OXNARD : 90 Dead Gulls Wash Ashore

A bad dumpster meal or deliberate poisoning could be to blame for the deaths of 90 sea gulls that washed ashore at Ormond Beach in Oxnard, state game officials said Sunday. But they won’t know for sure until a laboratory analysis is done.

Two of the dead birds were collected Sunday and placed in cold storage, said Morgan Wehtje, a California Department of Fish and Game biologist. Officials plan to ship the birds to Sacramento on Tuesday for examination.

Alan Sanders, chairman of the local Sierra Club, noticed some dead western gulls on the beach around 11:30 a.m. Saturday. When he returned two hours later, the number of birds had risen to around 90, he said.

“That’s a lot of gulls,” he said. “You see gulls die from time to time. I’ve never seen this amount of birds dead on the beach.”

Most of the birds were lying either on their backs with their feet in the air, or face down, Wehtje said. Aside from a dead cormorant found with the gulls, no other species seemed to have been affected.

The birds bore no gunshot wounds, discolorations or signs of being underfed, Wehtje.

Wehtje speculated that the birds could have eaten from a pile of food scraps that had gone bad or perhaps a dumpster full of trash that had been poisoned. People annoyed by gulls’ scavenging habits have been known to try to poison the birds, she said.

Sanders said he wasn’t certain poison was the culprit.

“If they were all poisoned in some way, how would they all die at the same time?” he asked.

The remaining gulls that weren’t sent to the lab will be left on the beach, Wehtje said.

“They’ll just wash back out with the tide like things do,” she said. “Things die all the time.”