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It turns out being “bird-brained” isn’t such a bad thing.
New research out of the UK has found that seagulls pay attention to humans’ snack choices and show a strong preference for sustenance similar to what people are eating nearby.
When given the choice between two different bags of chips, herring gulls at Brighton Beach overwhelmingly pick the same color bag that a human experimenter would be eating several meters away, researchers found.
This is because seagulls are notorious snack thieves – or kleptoparasites, according to researcher Franziska Feist.
“Many people still think that gulls are not very smart, even though kleptoparasitism to us suggested a higher level of cognition, so we wanted to explore this further,” Feist said, according to New Scientist.
Feist and her colleagues at the University of Sussex, UK, analyzed gulls on Brighton Beach for several months in 2021 and 2022.
During their studies, researchers presented blue and green potato chip packets to groups of seagulls while an experimenter sat on the ground about 5 meters away. The experimenter would either sit idly and watch the birds or pull a green or blue package of chips from their bag to eat.
Researchers found that 48 percent of the seagulls approached the chip packages when the experimenter was eating, compared to 19 percent when they weren’t.
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When the gulls approached and began pecking at a packet, they chose the same color as the experimenter’s package 95 percent of the time.
Researchers say this means the gulls are quick social learners with a high level of awareness.
“The evolutionary history of herring gulls wouldn’t have involved humans, since their urbanization is rather recent,” Feist said.
“So the skills we identified, those that allow them to learn from another species through observations, must come from more general purpose intelligence, rather than an innate ability. This is a very exciting notion to me.”
Madeleine Goumas at the University of Exeter, UK, said that while studies like this are helpful, the birds following human food cues could become an issue for the species later down the line.
“Gulls seem to have realised that we are a great information source when it comes to finding food,” she told the outlet.
“However, the kind of processed food humans eat is a relatively new addition to wild animals’ diets and it is unclear whether it is actually beneficial for them, which is a concern when the species is declining.”
