The best way to stop seagulls from stealing your food revealed
Ascientist claims to have figured out how best to stop seagulls nicking your chips – by making eye contact with them before they attack.
Staring and pointing at the ‘klepto’ winged raiders can scare them off from trying to pinch your food on a beach day out, a professor said.
Expert in animal behaviour Paul Graham added that to avoid dive bombs from seagulls tourists should stand against a wall for protection...
He described gulls as a ‘kleptoparasitic’ species, they prefer stealing food from other species instead of doing the ‘hard work’ of finding it themselves.
That's a useful word...
12 comments:
That reminds me of something I read by a historian of the Dark Ages. The Germans, he said, didn't like the hard work of clearing woodlands, so much preferred stealing already cleared land from the people whose ancestors had cleared it.
dearieme - I wouldn't like the hard work of clearing woodlands either. I've often wondered how they dealt with the stumps. Slow, hard work I imagine.
Not when a dozen come at you at the same time.
They kept the stumps for worship.
One area where I used to walk at work had seagulls nesting nearby on a flat roof. They were particularly aggressive after laying eggs and would dive bomb passersby. There was an 8ft tall fence near and I took delight in seeing their frustration when someone was so close to the fence, they could not attack without colliding with the barbed wire on the top.
The French, or rather, some French, have a way of getting revenge on the seagulls who steal their food. They know that seagulls can't belch or burp, so they put baking soda, or liver salts, in food and place it where the gulls will steal it. Once the soda is in their stomachs, it swells up, and the gulls explode. I'm told this is very popular with French fisherman. Not certain if gulls are a protected species in France, as they are in the UK, but it certainly is a horrible pasttime.
Penseivat
The late landscape historian Oliver Rackham opined that the clearing of British broadleaf woodland was the greatest feat of our ancestors yet nobody knows how it was done.
Any fool can chop down a tree. Then what? What, as you say, are you to do about the stumps? What about the trunk and the bigger branches? Unlike twigs and small branches the big branches and trunks won't burn unless you chop them up.
What are you to live on while you are devoting your time and calories to chopping down and chopping up?
He's an excellent writer: I recommend him.
dearieme - thanks, I'll bookmark him because I've come across historians who write that woodland was cleared much earlier than we might suppose, but nobody says how it was done, just that it was done. I've watched one or two videos about disposing of tree stumps by burning, but it seems slow, laborious and incomplete.
James - two would be too many.
decnine - but how did they clear lots of them?
John - I've encountered Terns protecting their nests by dive bombing people. Known for it apparently.
Penseivat - a horrible thing to do, but what a good idea.
He's got another good question. You know the old system of agriculture where the arable was divided into strips and each commoner would have one, or two, or however many strips to plough and reap. Similarly each would have one or more strips of meadow off which to take hay.
Rackham points out that no one knows how these strips were identified. If, say, commoner A hires a chap to plough his three strips, how is the ploughman to find them? If you say "he'd just ask his employer" that won't do because nobody knows how the commoner identified his strips. Given that it was usual for the strips to be swapped around from year to year this is not a trivial problem.
There are huge amounts we don't know about how our ancestors made their livings. For instance I have never seen a persuasive account for why this common field system of agriculture was introduced in the first place, or by whom.
Only about half of England used it; the rest consisted of separate farms of the sort we are used to now. Why?
Exploding seagulls. Those of a certain age will know of calcium carbide. Used in old hand lamps and carriage lamps. Dripping water onto the 'carbide produces acetylene, the gas used in welding. Stuffing some 'carbide into a lump of dry bread and tossing to a seagull is interesting. Unlike all other birds seagulls do not smell, taste or feel the texture of their food before sending it straight to the gut.
Less interesting is tying two morsels together with a few feet of string and having two seagulls catch them. Eventually one of them regurgitates and the other has to figure out how to get the food at the end of the string streaming from its beak.
Food, string, balloon is also fun.
Such larks.
dearieme - I don't have a good answer to either question, how the strips were identified or why that kind of farming arose. Its seems so complicated and open to dispute that the advantage must have been obvious, but I don't see it.
Doonhamer - on bonfire night with sparks floating high up into the air, the calcium carbide idea could lead to seagull fireworks.
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