In the last 30 years, gulls have come among us as never before. But is their moment coming to an end as we tackle our waste problem?

When was the last day you didn’t see a gull? Throughout Britain we ordinarily cross paths with these birds more often than with any other wild creature. They are hard to avoid. In the last 30 years – the lifespan of a large gull – they have come among us as never before. Though still popularly regarded as seagulls, many have moved inland, far from the seaside or saltwater. They have adapted to life in many places we have made, and they have thrived.

Cities and their hinterlands where we jettison our rubbish now sustain far more gulls than the birds’ former more traditional marine habitats. Indeed, in a paradox that might define the Anthropocene era, surviving coastal birds are now regarded as threatened with local extinction, while the same gull species in urban areas are so prevalent they are thought of as pests.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Woman holding leftover chips in polystyrene carton above her head to feed seagulls in Weymouth, Dorset. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Almost every human inhabitant of Britain’s cities could watch gulls every day if they wanted to. Urban rooftop nesting gull colonies are now spread throughout the UK. The birds feed among us, on our streets, as well as on our rubbish dumps. Many people are on their guard, however, because, one way or another, they have met the birds before and haven’t necessarily enjoyed the encounter. Gulls are frighteningly big – of a scale that seems out of sorts with their new habitat. They are loud. Their clawed feet stamp about the place. They lift off and fly with skill and menace, suggesting both ancient winged dinosaurs and futuristic drone ops. They seem to have an uncanny knowledge of what is going on and how to turn it to their advantage.

Above all, they steal our chips. And these opportunistic scavenging raids on a staple of the national diet have come to epitomise a contemporary mashup of nature and people in the feral world we have made, which we must now live in and share with other animal life.

As we have evolved in and adapted to an urban milieu, so the gulls have followed in our slipstream. And it now seems they will be with us, like badges of our creation, for the duration of this, our late hour. They are tracking us like no other bird: this year herring gulls were discovered drunk in south coast towns; last year a herring gull was dyed a lurid orange after falling into a vat of curry in south Wales. These avian encounters with human activities say much about how we live today, yet we commonly despise the gulls for showing us these truths.

The beginnings of this entangled story can be traced back to little over 100 years ago, when gulls first shifted from being seagulls. Among the early reporters on the arrival of black-headed gulls in inner London was the birdwatcher and conservationist WH Hudson. Severe winters in the late 1890s drew the birds upriver from even harsher coastal conditions. Many people regarded these ghostly white waifs as unwanted immigrants and shot at them, but Hudson (himself an immigrant from Argentina) saw the birds as beautiful additions to the urban avifauna.

Hudson was moved by the sympathetic actions of “working people” who came to the Thames Embankment to feed scraps from their lunchboxes to the hungry birds. Since then, the gulls’ reliance on human food has continued to prompt many people to regard them as scavengers rather as entrepreneurs, as feckless immigrants rather than refugees, as chancers and idlers, as scroungers keen to exploit any handouts going.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A gull pops in for chips in Burnham-on-Sea. Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian

These ideas have dogged gulls all the way to our current annual panics, triggered when a wild animal reveals itself to be rather good at aping human life and finding a way to successfully live in the world that we have made. Every summer, horror stories appear in the news after tales of chip-thieving are beefed up with accounts of tortoise and chihuahua murders. “Experts” are found who are happy to predict that, after our precious chips and our blessed pets, it will not be long before human children (or “tots”, in tabloid terms) are taken.

Seagull rage: why humans and birds are at war in Britain Read more

It hasn’t happened.

Gulls do seem big and they are strong. Every time I have been out ringing the large species on a rubbish dump in Essex, I have returned bloodied from holding the birds and with beak marks on my hands that took a week to fade.

But gulls are losing out at our hands much more than the other way around. A gull moment – 30 years or so – is coming to an end. Little food waste is now going into landfill. We are still too wasteful, but now most gull-edible trash is being composted or incinerated. That is surely good, but it also means that the good times for herring and lesser black-backed and great black-backed gulls are over. They will have to shift their behaviour once more. We’ve seen them do it before – but will they manage again?

• Tim Dee is the author of Landfill (Little Toller)