Research on herring gulls at Brighton beach found they can work out which scraps are worth snaffling by watching what humans are eating. When given a choice of crisp packets to peck at, gulls overwhelmingly went for the same colour bag as that from which an experimenter was munching while filming the encounters from several metres away.
"We've shown that adult gulls are able to pay attention to the behaviour of humans and apply that to their own foraging choices," said Franziska Feist, a biologist and first author on the study at the University of Sussex.
This story is from the May 24, 2023 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the May 24, 2023 edition of The Guardian.
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