Landfill by Tim Dee

Landfill Reviews

• 
  Paul

  With their slightly naff arcades and a stiff enough wind to blow sand in your ice cream, there is some unique and nostalgic about the British seaside. The cry of the herring gull is one of the distinct sounds that make the trip to the coast; for some, it is a special sound, others, however, detest these bold avians. However, their reputation is not great though, they are known as bin chickens and frequently called something ruder especially after they have just purloined your chips. In this modern world, there are a lot of creatures suffering at the hand of man, but some survive and others thrive. Gulls are one of those that are making the most of the way we are now using our landscape.
  
  Where gulls win though is our wastefulness these days, we throw so much rubbish away as well as littering the cities and countryside that they have become intertwined and dependent on us. As we are not allowed to incinerate rubbish these days, the items that we cannot recycle have to go into landfill. On every waste site around the country, you will see gulls in their hundreds, sifting through the plastic searching for titbits to eat. The generic, and incorrect term, seagull covers all of these large white birds. But if you take time to stop and look at them you will start the see the difference between the various species that live in the UK. Until recently it is only with the science of DNA testing that now that we are seeing the subtle difference between very similar looking gulls and that are many more subspecies than was first thought.
  
  A ghost gull - the colour of dirty ice or wood ashes. It was like an ice-light or snow lantern on the shore.
  
  Tim Dee has been a bird watcher since his teens, where he would try and look at almost anything with feathers, but he is becoming a “larophiles” or gull enthusiast as they pique his curiosity now. He heads to Essex to one of the main landfill sights for London to help catch and ring them and realises just how large they are when handling them. He travels backwards and forwards across the country seeking them, as well as heading to South Africa and then Madagascar to see their gulls. It is wide-ranging too, he finds gulls in books, those that have made it to the big screen as well as those that have had their fifteen minutes of infamy in the news. Mostly though this is a eulogy to a bird that most would not even consider worth watching, birds that he can see every day when he closes his front door in his home city of Bristol, birds that are intrinsically linked to us. Thought that this was another brilliant read from Tim Dee and after reading this I am never going to look at gull in the same way. Very highly recommended; if you haven’t read his other books, then I would urge you to do so.
• 
  Karen

  The subtitle for this book is Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene. The anthropocene - the current geological age, where human activity has had a dominant influence on climate and the environment - was a word I read many times in
  We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by
  Jonathan Safran Foer. So when I saw the subtitle, I thought I might be interested in this book. Anthropocene was the word that caught my eye. I thought the book would be about garbage and pollution, climate change and the environment. But, the key word in the subtitle and the key item on the cover is GULL. Oops. I kind of missed that when I checked this book out at the library. I was just so happy that my library is open again that I wasn't really paying attention to the key word there.
  
  Ah well. This book is about gull watching. The author is a very good writer, a naturalist from England. I learned quite a lot about gulls and the various types of gulls that are living in England, close to human populations, not necessarily near the sea/ocean. According to the book, gulls have been adapting to the food sources available to them for centuries. Now that the British laws have made food composting mandatory, gulls in Britain are adapting again to the diminishing supply of food waste in landfills and moving on to other options.
  
  Tim Dee spent many chapters discussing a variety of books, poems and movies where gulls are featured. He also interested many gull experts and spent many hours watching and writing about gulls. There is quite a lot of information in this book, mostly about gulls. People who are bird watchers may enjoy this book. Unless you are already a gull expert, I guarantee that if you read this book, you will learn more about gulls than you expected.
• 
  Jackie Law

  Landfill, by Tim Dee, is the most recent addition to Little Toller’s series of nature monographs. With jacket design and occasional illustrations by Greg Poole, this beautifully produced book explores the author’s interest in gulls, and how their populations have grown and adapted to make the most of modern man’s waste generating behaviour. Dee’s research was carried out at various landfill sites where birds are tagged and observed. These once migratory creatures now live year round in British cities where they are regarded as pests for getting too close to the humans who have enabled them to flourish.
  
  “It’s also important to remember that we’re responsible for all this. We’ve thrown so much edible stuff away.”
  
