It’s happened to most beachgoers. You sit on a towel and unwrap your sandwich, prepared to savor a waterfront lunch with your feet in the sand. But then you look up, and you see them—seagulls everywhere, prowling closer and closer to your ham and cheese. If your gut reaction is to shout at them, new research says that you’ve got the right idea.

In a paper published today in the journal Biology Letters, researchers tested different ways of shooing herring gulls away from a closed Tupperware box of chips on the ground (that’s right, no humans were harmed in the making of this study). Their results confirm what many people may have guessed—shouting is a good way to keep them away from your food.

“When trying to scare off a gull that’s trying to steal your food, talking might stop them in

See Full Page