A council spokesman said GPS monitoring of Dunedin’s southern black-backed gulls was under way.
Although it was included in the council’s draft black-backed gull management plan, when the council sprayed the birds with coloured dye to make them easy to identify, members of the public would not be asked to report sightings to the council.
‘‘We have decided to only rely on data gathered by trained personnel to inform us about the movement of black-backed gulls, but sightings by members of the public may still form part of the wider campaign to raise public awareness of the project,’’ the spokesman said.
The council was finalising the details of its public information campaign for the project and the coloured marking of black-backed gulls was yet to begin.
The council intends to halve the city’s population of about 10,000 black-backed gulls over the next five years as it closes the Green Island landfill, a major attractant for the birds.
Creating a black-backed gull management plan was a condition of consent for the city’s next landfill, at Smooth Hill.
Fears were raised that after losing the Green Island landfill as a food source, the birds would flock elsewhere, potentially affecting the city’s amenity, or, if they moved closer to Dunedin Airport, presenting a risk to aviation safety.
The council’s draft plan said 10 birds would be tracked with GPS devices and a large number of birds would be sprayed with non-toxic, food-grade dye for a three-month dispersal period.
During that time trained wildlife staff would use tools such as pyrotechnics or starter pistols to scare the birds away from the landfill.
The spokesman said the council was trialling a variety of techniques to disperse the birds so as to assess their effectiveness, but the dispersal operation itself had not yet begun.
