Professor Paul Graham

They're very good at observing each other.

And also one of the fun things that we see in urban gulls is they're actually able to learn from humans, which is quite rare for animals to be able to read the body language and behavior of other species.

You just said they learn from human behavior?

In what way?

Some of the research that we've done has shown that they're able to pay attention to the specific details of what humans were eating.

So what we did is we had student volunteers sitting on a beach eating from packets of crisps.

And so these packets might be green or blue depending on the flavor.

And then in front of the student, we would have other packets of crisps of those colours and some other colours.

But basically, what we observed in the gulls is that they would peck on the packets of crisps that were the same colour as the student demonstrator had been eating.

And so that showed us that they were paying attention to the details of what humans were actually eating at that point.

And then they were using that information, in this case, the colour of the crisp packets,

to decide where they should go and try and forage to get food.

So I can trick them into eating the crisps I like the least, like prawn cocktail?

Yeah, you could.

I mean, it'd be a very laborious way to get rid of your prawn cocktail crisp, but you could certainly, it would work, yeah.

The ones that have managed to move, the impact isn't too great.

So a subset of gull species, we think the ones that were ancestrally cliff nesting.

So if you were very good on cliffs, cities came along and provided really good nesting opportunities that turned out to be safer because things like foxes aren't going to steal your eggs on top of a tall building and they're also warmer.

And so those species that cliff-nested could move into cities really easily and their populations have stayed reasonably stable.

But the ones that couldn't move because they didn't cliff-nest