  Due to man’s habits, gulls no longer need to travel to find winter food. Gulls fly over wide areas but many return to breed where they hatched so populations expand. They are dynamic and fast adapting. In eating human rubbish they have become indicators of future problems such as when DDT exposure caused feminisation of embryos.
  
  The author has been a keen birdwatcher since his teens. He seeks out those with specialist knowledge to interview and accompanies them on field trips. He writes up the conversations that take place in: Bristol City Centre; various Essex landfill sites; an island in the Severn Estuary; the Isle of Lewis off Scotland; still segregated South African population centres; the rainforests of Madagascar; the Natural History archive centre. It is not always gulls that are observed. What bird enthusiasts seek are rare sightings and better understood avian behaviours. The author notes that evolution isn’t over – species are coming into existence as much as they ever were. When a new species is discovered it is new to science but could, perhaps, have simply avoided prior categorisation. Humans have this need to label – birds, animals and people.
  
  Although accessible and raising interesting questions, the subject will be of particular interest to other bird enthusiasts. Gulls deliver a challenge for ornithologists as certain species can hybridise – nature exists whether or not man names or understands it. Nevertheless, awakening interest, as chasing a rare sighting does, may make man less eager to follow through on his typically selfish and destructive behaviour.
  
  One rare bird spotted in Lewis in 2013 had twitchers rushing to watch in awe. They observed as its impressive aeronautic display was cut short, literally, by the blades of a wind turbine.
  
  There are many historic books featuring birds, the merits of which the author discusses in sometimes scathing terms. The only positive views he has on the Richard Bach’s best selling Jonathan Livingston Seagull are about Russell Munson’s photographs which he wished to identify. This desire to recognise and categorise is strong.
  
  In Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds, nature assembles to attack its greatest destroyer, man. Henry Mayhew’s London Labour London Poor, published in the nineteenth century, barely mentions gulls which at the time were kept for eggs or occasionally eaten, but rarely flew up the estuary. What this and other books offer as interest is how rubbish was perceived and treated. The recent growth in gull numbers is down to people. In visits to overseas landfill sites, Dee observes both human and avian scavengers.
  
  “When do objects – or people – cease to have value?”
  
  Having provided so bountifully for gulls, man is once again changing how his rubbish is treated. Food waste is no longer to be dumped in landfill sites, and these are to be covered over and converted into parks. Cities are taking measures to cull populations of birds regarded as unruly. Numbers may have peaked and now be in decline but the author is keen to show what wider lessons may still be learned from the tagging and sharing of information. If nature is to be protected it requires new generations of ambassadors.
  
  “The world is, and then the world is as we say it is.”
  
  As with each book in the monograph series, the author’s enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. I am highly unlikely to become a twitcher but will now view gulls with more curiosity. This was an interesting, informative and often entertaining read.
• 
  Rebecca

  Another great Little Toller offering, though I didn’t care for the abstract/cartoonish illustrations. This is mostly about gulls and the people who watch them, but it’s a Tim Dee book, so you know there is going to be a lot of delving into memory and much literary context. The allusions run the gamut from John Clare to Daphne du Maurier, with some low-brow popular culture interspersed:
  Jonathan Livingston Seagull, anyone? (The very worst book I read in 2019!) Dee looks at how gulls are portrayed in the media, and explores the history of landfills and rubbish management in general – what in Victorian London (e.g. in the works of Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew) used to be called “dust.” Wide-ranging and very readable. I’m sad I only have one Dee book left.
  
  Some favorite lines:
  
  “I ate black-headed gulls’ eggs once. A clutch of three, soft-boiled and toothsome, tasting of wet grass or a slightly high salad. A tart marsh. And the yolks, fogged sunrises loosed onto my plate, came sliding from the most beautiful homes I’d ever cracked. Chalk-buffed by their boil, the shells looked like old washed flints.”
  
  “Each age gets the hysteria it deserves. It suits us today that gulls are piratical chip thieves invading our spaces.”
  
