Council considers beach bird feeding ban
Scene compared to Alfred Hitchcock horror, 'the Birds'
North Somerset Council is considering bringing in a new rule to try and stop one man’s “excessive” bird feeding.
A man has been attracting huge flocks of seagulls to Clevedon beach by feeding them a large amount of bread. Now North Somerset Council is considering bringing in a public space protection order to restrict “excessive bird feeding” at the beach, a council scrutiny panel heard on June 11.
Michael Pryke (Clevedon Walton, Conservative), the local councillor for the area around the beach, described the scene as like something from the Alfred Hitchcock horror, The Birds. He told the panel: “If you’ve never been to Clevedon, it is a fairly spectacular sight to see a hundred seagulls and a man just chuck bread into the air.”
Nobody was named in the meeting but, two years ago, a Clevedon man was handed a £600 fine after feeding the seagulls in the town in breach of a community protection order. He had previously been sentenced to 15 weeks in prison, when living in Bristol in 2020, for breaching an injunction preventing him from feeding pigeons on a balcony.
Bringing in the order would mean putting up a sign at the beach telling people not to feed the birds. Mr Pryke said: “I am not quite sure whether a sign is going to cut it to be honest.”
Council officers agreed that the sign would be unlikley to stop the behaviour, but said that it would provide “a quicker route to enforcement.” It would mean that the council could issue a fine for feeding the birds without having to go through the long process of taking someone to court.
A meeting of the council cabinet on June 17, which did not directly mention the issue with bird feeding, agreed to work on drawing up the proposed new public space protection orders. They will be voted on by the full council later this year.
The council previously used public space protection orders to ban walking more than six dogs at once in 2023. A woman who owns nine dogs told the Local Democracy Reporting Service at the time that the ban was “ridiculous.”