As soon as Beavis launched from the window of Craig Golden’s truck, the seagulls dispersed, squawking their displeasure at another interrupted meal at the Lompoc Landfill.
It took the hawk one short swoop through the air to disperse the birds for the rest of the morning.
Like all landfills near the coast, Lompoc’s suffers from massive flocks of seagulls attracted by food in the mounds of garbage that have yet to be buried.
The gulls’ tendency to pick up and drop off trash, at times near people and places such as schools, is a significant public health hazard. They’re even considered disease vectors.
The most effective solution, solid-waste officials have found, is falconry.
“What we do in our job is to get seagulls off the landfills, because it becomes a nuisance problem,” said Golden, whose four-falconer company, Safari Depredation Co., utilizes hawks and falcons to scare away the birds at the Lompoc and Santa Maria landfills, the Cold Canyon Landfill in San Luis Obispo and other outdoor areas.
“They would defecate on you, they would take the trash down off-site, and it became a real problem,” Golden said.
Warding off the seabirds is required by the 39-acre Lompoc Landfill’s permit, said solid waste superintendent Keith Quinlan.
Though the landfill will never be able to permanently rid itself of seagulls, falconry — hunting wild quarry with a trained raptor — is the most effective method of shooing them away, Quinlan said.
His team’s only other tools are devices that make sudden loud noises to scare them off.
Safari Depredation has 21 raptors between its three landfills. With Dexter, a 10-month-old Harris’s hawk, on his gloved hand, Golden explained that the goal is not to kill the seagulls.
“What we do is train both hawks and falcons to chase the seagulls, which is called hazing,” he said.
While hawks are more aggressive — Golden estimated 80 percent of the seagulls they do catch survive and can be let go — falcons will snap their prey’s neck right away. Golden has personally rehabilitated seagulls his hawks have maimed.
The meddling birds, however, learn their lesson quickly.
Imagine, Golden said, you and your relatives had to cross a street together to find your food.
“Every day you lined up, and somebody said ‘Go!’ and you ran across the street, and then a Tyrannosaurus rex ran out and grabbed one of you and bit your tail off and ate you. What happens is the fear of that happening again and again and again — eventually the seagulls just leave.”
Once up to 2,000 birds strong, seagull crowds at Lompoc are now down to a couple hundred or fewer.
“The price they have to pay is too high for them, and they communicate amongst themselves and they just don’t come back,” Golden said.
Safari Depredation has been offering its “bird abatement” services in Lompoc for a decade, and is out during all operating hours from October through March, seagulls’ prime landfill-feeding season.
The rest of the year, they’re away breeding.
Golden, who’s practiced falconry for close to 50 years, raises and trains his birds with his wife, Kim Olson.
It’s been his dream job since a childhood hunting trip with his father in the Mojave Desert, when a red-tailed hawk flew just over his head and the two made eye contact.
“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he recalled.
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.