Gulls Answer Lunch Bell in Schoolyards Up and Down the Coast

Just before lunch hour at DeAnza Middle School in Ventura, a flock of gray and white sea gulls quietly assembles on the school roof overlooking the empty courtyard.

But soon after the lunch bell rings and the schoolyard fills with children, the birds swoop down to squabble over half-eaten sandwiches, leftover pizza crusts and other remnants of food.

The frenzy of shrieking gulls swarming around the children recalls scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “The Birds.” Yet this scene plays out daily at schools in beach communities across Ventura County and elsewhere in coastal California.

Uncannily attuned to the schools’ schedules, the scavengers know exactly when to arrive for lunch, morning and afternoon snack breaks, school officials said. On weekends and days when only teachers come to school, the gulls don’t bother to show up.

“I think they’re almost trained by the bell,” said Merle Price, principal of Palisades High School in Pacific Palisades.

School officials say the gulls create more of a nuisance than a horror.

The birds do more than eat. They splatter students, teachers and other school staff with their droppings.

“Everyone at one point or another has been bombed,” DeAnza Principal David Myers said.

At some schools, the gulls add to the children’s stock of stories. DeAnza students recall how one gull’s droppings landed in the eye of a classmate, the many times the birds have left their marks in children’s hair and the time a gull swooped down and snatched a piece of bread from a girl’s hand.

For most students and educators, the birds are accepted as part of the school routine.

“People have adapted to it,” said Jorge Gutierrez, director of facilities for the Ventura district. “Once in a while, you’ll get a complaint of bird debris falling on someone’s head. It hasn’t gotten to that stage where people say, ‘We want something done!’ ”

The gulls themselves are not dangerous, said Chanelle Davis, a biologist with the state Fish and Game Department.

But they could pose a health hazard, Davis said, if their feces were to contaminate food.

At Hueneme High School in Oxnard, Principal Joanne Black said the gulls have become enough of a nuisance that she is considering placing life-size plastic owls on the school’s roof to scare the birds away.

Black got the idea from a McDonald’s restaurant near the school that several years ago put nine owl decoys on its roof and on light poles in the parking lot to keep sea gulls off the property. The restaurant manager said the decoys are working.

The gulls typically head for school campuses as the weather cools, when fewer visitors to the beach mean fewer scraps for the birds to feed on, school officials said.

At schools such as Palisades High, the gulls don’t venture from the rooftops until the students return to class, giving the birds free rein over morsels left behind.

Price said the gulls do offer one benefit. Students afraid of getting hit by bird droppings often hurry back to class after lunch.

“I tell kids it’s part of our tardy sweep plan,” he said. “If they want to hang out, then they may get it.”

Besides Pacific Palisades and the Ventura County cities of Ventura, Oxnard and Port Hueneme, school officials in Venice and Santa Barbara also report a daily invasion of gulls.

And the birds often venture beyond beachfront communities. Price said that when he was principal at Jefferson and Fremont high schools in South-Central Los Angeles, the gulls were regular visitors.

“Schools are very familiar with the phenomenon of the gulls,” he said.

Most schools try to keep the nuisance under control by requiring students to pick up their leftovers and forbidding them to feed the birds.

But for some children, feeding sea gulls can be too much fun to resist.

“Most of the people like to feed them,” said Eric Alcantar, a sixth-grader at DeAnza. “They’re like pets.”

Fellow sixth-grader Rebecca Martens said the children play games with the gulls. “They dive down anywhere you put food.”

Other students said their initial fascination with the winged scavengers wore off quickly.

“They get annoying after a while,” said sixth-grader Calvin Barber.

During one lunch period recently, DeAnza teacher Tonya McFadden appeared unfazed as she walked through the frenzy of activity on the schoolyard: children throwing morsels, birds dive-bombing for food, students running for cover.

“We’re probably really used to it,” McFadden said of the birds. “They don’t really bother me. I just try to stay out of their line of fire.”