Shoppers along the waterfront already warn customers: If you buy food, try to hide it as much as possible. But they haven't been saved that way. The seagulls, which according to the description Watchman“They’re like turkeys,” flying in to spot their victims, choosing the most appetizing snack, attacking, and the cycle repeats throughout the day.
They are not aggressive – they just want to eat – but they walk in groups, and as soon as they see ice cream (or any food, they are not careful when choosing a meal) in the hands of vacationers, they organize themselves, wait for the right moment and attack. After leaving one or two crying children, they land and devour what they have stolen in a feast where only feathers and wings can be seen in the air.
On Reddit, a Bath resident claims the seagulls are “getting worse every year,” and that in just 10 minutes he saw several people being attacked outside a grocery store. He notes that “they also seem to be targeting dogs.” At the end of the post, he leaves a question: “Is there anything the Bath community can do?”
The truth is, there's not much you can do directly because seagulls are a living creature. Class The protected area, which is declining in numbers despite reports of attacks that seem to be increasingly frequent. The best thing you can do is keep cities clean and stay away from seagulls. These birds are adapted to the environments they live in, so while this diet of ice cream, hamburgers and French fries is not the most natural diet, there is so much food waste in cities that seagulls have become accustomed to this food.
Herring Gull Eating Ice Cream Cone
Ashley Cooper/Getty Images
Strategies to scare away seagulls
In the UK, everything has been tried to control seagull numbers: culling, egg removal, contraception, and Harris’s eagles, Roy Rufino, an ornithologist who has worked for more than two decades at the Nature Conservation Institute, explained to PÚBLICO in 2018. “There is no solution, no way to control it,” he added. Today, in some areas, it is worth reporting attacks to local authorities, and in Liverpool, there are Harris’s eagles that chase away seagulls.
In Portugal, especially in Porto, seagull attacks are also multiplying. The Porto City Council (CMP) noticed the problem in 2008 and since then several studies have been carried out. The aim was to put an action plan into effect this year which envisages that seagull nests will be rendered unviable either by removing them or by using oil that would hinder the embryo's development.
The action plan to combat the seagull population in coastal municipalities has been in place since 2022, but the measures proposed in it have yet to be implemented. In February, AMP’s executive secretary, Ariana Pinho, went to the Porto City Council to announce that she was “in the process of launching a procedure to implement the measures provided for in the plan” to control the seagulls. She added that the next step would be taken “in the coming months,” but it did not end up happening. The delay in implementing the plan makes some deterrent measures ineffective, such as those that included making nests unviable, since the eggs of the yellow-legged gull, the most abundant species in the area, hatch between May and June.
