offering from any of the many taco trucks that provide variety to New Haven’s cuisine.
At Long Wharf, second and third-year birds can easily be recognized among the crowd as the mottled grey and brown birds with blackish bills, pink legs and feet. As they age the birds get grayer and then whiter as they approach adulthood.
According to Joseph D. Zeranski’s and Thomas R. Baptist’s Connecticut Birds, Herring gulls have not always bred in the state. In the early 19th century were found here only in winter, when they visited the Connecticut River Valley and the the Long Island Sound shoreline to feast on its variety of seafood.
Farther north and east, New England’s early settlers gathered gull eggs for food. The late 19th century fashion for feathers brought the gulls numbers to precipitous lows.
By 1900 the Herring gull was a rare bird throughout North America. It was only later, in the 20th century, that the population stabilized and rebounded as egg collecting and the feather trade waned and the birds themselves adapted to scavenging off their human neighbors. By mid-century the massive landfills that neighbored many metropolitan areas became ready sources of easy food. The gull populations expanded and for some species exploded.
Connecticut’s first breeding records date from 1943 in Stonington (Zeranski and Baptist), and the population has grown ever since. Today the state supports colonies of this species all along its shoreline and river valleys. They nest freely on secluded beaches, rocky shores and building rooftops.
So far residents have not taken too much notice of their presence on Church Street, and developers probably need not fear their future plans will be delayed by years of state Department of Environmental Protection litigation. The gull does not sit on the federally endangered species list, and there is little chance future construction will be stopped by their presence. For that reason no state city officials were called and offered the opportunity to decline interview for this article.
For now the gulls enjoy their squat and will likely depart once nesting and fledging is over later in August or early September.
For those who have missed opportunity to witness this urban bird colony, there are still some weeks left to this summer’s breeding cycle and ample holes to peer through that fence and dream that you too owned such a delightful private beach.
Independent reporter Allan Appel offers the following update (9:19 a.m.):
According to the city’s deputy economic development administrator, Tony Bialecki, the property on which the gull condo has so spontaneously developed will, in the next week or so, be formally transferred by the city to the state.
Along with the property, of course, go the gulls.
It is the state, specifically through its Department of Public Works, that is designing and building the new Gateway Community College, where, sources tell us, the first registrants may be studying ornithology.
Bialecki said that state DPW is aware of the herring gulls. In a phone message, Bialecki indictated DPW has been in touch with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection in connection with the gulls.
“I think the schedule is to have bids for construction go out in the fall and be decided on in the winter. The start of construction would be early winter, spring 2009. That’ll give DEP plenty of time to plan so that when construction begins, it won’t disrupt the breeding of the birds.”
A call to state DEP’s Rick Carroll, the city contact for the project, was not returned in time for publication.
Several attempts to get a comment from the gulls were also unsuccessful.