Stare at a gull that is coming for your food and it takes about 21 seconds longer to reach it. That is a measured number from a real experiment, not a saying.
It is also not the same claim as the gull knowing who you are, and the difference is the whole article.
The short answer
- What has been tested
- Whether gulls read what a human is doing. Two experiments, both in Cornish towns, both on herring gulls going about their day
- What they found
- Gulls hesitate when a person is looking at them, and they prefer food they have watched a person handle
- What has not been tested
- Whether a gull can tell one person from another. No study we found used the masks, the matched pairs or the swaps that the crow, pigeon and mockingbird work used
- The honest summary
- Gulls are reading human behavior closely. That is not the same as recognizing a human
The staring experiment
Madeleine Goumas, Isabella Burns, Laura Kelley and Neeltje Boogert of the University of Exeter put a bag of chips on the ground in coastal towns in Cornwall and measured how long gulls took to reach it.
- The two conditions
- The researcher either looked directly at the gull or looked away. Everything else was held the same
- The measure
- Time taken to approach the food
- The result
- Gulls took on average 21 seconds longer to approach when a person was watching them
- Where and when
- Cornwall, published in 2019 in a Royal Society journal by a University of Exeter team
The number almost nobody repeats
Seventy four gulls were tested. Only 27 of them approached the food at all. Only 19 completed both the looking at and the looking away conditions, and those 19 are what the result is built on.
Read that the other way round and it says something the seaside stereotype does not. Most gulls wanted nothing to do with a person standing near food. The bold ones are memorable, which is exactly why people think all of them behave that way.
Nineteen birds is also a small number, and we would rather tell you that than let a clean headline stand on its own. It is enough to establish that the effect is there. It is not enough to tell you how large it is in your town, on your seafront, with the gulls that live there.
The second experiment, with the flapjacks
The next year the same group ran a different test in Falmouth and Penzance. A gull was shown two identical wrapped flapjacks. Before both were set down, the researcher picked up one of them and held it for 20 seconds while the bird watched.
- How many birds
- 38 herring gulls were offered the choice
- How many committed
- 24 of them pecked at one of the two items
- The split
- 19 of those 24, which is 79 percent, went for the one that had been handled
- The control
- The same test was run with sponges cut to the size of a flapjack. Preference for the handled sponge did not exceed chance
The sponge is the experiment
Without the control you could explain the flapjack result three or four different ways. Maybe gulls are drawn to anything a person touched. Maybe the handling left the wrapper crumpled and more visible. Maybe they simply follow movement.
Running the same procedure with a sponge kills all of those at once. The birds stopped caring when the handled object was not food. What they were tracking was not the human and not the touching. It was the pairing of a human with something edible.
The researchers put the conclusion carefully: gulls "are more likely to approach food that they have seen people drop or put down, so they may associate areas where people are eating with an easy meal."
Why this is not the same as recognition
Every other article in this series turns on a control that isolates the individual person.
- Crows
- The same rubber mask worn by different people, so the wearer cannot be the explanation. In the crow article
- Pigeons
- Two matched researchers who swap lab coats, so the clothing cannot be the explanation. In the pigeon article
- Mockingbirds
- The same nest and the same approach on five days, with only the person changed on the last one. In the mockingbird article
- Gulls
- Neither gull experiment varied who the person was. The person was a constant, and what changed was where they looked or what they had touched
So the gull work answers a different and arguably more practical question. Not "does it know me" but "is it watching me," and the answer to that one is yes, closely enough to time in seconds.
What the bird is reading, and what people think it is reading
Put the two experiments side by side and a pattern falls out. Both of them are about the gull extracting information from a person. Neither is about the person as a person.
- What people assume
- The gull has decided something about you. It has picked you out, it remembers you, it is targeting you
- What the gaze study shows
- The gull is tracking where your eyes are pointed right now. Change that and the behavior changes within seconds
- What the handling study shows
- The gull is tracking what you have touched, but only when the thing you touched was food
- What follows from that
- You cannot make a gull like you, and it probably has no view about you at all. What you can change is what it reads off you in the next few seconds
That is a smaller claim than the one on the postcards, and it is more useful. A bird that has an opinion about you is nothing you can act on. A bird that is watching your eyes and your hands is something you can act on immediately.
Is that even the same gull you have
Two things to flag before anyone carries this straight into a North American garden.
The experiments were run on herring gulls in the United Kingdom. The Cornell Lab lists the bird on this side of the Atlantic as the American Herring Gull, so the transfer is an assumption rather than a finding.
The range is the second thing. Cornell describes birds that breed near northern lakes and winter along the coasts, and that scavenge at "landfills, newly plowed fields, picnic grounds, and fish-processing plants" and roost on "agricultural and athletic fields, beaches, parking lots, airport runways, and garbage dumps." That is a bird of coasts, lakes and human infrastructure rather than an inland suburban yard.
What to do with this if you live near gulls
This section is our judgment applied to the sources above, and we are marking it as such.
- The water is not the problem, the food is. Nothing in either study involved drinking water. Both turned on food and on a person near food. A basin on its own is not the thing that brings a gull into a garden.
- Do not hand feed and then complain. The second experiment is a direct demonstration that gulls learn to associate people with easy food. That association is built by somebody, and it is built quickly.
- Looking at them works, briefly. Twenty one seconds is a real effect and a small one. It buys you the time to pick your lunch up. It is not a deterrent strategy.
- Clean on the same schedule, not a harder one. Larger birds foul a basin faster, which changes how often rather than how. The method is in the guide to cleaning a concrete bird bath.
What we could not check
- What we read
- The 2019 release as carried by ScienceDaily, the 2020 release both from the University of Exeter and as carried by ScienceDaily, and the Cornell Lab species account
- What we did not read
- Either paper itself. Every number above comes from the releases, and we have said so rather than presenting it as the paper
- What nobody has published, as far as we can tell
- A gull study that varies the identity of the person while holding everything else fixed. Until that exists, "seagulls recognize humans" is a claim with no experiment under it
Frequently asked questions
Does staring actually stop them
It slows them. Twenty one seconds on average, in birds that were willing to approach at all. More than half of the gulls in the study never came close enough to be tested.
Do they remember the person who fed them last week
Unknown. Neither experiment tested individual identity, and we are not going to borrow the crow result and attach it to a gull. The crow numbers are in that article and they belong to that bird.
Why do they go for food a person touched
The researchers suggest the association is between people and easy meals rather than between people and any object. The sponge condition supports that reading.
Will a bird bath attract gulls
Nothing we read speaks to it. Cornell describes gulls at beaches, landfills, playing fields and parking lots, which are open places with food, not gardens with a basin.
Are gulls smarter than crows
The studies do not line up well enough to answer that. Different tasks, different controls, different questions. We have written up ravens and hummingbirds the same way, and none of the three is a ranking.
References
- Reference: Staring at seagulls could save your chips | ScienceDaily, carrying the University of Exeter release on the gaze study, 2019
- Reference: Seagulls favor food humans have handled | ScienceDaily, carrying the University of Exeter release on the food handling study, 2020
- Reference: University of Exeter news release on the food handling study | University of Exeter news archive, February 2020
- Reference: American Herring Gull Life History | The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds