School Gulls : The Problem on Campus Isn’t Dropouts, It’s Droppings

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

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 left by the students.

The frenzy of shrieking birds swarming around the children recalls scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “The Birds.” The scenario plays out daily at schools in beach communities throughout California.

Attuned to the schools’ schedules, the scavengers know exactly when to arrive for lunch and morning and afternoon snack breaks, school officials say. On weekends and on 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 droppings.

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

At some schools, the gulls add to the children’s stock of stories. De Anza students recall how a gull’s droppings landed in the eye of a classmate, the many times the birds have left their mark in children’s hair and the incident of a gull swooping down to snatch a piece of bread from a girl’s hand.

“People have adapted to it,” said Jorge Gutierrez, director of facilities for the Ventura school 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 may pose a health hazard, Davis said, if their feces were to drop in people’s food.

At Hueneme High School in Oxnard, Principal Joanne Black said the gulls have become enough of a nuisance that she is considering mounting life-sized 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 such 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.

Sea gulls typically descend on school campuses after weather cools, when fewer visitors to the beach means fewer scraps for the birds to feed on, school officials said.

At Palisades High School, the gulls don’t venture from the roofs until students return to class and the birds have free rein over morsels left on school grounds.

Price said the birds do offer one benefit: Students afraid of getting hit with gull droppings often hurry to their next 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 Santa Barbara and Venice also report a daily invasion of the gulls.

The birds often venture beyond beachfront communities.

Price said that when he was a principal at Jefferson and Fremont high schools in South-Central Los Angeles, the gulls were regular visitors to those campuses.

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

Even at schools that make no attempt to keep the sea gulls away, officials try to keep the nuisance under control by requiring students to pick up their trash 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 De Anza. “They’re like pets.”

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

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

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

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

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