Drivers on part of West 12th St. in Erie have unexpected obstacles in the road - dead seagulls.

Natalie Reugare is one of those drivers. She was driving on West 12th St. near Weschler Ave. this week.

That’s when she saw drivers stop. They were trying to let one of the birds get across the road.

“As soon as I went, the car next to me in the other lane just ran over the bird that everybody else was avoiding,” she said.

Dozens of seagulls have been nesting on the roofs of buildings for months.

“They’re young and they’re nesting right above on these older buildings and they’re coming down because they can’t stand the heat,” she said. 

The executive director of the Erie Bird Observatory said some of the nesting birds have tried to fly off the roof. Some of them will get hurt when they land. Others will get hit and killed by cars on the road. 

“With more development happening, more humans…encroaching on natural gull nesting habitats, they’re looking for different places where they can safely nest and raise their chicks,” Holley Short said. 

She thinks the seagulls started nesting in early May.

“Once the chicks hatched, that’s when we started seeing them coming down to the ground,” she said. 

Several groups are working together to see what can be done, “whether it’s putting up fencing to stop them from going [onto] the road or putting up or implementing shade structures on the roof so that they don’t feel the need to come to the ground,” she said. 

They want more people to help and for drivers to slow down if they see a bird.

“Try to give it space to get out of the way, enough time to get out of the way,” she said. 

Reugare also wants people to be careful until there is a solution. 

“I just hope that in the future, hopefully next year, in the years after, that there is a solution or some sort of way to tackle this problem,” she said.

Short said anyone who sees an injured bird should contact Tamarack Wildlife Center for information about what to do.