Food-snatching seagulls are more likely to leave you alone if you shout at them, researchers say

A woman watches as two seagulls fight over a chip stolen off her lunch plate in Sydney, Australia Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2013. (AP Photo/Rob Griffith, file)

LONDON — Sweet talk won’t get you far if you want to scare off a seagull trying to snatch your food. Try shouting.

Researchers set out to find if a man’s voice was enough to deter bandit gulls from their penchant for purloining 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 at the Cornwall campus.

The researchers placed fries in a Tupperware box in towns across the southwest coast of England and tested how 61 European herring gulls reacted to recordings of a robin’s song, a male voice saying, “No, stay away, that’s my food,” and a voice shouting those words.

Previous research had shown that gulls could be dissuaded from snatching snacks by approaching them or making eye contact with them. They were also averse to shouting — the louder, the faster they fled.

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

The birds flinched at the sound of the human voice and showed signs of vigilance, pecking less on the food and leaving sooner than when exposed to the birdsong, the study found.

They tended to walk away from the speaking voice, but flew away from the shouting, suggesting they differentiated between the acoustic properties of the vocalizations.

“Normally when someone is shouting, 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 being said that was different,” Boogert said. “So it seems that gulls pay attention to the way we say things, which we don’t think has been seen before in any wild species.”

The experiment was designed to show that you don’t need to lash out at the birds, which are a species of conservation concern in the U.K., to frighten them. The voices of males were used, because men commit the most crimes against wildlife.

The researchers said that further studies could determine if there’s a different reaction to female voices.

“It is possible that herring gulls can discriminate between genders and are more scared of one than the other,” the authors wrote.

Brian Melley, The Associated Press