Sea Gulls Find a Haven for Their Nests on Anacapa Island : Nature: The birds flock to the remote breeding ground to escape predators on the mainland. They don’t welcome human visitors.

Nestled in the fuchsia blooms of the ice plant, tending their eggs and downy brown chicks, the sea gulls on Anacapa Island look positively serene.

That is, until you walk anywhere near their nests.

A loud squawking sound commences, followed by the flapping of wings and a webbed foot aimed squarely at the intruder’s head.

“Did you ever see that Hitchcock movie ‘The Birds’?” asked Howard Level, a retired Ventura College instructor who just finished fending off a swarm of gulls. “That’s what I think of every time I see those angry birds.”

The western gull can perhaps be forgiven its protective urges. After all, half to two-thirds of the gull chicks don’t live past their first year.

And the birds did choose this remote breeding ground in Channel Islands National Park specifically to avoid the sort of predators that exist on the mainland.

Here, some 15 miles from the Ventura beaches and trash dumps that they scour for food, the gulls come home to roost on the three islets that make up Anacapa Island.

“You get to see their family life,” said Jack Gillooly, a seasonal park ranger fascinated with the gulls on East Anacapa. “People sort of think of them as winged rats: They eat just about anything, they raid trash, they eat people’s lunches. The general perception is they are nuisances to be put up with.

“Coming out here and seeing how they nest, the cute little chicks, you get a whole different perspective of what kind of creatures they are.”

On their island domain, sea gulls soar majestically above 200-foot cliffs. They perch atop the giant coreopsis bushes. They lay their mottled eggs on the ground and watch them hatch.

A glance across the sloping terrain reveals hundreds of sea gull heads peering out from the low-growing shrubs that cover Anacapa. The birds are eight to 10 feet apart, each preserving its territory and protecting its young.

Researchers have counted 1,000 nests on this islet alone, and another 4,000 to 5,000 on nearby islands--making the national park one of the largest breeding grounds for western gulls in the country.

“That’s really the only place the gulls can nest because on the mainland you’ve got dogs, cats, all sorts of predators,” said Lisa Porto, a seasonal ranger with the National Park Service.

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Here, humans are the pests, if not the predators.

When the first human residents arrived with a new lighthouse in the 1930s, the brown pelican population fled to more remote West Anacapa. The sea gulls stayed, but have not made it easy on intruders.

When the Coast Guard installed a cement slab to catch rainfall and provide drinking water for its human visitors, the birds turned it into a prime perch. They plastered the cement with droppings and rendered the water undrinkable.

Today, the slab, used only as an emergency helicopter pad, bears the unmistakable stains and stench of the sea gulls.

Even regular visitors such as the park rangers, who live in a tiny house on the island, get no welcome from the gulls.

“These two birds, they see us from a distance and they start toward us,” said Olga Timofeyeva, a Russian who is staying at the rangers’ residence with her 2-year-old daughter. So far, the birds haven’t actually touched her. “I think if they did, I would never leave the house.”

Researchers and park rangers forgive the gulls their inhospitable conduct.

“First of all, we’re in their territory,” Gillooly said. “They are really territorial birds. They don’t like to be disturbed.”

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That extends to other gulls as well. In fact, if a newborn chick wanders out of his nesting area, it can be pecked to death by another bird.

Other chicks fall prey to ravens or the occasional rat. Still others starve to death in lean years or fall off the steep cliffs surrounding Anacapa--contributing to the 50% to 70% mortality rate for first-year gulls.

The birds also face an occasional human predator: A year ago, two men stranded on West Anacapa in a boating accident ate raw sea gull eggs to survive.

The more typical encounter with mankind comes on the 1 1/2-mile walking trail that rings East Anacapa. On a recent day, a crowd stopped to gaze into a sea gull nest, where a chick was pecking its way out of the eggshell.

The angry parents began squawking, then fluttering their wings as if ready to attack. The crowd moved on, and the birds quieted down. But when two visitors veered off the trail and marched through an ice plant patch, a flock of gulls took flight.

The birds swooped close to their heads, as the two men waved their hands frantically over their heads. “All those mamas, they don’t want you near their chicks,” said Howard Level, emerging unscathed from the episode.

Level and his friend, Casey Casella of Ventura, had used the preferred technique for dispelling enraged sea gulls. The gulls tend to aim for the highest point on the body and rarely inflict any damage, Gillooly says.

“The most that usually happens is that people get kicked in the head with little webbed feet,” he said.

Despite their unfriendly attitude, the birds do find some uses for human visitors. As a group of people gathers for lunch, a gull perches on the picnic table, hoping for scraps.

And the birds often bring pieces of the mainland back to their island home. Rangers keep finding plastic bags, emptied of sandwich scraps from trash dumps or schoolyards, on Anacapa. And visitors often see mysterious bones lying along the walking trail.

“They aren’t bird bones,” Gillooly said. “They aren’t ancient Indian burial bones. They are chicken bones.”