As students cross the blacktop in the G-Wing, whether to enjoy lunch or hurry to class, they are forced to shuffle past the hungry seagulls.
“I’ve noticed them during lunch. They always fly over us and try and steal food from our table,” freshman Kaden Gross said. The birds have been congregating on M-A’s campus for decades, but there has been a notable increase in their number and aggressiveness just this year.
The growing number of birds is, in part, a result of students’ tendencies to leave out food or feed the birds. “Even if they can be aggressive sometimes, [we feed them] mostly just for fun,” sophomore Samantha Fuentes said. The scraps immediately attract birds, and with them, phones at all angles, hoping to catch the birds in a funny video.
With the birds’ growing presence also comes increases in their aggression and poop—both of which have become nuisances for students. “We’re just concerned that our clothes will get dirty from their poop and stuff like that,” freshman Kaden Gross said. “My friend got pooped on by one of the birds, and it was on his clothes for the entire day. ”
According to Dr. William Sydeman, president and chief scientist at the Farallon Institute, which focuses on researching marine environments, this behavior is anything but random. “They will become more and more of a pest, they’ll get more aggressive because they know they can get food there, and gulls are extremely smart,” Sydeman said.
Sydeman tied the birds’ presence to their roosting behaviors. “When they go out to forage, birds will lead one after another, and they actually follow each other. And so that’s why you’re gonna find that the more that you guys feed them, the more gulls there are, so the future is that there’ll be more gulls unless the feeding is stopped,” he said.
Because of the birds’ plasticity, they can adjust to their environment astonishingly quickly. This means that when one bird finds a place to get easy food, they and their companions will rapidly change their habits to turn M-A’s campus into their new home, or at least their informal feeding area.
Another issue is the obvious sanitary concerns. “There’ll be a lot of poop around everywhere. We don’t want people sitting on this stuff,” Gross said. “It’s definitely worth considering the health hazards to the kids with having a bunch of gulls hanging around the lunch area, it’s not what you want.”
According to Sydman, the best way to remove these issues is to stop feeding the seagulls. “They can do different things easily, so they’re adapted to changing their food sources on the scale of days to weeks to months to years, and I don’t think they’d have any problem in shifting,” Sydman said. He explained that even if the population at M-A was 100-200 birds, they would be able to recover fairly quickly.
Ultimately, the solution is straightforward. If students stop the habit that incentivises the birds to come to the campus, lunch can become cleaner and calmer.
