OBSERVER Photo by M.J. Stafford Dunkirk officials gather in the Save a Lot Plaza on Fourth Street to tout a successful seagull removal effort. From left to right are Board of Education member Marcus Buchanan, First Ward Councilperson Natalie Luczkowiak, Housing, Building and Zoning Officer Glenn Christner, Mayor Wilfred Rosas, and Save a Lot Manager James Bartlett.

The seagull swarms have left a busy Dunkirk plaza.

City officials, joined by grateful business owners, gathered in the Save a Lot Plaza parking lot on Fourth Street on Tuesday morning to tout their efforts. The parking lot behind them — formerly a hangout for hundreds of squawking, defecating, aggressive gulls — saw not a single avian visitor.

Nathan Dolce, owner of Matt’s News on Third Street, spurred the effort by contacting First Ward Councilperson Natalie Luczkowiak in March 2022 to seek her help.

She called the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which referred her to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services.

“I called them …we had a roundtable at City Hall and they indeed had a solution,” Luczkowiak said.

Their solution: Remove the nests and eggs that the adult seagulls were flocking to protect.

“They came up with a price for everything in this plaza. I got a list of all the property owners and reached out to everybody and got them on board,” said city Housing, Building and Zoning Officer Glenn Christner.

The 11 property owners in the plaza block all contributed financially to the nest removal project.

“The city did front the funds to pay for this, but the owners got together and reimbursed the city, and that was the plan from the get-go,” Dunkirk Mayor Wilfred Rosas said.

“Every two weeks for 14 weeks, they came and removed all of the eggs from the nests,” Christner said. The city Department of Public Works provided ladders and trash cans to the Wildlife Services workers.

The work happened from April to July to coincide with the gulls’ breeding season.

“The result is, there was no baby birds, so the seagulls moved on,” Christner said.

They removed an incredible amount of nests, he said. “At times, they were approaching upwards of 2,000 nests” during each visit.

“It’ll be a year by year basis but I think it’s going to take a few years for the seagulls to know they can’t come here,” Luczkowiak said.

“I want to come by to thank Natalie personally for listening to our concerns. I think this is a great example of what can happen when the private end meets with the public end and they can solve problems,” Dolce said. “It’s the first year we haven’t had to shoo thousands of baby seagulls out of the area. It absolutely has made a big difference. … we were losing customers, it was an absolute mess.”

“Until we got help this year, it was a pretty big problem. They were multiplying by the hundreds,” said Save a Lot Manager James Bartlett. “To be honest, for (lack of) a better term it was embarrassing, because the seagulls were just everywhere. They were attacking people… especially in the back of the building.”

Christner said, “We were fighting a losing battle. We were trying to use wires and even lasers. Recordings, and all kinds of deterrents that were not addressing the problem. We finally have a solution to this.”

He noted that as seagulls are a protected species, specialized contractors has to address the problem.