By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

AUBURN – Water district statistics show that harassment efforts – along with a federally approved culling of Lake Auburn’s gulls – are working to reduce fecal coliform bacteria levels.

Because the birds land at Lewiston-Auburn’s public water supply during their fall migration, however, they’ll likely be back in November.

Last year’s Lake Auburn gull cull is expected to cost about $17,000 once all expenses are added up. That’s a cost that will likely be repeated for years to come, given the annual flight.

For whatever reason, the gulls began arriving at the lake – the public water supply for this city and Lewiston – in 2003. By 2004, their presence, sometimes in the thousands, resulted in wicked spikes in the district’s fecal coliform test results.

On Nov. 30, 2004, the count reached 178 in a scientific measurement. Federal standards hold that fecal coliform in public drinking water can’t exceed a count of 20.

This past November and December, the counts never came close to the 178; 53 on Nov. 23 was the max.

That’s also the day when professional gunners holding special federal licenses and contracted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture shot a ring-billed gull. A day earlier, the second for the hired guns, 19 birds were killed. Fifty-eight gulls died on the first day of the effort. In all, about 200 birds were killed.

Over the next few weeks, the birds began to get the idea. With the USDA shooters on the lake, gulls began setting down elsewhere.

“We started getting calls from people on North River Road and near Taylor Pond,” said Norm Lamie, superintendent of Auburn’s water district. “People wanted to know why we were chasing the gulls off Lake Auburn and sending them their way.”

The calls told him and his Lewiston counterpart, Dave Jones, that the shooters and other harassment actions at the lake were working.

As far as the reason for wanting the gulls off the lake, it’s pretty simple. The defecating gulls were fouling Lake Auburn’s waters. If the coliform counts couldn’t be kept in check, federal agencies would eventually step in and order the water district to build a filtration system.

That system “would cost $40 million in today’s dollars,” said Lamie. It’s his job to make certain the city’s drinking water is drinkable.

And it is, he adds, even on days when the fecal coliform count soared. That’s because the water gets chlorinated and filtered before it arrives at household taps.

“They don’t know why” the gulls have altered their migratory route, Lamie said of the USDA experts brought in to help with the problem.

That migration takes the ring-billed gulls from summer breeding grounds in Canada to wintering waters in the Atlantic hundreds of miles south of here.

Lamie and Jones said efforts in November and December to get the gulls to land on waters other than Lake Auburn were largely successful.

“I was the biggest skeptic,” said Jones of early indications that the birds were causing coliform counts to increase. Today, though, he says he’s convinced, and he’s also convinced that the USDA help is the way to go.

Lamie said district workers performed hundreds of sample tests over the year that ruled out other sources of fecal coliform then pinpointed an avian source. Because coliform didn’t spike at other times when other birds were on the lake, they were able to determine that the migrating gulls were causing the coliform problem.

Unless nature intervenes and prompts the gulls to revert to previous migration routes, Jones and Lamie said they expect the birds to return again next fall.

And, they said, the USDA gunners will probably return as well, to renew their efforts to get the birds to go elsewhere.

At least the cost, expected to run between $15,000 and $18,000 annually, is a far cry from the $40 million a special filtration system would cost, Lamie pointed out.

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