Britain's population of urban seagulls, the source of increasing complaints about dirt, health threats, noise and attacks on people, is now rising so fast that it may reach one million birds by 2020 if concerted action is not taken to manage the problem.
The national population is likely to be "substantially over 100,000 pairs" or 200,000 individuals, according to the leading expert on urban gulls, Peter Rock, an adviser to a string of councils in the South-west which are blighted by the urban gull invasion, among them Bristol, Bath and Gloucester.
The Government, however, has long claimed that there are only about 30,000 pairs – and has just turned down funding for the first serious research project on the ecology of urban gulls, which would seek to understand why their numbers seem to be exploding.
But pressure is mounting on the Government to recognise that what in the past has been seen as little more than a joke has become a serious environmental concern.
The phenomenon of the big urban gull colony is fairly recent: populations in towns and cities began to grow noticeably only in the early 1990s, mostly of herring gulls and their close relatives, lesser black-backed gulls.
But what is not understood is why urban gulls are flourishing, while herring gulls in the wild, in colonies in the countryside, and on the coastline, are in steep decline, and have been placed on the "Red List" of threatened species.
Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, a city which now has nearly 1,000 pairs of the birds nesting on its rooftops after their population doubled in six years, said yesterday: "The fact that no research is going to be done on this is more than daft, it's barking mad. It still appears that unless you've actually experienced the problem, as have many towns and cities now, you sort of think it's a bit of a joke.
"But when you start to see the level of damage these gulls are causing to buildings and the environment generally, you realise that it's a really serious issue."
Mr Foster is one of two MPs who have formally raised the issue of urban gulls with the Government via adjournment debates in the House of Commons in the past 18 months, as concern has grown.
In April 2009, he told MPs that the birds caused "significant problems to many people, and cost individuals, businesses and local councils a great deal of money". And he went on to paint a picture of "faeces deposited on tables, chairs and other furniture outside catering premises, creating a health hazard; stone pavements and steps rendered slippery by freshly deposited faeces, creating safety hazards; aggression towards pedestrians in public spaces and gardens, which is extremely frightening; and the pecking-open of refuse sacks, which leaves debris and encourages other vermin, creating further health problems."
In February this year, Parmjit Dhanda, then the MP for Gloucester, a town whose urban gull population doubled in five years and which now has 2,800 pairs nesting on its rooftops, raised exactly the same concerns in another adjournment debate. But although government representatives made sympathetic noises in both cases, they declined the MPs' principal request, which was for scientific research into the gulls' rapidly rising numbers.
drive from www.independent.co.uk