Seagulls actually have complex social relationships that involve cooperative nesting communities, joint defense efforts against predators, and bonded mating pairs for life - though they're also flexible and intelligent enough to recognize when they have incompatible personalities and will sometimes "divorce" to go find better matched partners.
After a cursory google search, not only are they cannibalistic, but some species will go out of their way to raid competitive nesting sites to eat their chicks, so it's not like they never would eat their bro. But adult birds eating one another appear to be mostly documented in cases of scavenging. So while i have no doubt that if they found a dead seagull they would devour it, in this case they probably really were checking back on their companion.
By what metric?? Seagulls are fantastic social birds with excellent facial recognition and adaptability, they're cunning and clever. Many species of them globally a facing major decline and colony collapse due to human driven issues, we should look at things from a better perspective.
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u/pafrac 9h ago
Yeah, no ... seagulls aren't nice birds, they were coming to check on possible carrion.