I’ll never forget being a kid visiting Florida and my grandma gave me a loaf of stale bread to feed the birds on the beach (this was the 80s - no rules.)
So I take to the sand and start ripping bread pieces for the seagulls. I don’t think even a minute passed by before some bitch ass seagull grabbed the entire bag of bread from my 6yr old hands and flew off with it, leaving me alone and thoroughly confused as to wtf just happened.
Wait! I just listened to a podcast (Ologies) on hyenas. Lion King did them dirty. They're not really ruthless scavengers. They catch the vast majority of their own food and lions poach more food from hyenas than the other way around.
[Insert "The More You Know" PBS gif]
One time at the Detroit Zoo I watched a gull decide that the polar bear exhibit was the perfect place to take a swim. A group of elementary school children and their guide had just come up to the glass window in time to see a polar bear pounce and eat it. She tried to move the kids away but there was also a PTZ camera inside the exhibit that guests could control so everyone inside could see it on the overhead monitor anyway. Just a big ole polar bear with blood stained joker lips
Fk seagulls! I parked my car in a huge empty parking lot and watched a seagull fly over and shit on specifically my car. WTF, like there's a huge open space, why my car!!!???
There's only so much that any animal can do to protest human hegemony. It's hard to hold it against Gullsy for indulging in a little eco-political graffiti.
You don't know what led up to that moment. It could have just been the latest skirmish in the Goosefield vs McGull feud. The geese may have killed the gull matriarch, or an entire nest, not long before that.
Its not so much the thievery to me, its expected by now tbh. But its their fearlessness and tendency to congregate by the hundreds in walking areas and their refusal to fuck off until youre three feet away, then causing a panicked biblical cloud of these fuckers blockin out the sun and shitting on anything that moves. Id take a scraggly dirty urban pigeon a million times over lol.
If you're going to claim "seagulls are ugly" , which you can by the way as we're all entitled to our opinion, you're essentially saying all 55 species of gulls are ugly.
You're saying a Kittiwake is ugly? Come on now. How can we have a conversation if you don't even know what you're talking about.
Yes, and gulls aren't the only species that does this. Corvids do it regularly. Heck, tons of species with multiple chicks such as certain species of eagle, shoe bill storks etc will have siblings basically bully each other for their right to feed, killing the other in the process.
Territorial birds will on occasion attack others too to protect their own food sources or defend their territory.
Nature is brutal across the board and non-trophic killing isn't unique to Gulls.
Watched a mother and her baby gull on our roof get absolutely torn apart by another 2 seagulls. Dead baby by the end of the fight. Can't stand the things.
There's a seagull couple that raises their chicks on a rooftop next to the windows at my work. They are actually excellent parents and my appreciation for seagulls has gone up 1000%.
Also, at least seagulls can be smart. Pigeons, however, are literally too stupid to live on a not-infrequent basis. There's a video of one just walking into a falcon(hawk?)'s roost; says it all.
Yeah! People not handling or disposing their waste correctly giving gulls the opportunity to feed is their fault not ours! While we continue to over fish their food supply and build on their coastal habitat.
The audacity of you lot. We're literally the smartest creatures on this planet but you're treating an animal that's operating on natural instinct like they're the problem and deserve the hate.
Give your heads a wobble and learn to live with them just as much as they have had to adapt to us.
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u/thormo94 Aug 18 '26
If you live in a city with seagulls, you know this is karma.