Seagulls more likely to leave you alone if you shout at them, researchers say

LONDON — Sweet words won’t get you far if you want to scare away a seagull that’s trying to snatch your food. Try shouting.

Researchers investigated whether a man’s voice was enough to deter bandit gulls from their penchant for stealing food in seaside towns and found it was effective if delivered with more urgency.

“Talking might stop them in their tracks, but shouting is more effective at making them fly away,” said Neeltje Boogert of the University of Exeter’s Center for Ecology and Conservation on the Cornwall campus.

Researchers placed chips in a Tupperware box in towns on the southwest coast of England and tested the response of 61 herring gulls to recordings of a robin’s song, a male voice saying, “No, stay away, it’s my food,” and a voice shouting the words.

Previous research had shown that gulls could be deterred from grabbing snacks by approaching them or making eye contact with them. They were also reluctant to scream: the louder they screamed, the faster they ran away.

But the new study published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Biology Letters aimed to measure the difference between talking and shouting if both were played at the same volume.

The birds twitched at the sound of human voices and showed signs of alertness, pecking at food less and leaving earlier than when exposed to bird song, the study found.

They tended to move away from speaking but moved away from shouting, suggesting that they were differentiating between the acoustic properties of vocalizations.

“Normally when someone screams it’s scary because it’s a loud noise, but in this case all the noises were the same volume, and it was just the way the words were spoken that was different,” Boogert said. “So it seems that gulls are paying attention to how we say things, which we think has never been observed before in any wildlife species.”

The experiment was designed to show that there is no need to attack birds, which are a species of conservation concern in the UK, to scare them away. Men’s voices were used because they commit the most crimes against wildlife.

The researchers said further studies could determine whether there is a different response to female voices.

“It is possible that herring gulls are able to distinguish between sexes and are more afraid of one than the other,” the authors write.