The lesser black-backed gull and the herring gull are protected species in the EU. There are 6, 500 breeding pairs in the whole of Flanders, according to Eric Stienen, an expert in colony birds at the Flemish Institute for Nature and Forests.
Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, returned to Wharton for a chat with his old finance professor, Richard Herring and the talk makes provocative reading which might send you to Amazon for more.