The Case of the Missing Gulls

With its 1,367 cherry orchards sloping down to spotless Lake Michigan beaches, Traverse City (pop. 18,000) was long admired as one of the state's prettiest communities. But no longer. The beaches are now littered with rotting alewives, smelts and garbage. "I've been raking dead fish into piles, but I can't keep up with the amount that washes in," says Mrs. Josephine Hoehler, a summer resident. She notes another change: "I haven't seen one sea gull since I came up here three weeks ago."

In past times, the area teemed with thousands of breeding gulls. Wheeling overhead, they scavenged for dead fish and refuse--and picked the beaches clean. In 1962, William C. Scharf, a biologist at Northwestern Michigan College, counted 2,500 gulls' nests on nearby Bellows Island alone. This spring he found only 300. Why? Scharf partly blames dune-buggy drivers who careen through nesting grounds, plus harmful human discards like pop-top beer-can rings, which can injure hungry gulls. But the chief reason is heavy use of chlorinated hydrocarbons: DDT and its chemical cousins, dieldrin and chlordane.

Danger Signal. Washed down from the cherry orchards by rain, those long-lived pesticides have entered the lake's food chain. When gulls eat fish, they also take in a concentrated dose of poison. As a result, they lay eggs with such thin shells that most do not hatch. "Gulls here produce .42 chicks per nest compared with 1.22 chicks per nest in less polluted areas," Scharf explains. He fears for the human population too. "The Government has linked DDT with cancer in laboratory experiments. We know that it has the same type of effect on mammals as on birds. Nature is flashing a danger signal."

The signal has not gone unheeded. In 1969, Michigan banned sales of DDT; Traverse City's cherry growers also stopped using related poisons. Even so, the pesticides already in the environment will remain potent for years, and Lake Michigan is surrounded by home gardeners who use other persistent poisons. All the citizens of Traverse City can do now is rake their reeking beaches and hope for a miraculous return of the gulls--the area's best and cheapest garbagemen.

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