  “Wasps make magnificent homes for themselves but every winter all of the builders die. Many of us know this and its wider implications, but most of us also live as if this weren’t true.”
• 
  Karen Mace

  If you don't become a 'gull' fan after reading this book then I think there's something wrong with you! They're a bird I've taken for granted, especially living so close to the estuary and the large landfill site in Pitsea where a lot of this book is set (and I never knew such gull action even went on there!), but in this stunning little book, the author really gets behind the 'trashy' image we all get of gulls - that they're aggressive and ugly and serve no real purpose other than nicking your food if you're at the seaside, or attacking small animals in gardens, thanks to silly season reports in newspapers! The more that he studies these birds in various sites, the more he begins to appreciate them and realise just how much human behaviour has impacted on their habits. Hence the link with rubbish and why so many can be spotted at landfill sites across the county.
  
  The author is a birdwatcher, and his enthusiasm and passion for the subject is infectious as he follows the birds and talks to the people who follow these birds and are known as 'gullers'. They've become fascinated by the species and their behaviour and will travel long distances for glimpses of rare breeds but also to note changes in their numbers. And due to the changes in the way we dispose of food waste especially now, the numbers aren't seen at landfill sites anymore so they're having to change where they get their food, and heading away from the seaside and into towns.
  
  I really enjoyed the mix of the way the author told the story of the gull - he used his own knowledge alongside where they're mentioned in poetry, literature and films, and it made for an absorbing read and I never thought I'd find the subjects of gulls and rubbish so fascinating! The information and anecdotes were really well balanced and made for an enthralling read.
  
  I'm really glad to have been educated about these birds that I think we all take for granted and largely ignore, so will definitely be paying more attention to the local gull population!
• 
  Dylan

  I'm reading through Lithub's
  365 Books to Start Your Climate Change Library, a reading list in four sections (Classics, Science, Fiction & Poetry, and Ideas). This book is #6 of
  Part 4: The Ideas and #16 overall.
  
  I love learning from someone who is very passionate & knowledgeable about something specific. This book works so well because author Tim Dee is good at translating his passion for & knowledge of gulls onto the page. An added bonus is that he is able to take his love for such a specific thing (gulls) & from there weave in more universal truths & observations, e.g.: the relationships between humans, the waste they produce, & the natural world.
  
  Fascinating & thought-provoking, worth checking out.
• 
  granolabars

  I liked that a lot of it was set in Bristol and I liked the appreciation for birds that are often overlooked / disliked. However so much of this was about literature that was sort of linked, and I didn’t read this book to read excepts of other books.
• 
  Andrew Blok

  I didn't expect this book! I picked it up off the shelf and thought I'd read about adventures in IDing gulls on dumps. What I got was a poetic, creative and thoughtful telling of one group of creatures (gulls) reacting and adapting to another set of creatures (us) and their throw away culture. It was poetic, surprising, and cast western cultures relation to the natural world in a new light.
  
  This might not be the book for everyone, but I'll be thinking about gulls, landfills, dust, deterioration, adaptation and all the ways I can't understand the world for quite some time because of it.
• 
  Liz

  This was the perfect book for fractious times, because it was lyrical and distracting, but it also had a lot to say about humans’ impact on the Earth and our relationship to birds: naming them, specifying them, writing about them, and loving or despising them. Dee has written a peculiarly British essay on gulls (never “seagulls”) and their proximity to humans; the chapter on Alfred Hitchcock and Daphne duMaurier’s versions of ‘The Birds’ alone was worth the price of the book.
  
  Here’s a sample: “All of the world’s 135 or so species [of nightjar] are tailored somewhere between a fast owl and a stuttering moth — long sharp wings, wide-mouthed faces, blackcurrant eyes — and they are silently assembled, as are many night things, from old fabrics woven and reopen, stitched and unstitched, worn, patches, and appliqués. If an owl is a worked bag of leafy air, a nightjar is a dusty carpet that has absorbed into its pattern the thread of that which has been trodden down into it, until it cannot be said what is dirt and what is design.” (207)
• 
  5greenway

  Fascinating on two levels - the animals themselves (gulls, here) and the humans who watch them. 'Ticking' culture, whether that's birds, buses or beers, leaves me scratching my head sometimes; this was a window into that kind of world and the broader landscape that was informative, funny, warm-hearted, thought-provoking.
• 
  Emily Weatherburn

  In a diary entry published in March 2010, birdwatcher and radio producer, Tim Dee, stated that “birding … has the intensity of first love.” Author of The Running Sky (2009) and Four Fields (2013), Dee has spent his life studying and cataloguing the behaviours of birds. Fascinated by the ways that they intersect with our own lives, he has a passion for them that is clearly expressed in his latest release, Landfill.
  
