This has happened to most people who go to the beach. You sit on a towel and open your sandwich, ready to enjoy a seaside lunch with your feet in the sand. But then you look up, and you see them – seagulls everywhere, getting closer and closer to your ham and cheese. If your gut reaction is to yell at them, new research shows you have the right idea.
In a paper published today in the journal Biology Letters, researchers tested different methods of scaring away herring gulls from closed Tupperware boxes of chips on the ground (that’s right, no humans were harmed during this study). Their results confirm what many people might have guessed – yelling is a good way to keep them away from their food.
“When trying to scare away a buzzard that is trying to steal your food, talking may get it to stop, but yelling is more effective at getting it to fly away,” Neeltje Boogert, a researcher at the Center for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter and co-author of the study, said in a statement from the university.
That’s my food!
The researchers tested three different methods. When a seagull approached the chips, they either played a recording of a male voice yelling, “No, stay away, it’s my food”; A recording of the same voice speaking the same words; Or the “neutral” bird singing of the robin. By the end of the study, they tested these methods with 61 Gauls from nine seaside towns in Cornwall. According to the statement, they chose to use recordings of the five men’s voices “because most crimes against wildlife are committed by men.”
The team documented that about half of the gulls that heard the shouting fled within a minute. 15% of the Gauls who heard the speaking voice flew away, and the rest still, sensing danger, moved away. As for the robin song, 70% of the gulls remained near the food for the duration of the experiment.
“We found that urban gulls were more alert and pecked less at food containers when we exposed them to a male’s voice, whether speaking or shouting,” Boogert said. “But the difference was that the seagulls were more likely to fly away when shouted and more likely to move away when spoken.”
Interestingly, the different responses had nothing to do with the volume of the men’s voices, as the recordings of them speaking and shouting were given at the same volume. This indicates that gulls are sensitive to differences in the acoustic properties of the human voice.
“The Gauls seem to pay attention to the way we say things, which we don’t think has been seen before in any wild species, only in domesticated species that have been raised around humans for generations, such as dogs, pigs and horses,” Boogert explained.
words, not hands
Although you might interpret the results of this study as a weapon in the continued defense of our picnics, the researchers’ intent is actually to demonstrate that you don’t need to resort to physical violence. Despite the gull-induced trauma of many people, Boogert said, “Most gulls are not daring enough to steal food from a person, I think they have become quite infamous.” “We don’t want people to injure them. They are a species of conservation concern, and this experiment shows there are peaceful ways to stop them that don’t involve physical contact.”
As the age-old parenting advice goes, use your words instead of your hands. But unlike when you’re arguing with a sibling, you should definitely yell at the seagull.