Pirates Of The Seaside Town

Anyone who lives on the UK's coast will be well aware of the seagulls love of a free meal, or even a stolen meal .... 

Seagulls Stealing Food Is A Common Problem

..... its one of the perils in any coastal towns and villages.

They are particularly fond of locations such as café's with outdoor seating, Greggs hot pasty shops and and fish'n'chip shops. These are all usually busy if there are tourists around, and offer ample opportunities for bin raids, dropped food (sometimes caused by a dive bomb attack - sometimes on small children), or even outright theft from plates or tourists hands.

It appears that over the decades, and a number of seagull generations, they develop favourite hunting grounds, that are passed from gull to chick. This is partly as gulls often use the same nest site year on year, and these of course are near food supplies to feed the chicks. Obviously that food source once would have been fish from the sea, but a combination of over fishing in UK waters and the rise of fast food shops on the seafronts, have made the latter the main food source for many brooding gull families.

Now, researchers from the British Trust for Ornithology have confirmed the gulls long term memory preferences for food sources. They did this by tagging Herring Gulls in Scotland, and tracking their movements. They found that for many of this particular group of gulls, there was a favoured fast food location.

Gulls Like A Visit To The Wee Hurrie

This was the Wee Hurrie chippy in Troon, on Scotland's West coast.  This fish and chip source was visited regularly by some seagulls from as far away as the Inner Hebrides ....  a flying distance of more than 100 miles (as the crow, err gull, flies). Whilst the test sample of gulls wasn't huge, it was enough to show that gulls have memory of reliable or favoured food locations, and will travel long distances to visit them.