  Acting as both a biography and a collection of critical essays, Landfill deconstructs contemporary understandings of the creatures that have most successfully adapted to our streets: gulls. Dee questions what he presents as an irrational hatred, suggesting that these “[b]in chickens” are unjustly associated with the waste that they consume. Fulfilling a role that can only be described as ‘defender of the gulls’, Dee forcefully reminds us that their proximity is a result of our industrialisation: “The gulls are canny opportunists and worthy embodiments of the spirit of the place. And people hate them for it”. Drawing on personal experiences, he describes his interviews with fellow ‘birders’, using them to illustrate the gulls’ behavioural patterns. Harshly criticising those who call them ‘seagulls’, he reveals how the term ‘gull’ relates to many different species and subspecies, exposing a three-dimensionality to the bird most of us call vermin.
  
  Alongside these interviews, Dee examines literary representations of gulls, commentating Daphne de Maurier’s “The Birds” and Chekhov’s Seagull. By analysing such works, he is able to draw attention to the how the gull has been consistently demonised, perhaps resulting in “[t]he gull panic” of 2015, where, after a tortoise was attacked by a group of gulls, the public began to fear that children and small dogs could be attacked. Despite Dee’s apparent efforts to remain impartial, his dismissal of these claims is undeniable as he reminds us that de Maurier’s “great-gull apocalypse” is an evolutionary impossibility.
  
  Yet it can be argued that Dee’s powerful assertions are overshadowed by the complex structure of Landfill. It seems that he inadvertently describes his own narrative as he refers to Malling Olsen’s Gulls of the World: “It is almost beautiful and almost mad. It reads like a dreamy grit, arresting my attention and dissolving it at the same time”. As Dee’s mind flits between famous ‘gullers’ and historical works of fiction, his narrative is thrown from subject to subject, demonstrating his thought processes, but also alienating his readers. Partway through Landfill, he notes how he is “in pursuit” of a specific presentation of the gull, and this is evident from his nonsensical structure. As he seeks out this presentation, he produces a book that is both a biography, and a literary analysis; in doing so, he transgresses genres, embracing a structure that is both mesmerising, and highly disruptive. For many, it may seem overly complex; it is, after all, unconventional, and may lead to the loss of Dee’s emotive messages.
  
  On the other hand, to suggest that Landfill is poorly written is to misunderstand it. This book focusses on the individualism of the gull, explaining how each creature has different behaviours. Even as this is revealed, Dee’s novel also becomes an individual; just as the gull cannot be associated with the umbrella term, “seagull”, Landfill cannot be defined by the categories of “biography” or “critical essay”. This is a book that will make you question the societal norms that you have blindly accepted, and, even as it does so, you will come to appreciate the brilliance of its emotionally-charged, truly passionate author.
  
• 
  Rose

  I thought there would be more landfill and less gulls. Instead, I found pages and pages of gull talk, from field observation to poetry to tabloid descriptions. Instead of a discussion of human society and gulls, we get lots of interviews with gull enthusiasts and scientists. Pages of direct quotes follow introductions of people, some birders and some scientists. More long quotes are interspersed with bird sightings or disappointments.
  
  I thought this would be one of those books on a topic that seems dull but isn't. Sadly I never became interested in categories of gull, and I remain uninterested. I did learn quite a bit about gulls and the various media depictions of them - I just wish Dee went deeper. At a few points he gets near bigger ideas, but he doesn't go far enough with them. What makes something garbage? Interesting idea, little elaboration. Why do we focus so much on categorizing species and subspecies, the author asks, before returning us to his hunt to see some specific rare gull. If categories are just a human-created affectation, and even if they aren't, who cares if someone checks an unusual gull of their list?
  
