Urban gulls target school break times for food, says report

Super-smart gulls flock to school playgrounds shortly before break times in order to hoover up the scraps, a study has shown. The birds also target rubbish dumps, but mainly on weekdays when fresh waste is being delivered.

Having a snack snatched from your hand by a greedy gull is already a common, if unwelcome, occurrence. But the latest research shows the birds are even smarter than thought: they know where and when their meals are being served.

The research was conducted in Bristol but related behaviour has been reported from Spain to Japan. The scientists think that the gulls’ ability to adapt to a human timetable is one reason populations of gulls have soared in cities in the last 40 years.

In Bristol, the researchers followed herring gulls and lesser black-backed gulls that nest on roofs near the city centre. A dozen had small GPS backpacks fitted in order to track their movements and the scientists also observed their behaviour at their favourite feeding spots in the summer of 2018.

“They are super-smart,” said Anouk Spelt, at the University of Bristol. “At the school there were not many gulls around until break time. Then you saw them sitting on the rooftops. The moment the bell went off, they all flew up and started looking for leftovers.”

She said she was not too surprised at the gulls’ ability to learn when food was available as they had heard stories, including birds regularly knocking on windows at 6pm looking for dinner leftovers. “We’d heard all these anecdotes but now we can show it’s definitely true,” Spelt said.

The research is the most in-depth analysis of how urban gulls find food. Another recent study in Spain showed yellow-legged gulls can time their visits to rubbish dumps. Earlier work in Japan showed gulls visited fish processing plants and markets at the best times.

Related: Gulls! Gulls! Gulls! How the seaside birds took over urban Britain

The analysis, published in the journal Ibis, showed the average number of gulls present at the school was three times higher when the children were outside eating their snacks or packed lunches at morning break or lunchtime. The scientists spent a month observing a school, a waste site and a park. The GPS data showed the gulls visited 25 schools, with their visits always most common at break times.

At the rubbish site, new waste was only unloaded during working hours on weekdays and this was when the most gulls flew in. “The predictable timing of food at these sites appears to have resulted in the birds adopting a sit‐and‐wait approach, instead of actively searching for food,” said the researchers. “This may allow them to minimise the time and energy foraging.”

The gulls’ visits to the park were usually in the early morning and did not coincide with human activity. Instead, the researchers saw them searching for worms and insects, which are present in higher numbers during these early hours.

“Most people don’t really like gulls – they are aggressive,” said Spelt. “So we wanted to show why these gulls are in cities and what moves them to be around humans.”

Cities offer safer rooftop nesting sites, warmer temperatures and more readily available food. “So there are many different reasons, but we now think that [the ability to adapt to human timetables] is one of them,” she said. Spelt hopes research like this will help councils better understand gull behaviour and manage potential nuisances.

For the problem of food being snatched out of people’s hands, other researchers reported a solution last year. Extensive tests in Cornish towns showed the bold birds back off from your snacks if you stare them out.