It’s happened to most beachgoers. You sit on a towel and unwrap your sandwich, prepared to savor a waterfront lunch with your feet in the sand. But then you look up, and you see them—seagulls everywhere, prowling closer and closer to your ham and cheese. If your gut reaction is to shout at them, new research says that you’ve got the right idea.
In a paper published today in the journal Biology Letters, researchers tested different ways of shooing herring gulls away from a closed Tupperware box of chips on the ground (that’s right, no humans were harmed in the making of this study). Their results confirm what many people may have guessed—shouting is a good way to keep them away from your food.
“When trying to scare off a gull that’s trying to steal your food, talking might stop them in their tracks but shouting is more effective at making them fly away,” Neeltje Boogert, a researcher from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter and co-author of the study, said in a university statement.
That’s my food!
The researchers tested three different approaches. When a gull approached the chips, they played either a recording of a male voice shouting, “No, stay away, that’s my food”; a recording of the same voice speaking those same words; or the “neutral” birdsong of a robin. By the end of the study, they tested these methods with 61 gulls from nine seaside towns in Cornwall. They chose to use recordings of five male voices “as most crimes against wildlife are carried out by men,” according to the statement.
The team documented that almost half of the gulls that heard the shouting voice flew away within a minute. 15% of the gulls who heard the speaking voice flew away, and the rest walked away, still perceiving danger. As for the robin song, 70% of the gulls remained near the food for the length of the experiment.
“We found that urban gulls were more vigilant and pecked less at the food container when we played them a male voice, whether it was speaking or shouting,” Boogert explained. “But the difference was that the gulls were more likely to fly away at the shouting and more likely to walk away at the speaking.”
Interestingly, the different reaction had nothing to do with the volume of the male voice, because the recordings of their speaking and shouting were delivered at the same volume. This indicates that gulls are sensitive to differences in human voices’ acoustic properties.
“It seems that gulls pay attention to the way we say things, which we don’t think has been seen before in any wild species, only in those domesticated species that have been bred around humans for generations, such as dogs, pigs and horses,” Boogert explained.
Words, not hands
While you might interpret the results of this study as a weapon in the perpetual defense of our picnics, the researchers’ intention is actually to demonstrate that you don’t need to resort to physical violence. Despite what many people’s gull-induced trauma might suggest, “most gulls aren’t bold enough to steal food from a person, I think they’ve become quite vilified,” said Boogert. “What we don’t want is people injuring them. They are a species of conservation concern, and this experiment shows there are peaceful ways to deter them that don’t involve physical contact.”
As the age-old parenting admonishment goes, use your words instead of your hands. But unlike when you’re arguing with a sibling, you should definitely yell at seagulls.