  When we did move away from gulls it wasn't always clear what the connection was, other than the fact that humans produce garbage and gulls consume it. A long discussion of the Dickens-era London poor yields this mystifying sentence: "Even with their titles, Mayhew knew that these lowly men - and they were almost always men - weren't really doing jobs. They were begging of the earth." What a strange idea, that using the resources one has available to survive is lowly or lazy. Are miners "begging of the earth"? Are hunter-gatherers? Birds that catch fish, or garbage? Is Dee comparing the London poor to gulls? I have no idea, since he stops short of saying more on the topic.
  
  Instead, we return to birding. I began to suspect that the true purpose of this book is to snare an audience for the author's birding exploits. Birding is fun for (some) people to do but it is not interesting to read about, except in small doses or in service of a larger point (see How to do Nothing). This is a hill I would die on. I don't think anyone will ask me to.
• 
  Mary Warnement

  Dee's book is about gull-watchers as much, or more, than about gulls. His literary examples are not always obvious or well known. Yes, there's a chapter on The Birds but he also equates Borges with taxonomy. I learned new vocabulary, not only scientific terms but also British birding slang. I really wondered at first why that watcher was twitching. But he was a twitcher looking for a twitch. If he twitched a rarely-seen bird, he scored a mega.
  
  Unlike other birds, gulls come to humans. Probably to their detriment. They shouldn't rely on us. They've been feeding off landfills for a long time, but now we've filled them and are turning them into parks. Gulls will have to look elsewhere.
  His book is about: (130) "This record--a rare gull, a 'new' species, making its way in the Antrhopocene by stealing chips from a dump--might in a single moment have floodlit everything that I am in pursuit of here. i wish I had seen it."
  
  There's a lot of descriptive narrative--reportage really--but also thoughtfulness. He knows the science and the literary connections.
  
  Among the scientists and birders mentioned, Tim Birkhead is always cited followed by et alia. Did he always have co-authors? Is Dee referencing a certain type of scientist?
  
  Dee has a way with words and can tap an apt turn of phrase.
  50 "I got out of my car into a smell of Death I would say. I could tasee it too."
  57 gulls are "cruelly useful bioindicators of various environmental calamities."
  67 "endlessly wrong"
  69 "We are right to tell the difference but the difference tells"
  72 Poet Paul Farley "among the wreckage of who we were 40 summers ago"
  91 "gullery"
  163 "Doing some freaking and casting its fluence"
  169 Is Dee describing the point & beauty of birding? Of human interaction? "Isn't that a beautiful, even a lovable, thought--this expression of such interest in an individual organism. One bird. There, that one, in the middle of that dishevelledgang of them, standing around on the quayside, like men outside a pub at closing time, I want to know _that one_ not because it might be rare or different, no, _that one_ because everything about it says who it is, and if only I could read all this written into it I could know it as an individual."
  197 "serenaded by a dark scarf of blackbird song"
  202 1:1 scale not viable "Remembering everything prevents you knowing the value of anything"
  207 "A smothered forest stirs in its night-sleep, quilted by the dark"
  222 "books beyond shelving"
  
  121 The sad sight of a rare bird seen, who then flies straight into a turbine
  61 I was shocked by his description of catching and placing metal rings on birds' feet. Bagging a bird seems cruel to me. I know I would suffer through an ordeal like that. I have suffered similarly through the good-intentioned efforts of doctors, so perhaps I can forgive those studying birds.
  
  I wonder how the bird specimens are preserved at Tring.
  
  I won't list all his literary references. There are whole chapters devoted to one gull-related work but many references throughout. He quoted Larkin at least twice and led me to order a collection I don't have, The Less Deceived.
  
