For years no one liked the geese, maybe still don't, probably still watch where they walk, but it's the gulls which we have proof about. From the the time bacteria counts began closing Racine's beaches, some people blamed the the birds which carpeted the sands. Now we know that there's a certain risk in having those birds around.

A wing and a germ

It took time and a lot of DNA analysis, but scientists have found that not only do gulls carry germs specific to themselves-which you'd expect-but they also are very likely carrying microorganisms that can cause disease in humans.

From 2004 through 2006, researchers collected 724 samples of gull feces from North Beach in Racine and another 226 in 2004 from Bradford Beach in Milwaukee. They examined the samples for organisms which commonly live in the intestines of animals and people, salmonella, campylobacter and pleisiomonas. Salmonella you probably know from various food contamination advisories, and the other two cause the same problems, the fever, nausea, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and so forth.

In the December issue of the Canadian Journal of Microbiology, the researchers reported that they found a link between gull feces and human pathogens. They also looked for the parasites Cryptosporidium and Giardia and didn't find them, nor did they find any human viruses.

What they did find definitely suggest that gulls can carry human disease, said Julie Kinzelman, the Racine Health Department research scientist and laboratory director and the lead author on the study. The bacterial species tested for are those which have been found in the presence of human illness, she said.

As with most scientific work there are caveats. Health department reports show no increase in gastrointestinal illnesses, she said. We don't know how much risk of infection exists when people touch sand (hand washing is a good idea if you're recreating at the beach and then eat), and there's always the question of how many organisms people ingest because getting an infection requires different numbers of different organisms. That infective dose varies greatly, from more than 1 million organisms in the case of Pleisiomonas to as few as 15 to 20 cells for Salmonella.

There's no question that gull feces increases the bacteria count in waters near shore, and it's also the case that the water quality standard set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency doesn't discriminate between bacteria that cause illness in birds and those which cause illness in people. That 1986 standard is due to be replaced in 2012, Kinzelman said, and one of the key questions is whether the rules should make such a distinction.

Not-so-distant shores

It's not an academic distinction, and the issue of what's in gulls is not one for Racine only or Milwaukee only or Sheboygan only. Work in Chicago has shown that.

Starting a couple of years ago, workers from the U.S. Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service started tagging gulls at a couple of big nesting sites in Chicago and Indiana. They oiled eggs, too, to kill developing embryos by stopping the movement of oxygen through the shell. They oiled tens of thousands of eggs, but tagged fewer birds because it was a very labor-intensive process, said Scott Beckerman, the Illinois state director for wildlife services with APHIS.

They targeted ring-billed gulls, he said, because that type is present in large numbers.

"They're considered a generalist species. They forage on a wide variety of food sources. They've adapted very well to live in our urban environments."

When human leftovers are scarce, ring-bills will feed on cicadas or dead fish, he said. And since the early 1900s when people stopped hunting gulls for their feathers, and especially since the pesticide DDT was banned, gull numbers have rebounded. There are an estimated 35,000 gull nests in Cook County alone, and those are only basic estimates because bird surveys are not designed to provide a good county of gull numbers, he said.

After settling on a biodegradable dye to make tagging easier, Beckerman said, researchers waited for observations to come in and tell them where gulls had gone.

"We had some up the lake shore in Wisconsin to Sheboygan."

That's 129 miles from Chicago as the gull flies. Other birds were found in downstate Illinois and one as far away as New York state. These weren't juvenile birds moving away from the nest and looking for a new home but breeding adults. Still, Beckerman said, for the most part the Great Lakes gull population is considered a closed group; birds born in the region tend to stay and breed in the region if they live that long.

That movement suggests that no one's gull problem is just their problem. It has come and gone in Lake County, Ill., for example.

Your gull is my gull

For some time the beach at North Point Marina in Winthrop Harbor (just to the south of the Kenosha County border) was plagued with closings, said Michael Adams, senior biologist for the Lake County Health Department.

"One of the main reasons it closed is probably because there's 5,000 gulls that hang out on the beach," he said. Nearby, at an abandoned coke plant (the coal derivative, not the soft drink or the narcotic) was a nesting colony of several thousand gulls. Once that colony was encouraged to move, the beach problem decreased. Now the county is trying to find out what its neighbors know and what they've done.

"We know our beaches well enough to know which ones have problems with what issues," Adams said. "How to solve that problem is the next big step."

In the Chicago Park District, which manages the city's lake front beaches and marinas, workers have tried anything and everything, said Ellen Sargent, deputy director in the park district's Natural Resources Department. That effort began with a public education campaign about not feeding gulls.

"What we were finding was with our standard garbage container at the time, it was kind of a 55 gallon barrel and it was open at the top … and often times birds could sit on the very top of that can and have a buffet of food that people had put in the can," she said.

Along with the education campaign came an initiative to install solar-powered garbage cans. The solar panels run a trash compactor.

"It's actually a smaller garbage container. It looks like it would only be about 35 gallons, but because there's a compactor it can hold up to 200 gallons of trash."

Those have the side benefits of requiring less frequent emptying which cut down on labor and fuel, she said.

Dogs made the greatest difference. For a couple of years the district experimented with hiring a border collie handler to harass gulls and encourage them to stay off beaches, Sargent said. Last summer the district tackled its most challenged beach with full-time dog patrols.

The 63rd Street beach is in Foster Park near the University of Chicago. It's very shallow-2 to 3 feet of water 100 feet from the shore-and two breakwaters mean there's very little flushing of the water along the beach, she said. All the factors combined meant that this beach typically had some sort of swim advisor for 45 percent of any season, Sargent said.

Last summer there were dogs at the beach from dawn to dusk. The number days when swim advisories were posted dropped 91 percent.

This year the city will try changing the way it grooms the beaches, she said. As Racine has done, it will leave the sand rough-looking so the sun helps dry up and kill bacteria sheltering among the grains of sand.

All the research also points to the need for more than strictly local initiatives.

"If we have all of these gulls nesting in Indiana and then flying up to Illinois beaches or Wisconsin beaches," Sargent said, "we need some kind of regional initiatives."