Scientists Can’t Stop Watching Seagulls Steal Your Food

BY NATASHA DANGOOR

Birds’ complex and evolving eating habits are a source of fascination and bewilderment

A peaceful lunch on the British coast often comes with a crucial caveat: Mind the gulls!

These seaside snack thieves reign as undisputed champions of opportunistic dining. As Lorna Forbes went to take a bite out of her steak bake in Swansea, a seagull swooped in and snatched it from her hands. “I didn’t even get a bite,” the 38-year-old healthcare assistant said.

Gulls’ cast-iron stomachs are capable of processing almost anything that fits within their beaks: burgers, bread, ice cream and even the regurgitated remnants of Saturday night’s excesses. The gulls’ philosophy? Food is food. And unlike us delicate humans, gulls don’t get sick. “Who do you think clears up after Glastonbury?” Peter Rock, a Bristol--based expert in urban gulls, said of the music festival.

Some scientists are fasci-

nated, and slightly bewildered, by gulls’ complex and evolving eating habits, which in some cases means swapping marine food for a Big Mac.

Alice Risely, an animal ecologist at the University of Salford, set up a site called “Gulls Eating Stuff” where people upload photos of gulls devouring the extraordinary. She hopes to use the data to research ways to halt the decline in gull populations.

The site has become a trove of amusing shots of gulls tucking into a kid’s burger in Cornwall, demolishing a fresh bag of churros in Barcelona and feasting on a giant Pacific octopus in Canada.

One recent photo shows a gull eating a rat at the Sistine Chapel during the Papal Conclave. “Their last supper before the white smoke,” the photographer wrote. Another taken in Liverpool shows a gull relishing a juicy chunk of raw meat that rivals the size of the bird itself.

Gulls put a formidable intellect into the search for food. Experts have found that they adapt their foraging strategies based on observed human behavior, some even learning to pluck apples from trees.

“If you put something to your mouth, that’s a cue to them that it’s food,” said Risely.

Rock’s studies of gulls have shown how they learn to follow human routines and temporal patterns.

They know not to hang around schools on the weekend. Gulls also know the routes of garbage trucks and which days of the week they will be in certain places, Rock said, so they perch on rooftops and wait for inevitable spillage.

Seagull populations are declining in the wild due to overfishing and other habitat changes, but they are growing in urban areas as the birds increasingly swap their less available marine prey for human scraps.

The quality of what gulls eat in towns is far from that of their traditional diet and means they produce fewer, smaller eggs, says Edward Kroc, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

But sharing our Big Mac diet with gulls isn’t necessarily all bad. Junk food—especially meat—has a lot of protein that can boost chick survival, meaning more young gulls survive to adulthood, said Risely. Wild fish are also full of parasites so eating junk food can help gulls avoid infection.

Sharing space is another matter. Gulls, notoriously noisy, are considered by many to be the ornithological equivalent of football hooligans.

Each summer, British tabloid papers wage war on the birds. The Daily Star has warned of “psycho” seagulls “terrorising” British towns. The Daily Mail offered advice to its readers on how to avoid food being snatched by the “feathered thugs menacing Britain’s beaches.”

In response, coastal towns around the U.K. are finding creative ways to deter gulls.

Seaside restaurants have been sticking googly eyes on takeout boxes to scare gulls away.

Some towns use audio of people shouting to deter gulls. In 2023, Blackpool Zoo upped the ante by hiring someone to dress up as a raptor and run around to scare off the gulls. “Not sure if the gulls were convinced though,” said Risely.

The fight is happening outside Britain, too. Hawks were deployed in Cannes during this year’s film festival to prevent gulls dive bombing celebrities. In Venice, hotels have been known to hand out water guns for guests to fend off the birds.

St. Ives in Cornwall, which Rock dubs the “world capital of food snatching,” took a more human-targeted approach. The Business Improvement District launched a campaign to pack takeouts in paper printed with humorous and informative messages about gulls. This “Daily Gull” newspaper-style wrapping featured “Tips from the experts to help you protect your pasty” and quizzes on gull species.

One tip: Stare at the gulls. Researchers at the University of Exeter did an experiment which showed that gulls took 21 seconds longer to approach a bag of fries when a human was watching them, compared with when the human looked away.

“It’s like shoplifting,” said Boogert. “You wouldn’t look at a shopkeeper whilst stealing from them!”