With Flying Ant season in full swing, Mirror reporter Julia Banim visited Brighton, where ‘drunk’ and frenzied seagulls have left locals alarmed with their frantic feasting
It’s that time of year when millions of winged ants take to the skies in a phenomenon that has become known as Flying Ant Day.
Between June and August, the queens fly high to find the strongest males to mate with. The males die straight after before the queens chew their own wings off and find a spot in the ground to start a new colony. While the fun takes place over several weeks, temperatures of over 25C, as seen last Friday, can spark a concentrated surge.
The Mirror visited Brighton, which is said to be one of the UK’s hot spots for flying ant activity. Speaking with the Mirror, local resident Scott Vincent, 40, described horror scenes of discovering a Thai-style fold-out bed in covered in layer upon layer of the flying insects.
“I lifted it up, and the entire thing was like a mattress within itself, like a template of the fold-out bed was just moving with flying ants. I ran inside straight away,” he said. Another time, he was forced to take cover after being surrounded. “I went to meet my friend off the train, and we got swarmed and attacked by them then. We ran to the car.”
Scotty Bell, 31, is a bar manager at The Star and Garter, a cosy historic pub with enviable views overlooking Brighton’s iconic coastline. Despite sweltering temperatures, he says they often have no choice but to baricade themselves in. “Flying ants love to linger by the windows. That means they’re always going to come into the building. We’ve had to close the windows, close the front door, and just deal with very hot temperatures.”
In apocalyptic scenes, he told how an ‘obscene amount’ of ants once descended on him and his dinner guests in nearby Lewes. “It was like a really low, low hum. And one of my friends went out of the gate of the back garden, and you could see the thick smog coming towards the house,” he said.
But it isn’t just the residents who are terrorised – there’s a secondary victim amid the madness. Perpetually hungry seagulls feast on the swarms and become intoxicated by the formic acid the ants release to defend themselves. The result – flocks of ‘drunk’ birds who become walking targets for accidents.
Indeed, walking through the town, excitable flurries of birds dart this way and that. Over on the seafront, the gulls appear to have a wilder look in their eye than usual, scanning the skies and diving about on the busy road that runs along the coast.
Locals say the mayhem really begins when the ants settle on the walls along the long stretch of pebble beach – a dinner bell for gulls who don’t care to queue.
The most commonly seen type is the herring gull, distinguished by their pink legs and white ‘mirrors’ on their wing tips. While these are known to be “smart, intelligent birds”, all sense goes to the wind when they catch a whiff of an ant army in flight.
Jack Thompson, Hove resident and Wilder Communities Officer at the Sussex Wildlife Trust, told the Mirror: “They love taking the opportunity to have a bounty of food in terms of the ants. And they can become very hyper-focused on the feeding of ants.”
“I’m always worried whenever I see the gulls close to the road, because they’ll be beelining for the ants, and trying to pick them off, and not being fully aware of everything that is going on around them.
“I think it is that frenzied behaviour when they are locked into the ants, which means they’re not going being danger-averse at these sorts of times. So it can often lead to collisions with cars and these sorts of things in our urban areas.”
Carmen Appich, who has lived in Hove for more than 20 years, says accidents involving the feathered gluttons increase markedly in flying ant season. Speaking from her colourful beach hut, Carmen, who is in her 60s, told the Mirror: “Seagulls ignore the traffic and walk out in front of cars. And it’s as if they’re drunk on these flying ants.”
Carmen has spotted seagulls ‘gawking about’ around the taxi rank near the town hall, with no apparent concern for the wheels that could crush them in an instant. She added, “You have to be really careful that you don’t run one over, even on a bicycle. Normally, they get out of the way quite quickly, but when there’s flying ants, they’re obviously a bigger delicacy than chips!”
What makes this all the sadder is that the classic herring gull is on the decline, and is currently on the red list due to factors such as nesting habitat loss and insufficient food availability. Another victim is the common swift. Jack remembers one summer a couple of years ago, when ant-obsessed swifts, who usually stay high up in the skies, covered Hove Lawns next to the waterfront, saying, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
According to Scotty, the most perilous place to be is the beach. “That’s when you get both of them. It’s like being attacked. It’s not particularly fun.”
So what is it about Brighton that attracts so much activity? with the abundance of green spaces, from Hove Lawns to East Brighton Park, it makes for a covetable location for queens looking to kickstart a thriving dynasty.
Jack explained: “In places like Brighton, if there are the right conditions, if there is the right amount of green space available for those ants to thrive, then we’re going to see larger amounts of ants on these particular days.
“When it comes to Flying Ant Day, we get these huge aggregations of ants that are coming in all at once, when the conditions are right, so when you’re getting these warm humid days, so once the temperature has reached the right amount.
“When the conditions are right, that’s when we start seeing these new queens coming up, alongside males as well, and they’ll be going through that mating process. So that’s when they have their wings, and they’re able to move across to others from other colonies and then successfully breed and find a new space for these new queens to start their own colonies.”
But while flying ants might be unpleasant, they are a vital part of the eco-system and one that Jack warns, is under threat from climate change.
“Ants are integral to our ecosystems because of their ability to move nutrients across different places and help with those sorts of natural processes,” he said. “So if they’re impacting ants, then it’s going to impact the wider biodiversity as well.”
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