A Benton Township woman is on a mission to rid the Orchards Mall of its gull problem.
Christina Castaneda is a former manager of the mall, who told Benton Township Trustees this week she’s spoken to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture about the issue. She’s learned Benton Township isn’t the only community to have a problem with gulls, and some places have managed to rid themselves of the birds.
Castaneda told us when she was mall manager, they tried for years to drive the gulls away.
“So I started playing falcon sounds from my car speakers, and the mall owners bought a six-foot eagle kite, and I flew that around, paid somebody else to fly it around,” Castaneda said. “We got a falcon that goes on a 60-foot pole, and we put that up on the roof.”
Castaneda also installed trash cans with metal lids and would bang them frequently. At one point, the mall had permission to remove nests from the roof, but the gulls just came back and built new nests.
“The first day they completely left, disappeared. Second day, they left most of the day, came back early evening. And as the days went on, by the ninth day, they flew out to the parking lot and came back. So they became very desensitized to that. So we’ve tried everything over the years.”
Due to the size of the mall’s roof, it’s a perfect place for gulls to congregate because nothing disturbs them up there. Plus, food and water are nearby. Castaneda says the real issue is that people feed the birds, adding she would catch people doing it all of the time when working for the mall.
Castaneda is now talking with a firm that has successfully driven away gulls from areas like the mall and tells us the mall owners are interested in learning more about what they can do. She says she wants to be the catalyst for making that happen so that the mall’s gull problem can finally end and the community benefits as a whole.