  214 Are living things invisible without a name? To humans. He admits, (217) "the bird cared neither way." Somehow his caring brings him loneliness, which I don't quite understand. He ends by talking about his parents, their aging and associated frustrations--for them and him--and then he goes bird watching, sees a bird he's seen only twice before, and knows he has his book's conclusion.
• 
  Giles Watson

  This is simply marvellous: poetic, intelligent and totally gull-obsessed. I am reminded of nothing so much as the ramshackle encycolopaedic genius of ‘Moby Dick’. Tim Dee patchworks his own experiences with urban gulls into a whole fabric of human-gull-culture, stitched together with the narrative of gulls’ adaptation to the shifting patterns of our habits in the disposal of human waste. Hitchcock and Du Maurier find their way into the recycling too (Dee prefers Du Maurier, and I tend to concur), as does Henry Mayhew’s magnum opus, ‘London Labour and the London Poor’, which tellingly contains not a single reference to gulls, but minutely catalogues the different occupations of human beings who scratched out a subsistence on waste, from scrap metal to dog shit (it was used in enormous quantities in the process of tanning leather). We learn, too, that the opportunistic lifestyle of gulls on rubbish tips is already in decline, as more and more waste-management systems take to composting kitchen waste. We can guess, though, that the extraordinary evolutionary fluidity of gulls will ensure that, however our habits may change, they will find new ways of flourishing, even as we continue to wipe out other species.
  
  But it is the passages which describe his own encounters which really shine. He captures the loops and curves of gulls in flight; he records their raucousness with evident relish. His writing achieves a tactile brilliance when he describes exactly what it is like to hold a gull which is being ringed – a sustained prose-poem which any nature writer must envy. He reflects on that most curious of mysteries: how gulls – which gorge on fish blood and whale blubber, and gabble their way through human garbage – always maintain their pristine whiteness.
  
  As a wild bird rehabilitator, I have myself marvelled at the wonderful resilience of gulls: how a bird with botulism, washed up waterlogged and sand-riddled on some estuary beach, will, over the space of five days of resting and drinking fresh water, right itself, preen and restore its haughtiness, and then clamour again for freedom. No bird, with the possible exception of the feral pigeon, is so staunch in enduring a battle-wound, either. There is still a silver gull, whom I named Kehaar in honour of Richard Adams, who turns up occasionally at my parents’ place for a meal of mackerel, and occasionally on the opposite side of the harbour near the Brig Amity – four years after she first flew away. She had come to me with a compound fracture of the radius and ulna: an indication for euthanasia in most other species. It is easy to admire her more than quite a lot of human beings.
  
  Those who despise gulls call them “rats with wings”, “flying vermin” and “bin chickens” (in Britain – in Australia, this epithet is reserved for the white ibis). In doing so, of course, they revile themselves, because all of the characteristics they dislike in gulls are attributes they share with human beings. There’s an obvious hypocrisy when the most successful species on the planet reviles other species for being successful, especially when that success has arisen precisely out of exploiting human profligacy. Read Tim Dee’s ‘Landfill’, and see whether, by the end of it, you too are filled with a gull’s self-assurance and bolshiness, and experience the temptation to say, “If you don’t like gulls, defriend me now.”
• 
  Catherine Woodman

  I am not familiar with this author, but this is not his first book that looks at the effect of man on the world around him in general, and more specifically on birds. He highlights gulls as the bird of choice, and the ubiquitous nature of this particular shore bird makes it a good subject.
  This is a treatise about the damage that people wreck upon the animals around us--which reminds me of the documentary All That Breathes, which is about 2 brothers in Delhi who rescue Black Kites, birds that can drop from the sky due to poor air quality. In addition to that, the urban kites eat human discard food and have different metabolisms than their rural brethren.
  Gulls have become increasingly familiar in our towns and cities. They are infiltrating our urban worlds, and as their behavior evolves, so does our view of them. Scavenging discarded fast food from gutters, snatching chips from tourists’ fingers, picking over rubbish dumps for food waste, gulls are not highly valued. These gulls are less healthy than gulls that feed at sea--no surprise, but fast food is not good for people and it also is not good for gulls either. The author documents his experience reading about, watching, and actively banding and studying gulls. It is not all gulls as victims--they have also become emboldened to go directly to the source, grabbing food directly from people before they discard them.
  Dee’s book is a wonderfully thoughtful and gently ironic meditation on “gull-life and gulling-life”, as well as our changing relationship with nature in the Anthropocene.
• 
  Sue

