'Either You Choose To Shoot Gulls Or You Choose To Let That Tern Colony Disappear'

On New Brunswick’s Machias Seal Island, predatory gulls are pushing endangered Arctic tern colonies to the brink. Should we kill one bird to save another?

- Katrina Pyne

BIRDERS WEIGHTED down with cameras and binoculars shuffle onto Day’s Catch from the wharf at Seal Cove on New Brunswick’s Grand Manan Island, ready to catch a glimpse of the Atlantic puffins, razorbills, murres, petrels and other seabirds that have been drawing ornithophiles to the region since John James Audubon visited the island in 1833.

As the lobster boat-turned-tourist vessel departs, a gull hovers behind it, perfectly still. While most people wouldn’t think of gulls as particularly men-acing (unless they’ve had a boardwalk lunch ruined by the dive-bombing bird), there is something ominous about this one, which appears to be hitching a ride on the boat’s draft, trailing it as it pulls away from the island. Perhaps that’s because here in the Gulf of Maine, gulls have garnered a far more predatory reputation, at least among the migratory seabirds that can be found on the islands that dot these waters.

Day’s Catch heads southwest on its tumultuous 28-kilometre journey into the gulf, plowing through metre-high swells toward its destination, Machias Seal Island, an eight-hectare flat treeless rock that’s protected by the Canadian government as a migratory bird sanctuary. But as the boat nears the island, cellphones begin to flash roaming alerts, a signal that the passengers have crossed into the United States. Or have they? It’s not entirely certain, because Machias Seal Island is disputed land, a 235-year-old territorial kink between the two nations that they haven’t managed to iron out, thanks to differing interpretations of the American Revolution-ending Treaty of Paris of 1783.