Gulls in the Highlands, including in and around Inverness, have had a mixed reputation for many years. To some they have been the source of food, the adults at one time and the eggs for a very long time indeed. At one time the adults were caught alive and then fed for up to three weeks on various food such as barley mixed with buttermilk. The idea was to get rid of their fishy smell and taste. Roasting them was a common recipe and is included in cookery books up until the 1940s. Eggs have been used as a long tradition and the St. Kildans, for example, used to collect them to eat and store them in the ash from burnt turf. In the ash they would last for six, seven or more months although it must have been an acquired taste.
This may seem an old fashioned approach but the actual eating of fresh gulls again is still very much practised today in a few areas. It was, for example, only a few years ago when the colony of herring gulls nested along the cliffs east of Rosemarkie. They were on or near what is now shown on the map as the Skart or Scart Cliffs after the cormorants that nested there. The herring gull eggs were taken for eating by people that came from far and wide. To start with only the third or fourth freshly laid eggs were taken as the bird simply laid more but it was soon out of hand with all the eggs being taken. The attraction of gulls eggs must lie in their size and the ease with which some of them, particularly the larger gulls, are collected. Mobbing by the adult birds can put people off although it is nowhere near as intense as when the birds have chicks. The down side is the strength of the flavour of the eggs perhaps from the range of food, particularly fish, that they eat. The strongest flavour is from the huge eggs of the great black-backed gull.
The names of the commoner breeding gulls in the area are mainly linked with their plumage. The largest of the gulls, the great black-backed gull is typical as the name comes from the dark colour of the back of the bird sometimes called the mantle. The lesser black-backed gull is the same but as the name suggests it is smaller. Two of the gulls do not follow this rule, however, namely the herring gull and the common gull. The name “herring” is not particularly apt but perhaps comes from when the herring was so prolific around the coasts. It will eat herring but also a wide variety of other fish and a wide selection of other food from crabs to small mammals and birds and edible rubbish.
The common gull may appear mis-named as these days it is by no means common. Perhaps it goes back to the time when in the Highlands and the Northern Isles it was the commonest gull. Or it could have been named in the Middle English sense of having no distinguishing features. The black-headed gull is a misnomer as whilst the head may appear black at a distance closer to it is an attractive shade of dark chocolate brown. This is the breeding plumage but in the winter, as in the photograph, there are two dark narrow lines on the head. The bird was photographed on the sea at Nairn harbour and is an adult. If it had been a last summers bred bird it would have had brown markings on the wings.
The common gull may appear mis-named as these days it is by no means common. Perhaps it goes back to the time when in the Highlands and the Northern Isles it was the commonest gull. Or it could have been named in the Middle English sense of having no distinguishing features. The black-headed gull is a misnomer as whilst the head may appear black at a distance closer to it is an attractive shade of dark chocolate brown. This is the breeding plumage but in the winter, as in the photograph, there are two dark narrow lines on the head. The bird was photographed on the sea at Nairn harbour and is an adult. If it had been a last summers bred bird it would have had brown markings on the wings.
