It stole your chips. It makes noise beside the bins. It has moved onto your roof and disturbed the entire street.

But the gull — please don't call it a seagull, that word lumps fifty distinct species into one lazy label — is one of Britain's most underrated intelligent animals.

Research has shown that herring gulls know when you are watching them and change their behaviour accordingly. Another study showed they observe what food a person picks up and eats, then preferentially approach that same item. When an experimenter ate crisps from a packet, gulls approached the crisp packets 49% of the time — compared to just 19% when the experimenter sat quietly doing nothing. The gull was reading human behaviour to decide what was worth eating.

Then there is the rain dance.

Herring gulls stamp rhythmically on grass, mimicking the vibrations of rainfall. Earthworms come to the surface. The gulls eat them. This is a learned behaviour, passed from older birds to younger ones, documented by Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, who spent decades studying herring gull behaviour.

Herring gulls also use bread as bait to lure fish — placing it on the water surface, waiting, then taking the fish rather than the bread. Tool and bait use in a wild bird, the same class of behaviour as crows and chimpanzees.

And yet this remarkable animal has declined by 50% and is red-listed. The herring gulls nesting on urban rooftops are not invading us. They are refugees, displaced from coastal habitats, using their considerable intelligence to survive in a landscape they didn't evolve for.

In this episode of BIRDZNERDZ we also look at the black-headed gull and the common gull, and how to tell all three apart at a glance.

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