Seagulls Were Terrorizing Ocean City’s Beaches. The Town Fought Back With Birds of Prey.
Had you braved the bumper-to-bumper traffic on any one of the four bridges leading to Ocean City, an island-town on New Jersey’s coast with eight miles of sandy beach, muscled your way through a phalanx of umbrellas, bikinis, and bros to claim your spot by the Atlantic, and spread out your towels and blankets for a day in the sun, you’d be forgiven for thinking the hard work was over. But then, in all likelihood, you’d look up and notice the seagulls. Legions of them. Flocking together in formations so thick they’d block out the clouds.
This, Angelina Caselli tells me, is what the beachgoing experience used to be like at Ocean City, where the number of people balloons to almost 150,000 every summer.
“You’d throw pizza crust in the air and it would bounce off a seagull,” she says.
How many gulls were there? It’s tough to say for certain. But Caselli, who has called Ocean City her place of employment since 2019, says there were thousands. Maybe 3,000, she guesses. Maybe four. Enough that grabbing a slice at the popular pizza joint Manco & Manco up on the boardwalk was akin to taking your life into your hands. All right, maybe not your life. But until recently, pizza, fries, cotton candy, and caramel corn were not treats to be savored, but valuables to be guarded against swarms of winged pickpockets. Take your eyes off your pizza for a second, and chances were good a dive-bombing seagull would snatch it right off your plate.
So I was warned. But on a Friday in mid-July, the salty air my only reprieve from a scorching summer sun, I barely count three-dozen seagulls above me. And as I approach my destination not far from the city’s famed boardwalk, I soon discover why. Inside a building that resembles a backyard toolshed are 13 birds: a pair of dark-feathered hawks, brothers Marco and Polo, one owl who’s an absolute unit, and ten falcons. Three rows of predators with sharp talons. There would be a 14th bird here, too, another hawk called Karen, named for her impeccable ability to never shut up, but she’s off in Atlantic City guarding a bunch of high-rollers at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.
Quickly, the purpose of these birds comes into focus. The small shed is a mews, a place for resting raptors, and Caselli and the handful of staff inside, clad in green caps and shirts, are trained falconers with East Coast Falcons, an outfit in North Jersey. Their mission? To walk Ocean City’s boardwalk and protect tourists against the hordes of seagulls—with birds of prey.
“This is the original bow and arrow, the original gun to go hunt with,” Caselli tells me as we walk around the mews.
After years of waging battle on the gulls, Ocean City turned to a thousands-year-old remedy to defend the boards and the tourists who visit every year. Handled carefully by Caselli and crew, these birds patrol every day, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Not to kill, mind you, but to scare. To frighten a population of bold gulls, and to keep a summer ecosystem of people and prey living in relative harmony—even when pizza is involved.
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