  I loved Landfill: Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene because this book is about 1) observing the natural world and how as, human beings we are affected by it, 2) how the natural world is affected by human behavior, 3) it is philosophical and literary, 3) and sheds lights on evolution of animal species, particularly gulls in the United Kingdom. I am an amateur naturalist (emphasis amateur), meaning I like to hike and learn about the plants and wildlife I see on my outings. This year I noticed the amazing variety of lichen, for example, and learned that the plant is actually a partnership of algae and fungus. I made the above list to describe Landfill because I think the title is a somewhat misleading; someone might pick it up thinking it is about landfills, which it really isn't, and miss the treasure that it is.
• 
  Jennifer

  A lovely Little Toller. Tim Dee has too often been somehow disappointing and there were echoes of this in Landfill as it threatened to become a bit of a landfill of its own at times (even though I do love a good meander) However the whole draws it all together into a thing of beauty in words as well as the fabulous Greg Poole cover and illustrations and the delight of the volume in the hand. It's personal but ponders some interesting questions about science and the uses of taxonomy. There is less about the relationship between people generally and gulls than I anticipated. One of the most enjoyable parts of the book was a trip looking for nightjars on Madagascar.
• 
  Samantha Sarkar

  I won't rate this book as I clearly wasn't the right audience for it. I think you need to be more of a birder to appreciate it. Theres a lot detail describing the speciation of gulls and their classifications. The book is arranged into mini chapters of disparate thoughts and memories that jump from topic to topic.
  
  I did enjoy some of the high level ruminations he had on the theme of how gulls are one of the species that thrive on human waste and refuse, and how, ironically, the environmental efforts to separate organic waste and compost it instead of sending it to landfills has in a way deprived gulls of a source of food.
  
  Full disclosure though, I got bored and didn't finish.
• 
  Cecelia Bradley

  I enjoyed this book because it was poetically written and I enjoyed learning about Gulls but also having a break from the gulls with Dee’s intertwined sometimes poignant sometimes subtlety funny personal stories. A great book if you want to learn something about gulls but not be lectured. Honestly I picked this book up with a bad hangover and just wanted to read a book that was totally different to my normal kind of books. But in general throughly enjoyed. Don’t be fooled by the title know if is not really anything about landfill although that’s where many gulls like to go.
• 
  Petra

  Aardig boekje over meeuwen. Het waaiert wel wat veel uit. Het gaat over meeuwen spotten op vuilnisbelten, over taxonomie. Dan zijn er nog hoofdstukken over gedichten en boeken die over vogels/meeuwen gaan. En aan het eind vertelt de schrijver over nachtzwaluwen spotten op Borneo. Het interessantste waren de stukken over de relatie tussen mens, meeuw en afval. Tim Dee kan gepassioneerd vertellen over zijn hobby. Dit boek is vooral interessant voor mensen die zelf ook vogelspotter zijn.
• 
  17CECO

  It's upsetting how much this isn't about the anthropocene.
  
  Because I'd be interested in the relationship between Dee's taxonomic obsessions and the ongoing waves of extinctions.
  
  He's a lively writer.
  
  But who slapped the anthropocene on this?
• 
  Nikky

  The illustrations are great and the premise is clever, but ultimately this book tries to take a hundred-page concept—gulls are interesting birds and their fates are intertwined with ours—and expands it to 220 pages. Start reading every essay, and if it doesn't suit you, just move on to the next.
• 
  Alan Fricker

  Had not appreciated the extent of the gull focus of this book. Not being much of a birder I had a mixed level of interest - I definitely learnt a lot on the challenges of bird identification and something of evolution. Took me a while to get into the swing of the writing
• 
  Sally Anne

  As a naturalist, I loved this book. His heartfelt observations, obvious love and awe of the natural world, as well as a honed expertise. As a reader, I loved this book. No word was wasted. Lovely. Just lovely prose.
• 
  Sarah Boon

  Weird but kind of interesting