LONDON (AP) \u2014 Sweet talk won\u2019t get you far if you want to scare off a seagull trying to snatch your food. Try shouting. <\/p>\n
Researchers set out to find if a man\u2019s voice was enough to deter bandit gulls from their penchant for purloining food in seaside towns and found it was effective if delivered with more urgency.<\/p>\n
\u201cTalking might stop them in their tracks, but shouting is more effective at making them fly away,\u201d said Neeltje Boogert of the University of Exeter\u2019s Center for Ecology and Conservation at the Cornwall campus.<\/p>\n
The researchers placed fries in a Tupperware box in towns across the southwest coast of England and tested how 61 European herring gulls reacted to recordings of a robin\u2019s song, a male voice saying, \u201cNo, stay away, that\u2019s my food,\u201d and a voice shouting those words. <\/p>\n
Previous research had shown that gulls could be dissuaded from snatching snacks by approaching them or making eye contact with them. They were also averse to shouting \u2014 the louder, the faster they fled. <\/p>\n
But the new study published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Biology Letters aimed to measure the difference between speaking and shouting if both were played at the same volume.<\/p>\n
The birds flinched at the sound of the human voice and showed signs of vigilance, pecking less on the food and leaving sooner than when exposed to the birdsong, the study found. <\/p>\n
They tended to walk away from the speaking voice, but flew away from the shouting, suggesting they differentiated between the acoustic properties of the vocalizations.<\/p>\n
\u201cNormally when someone is shouting, it\u2019s scary because it\u2019s a loud noise, but in this case all the noises were the same volume, and it was just the way the words were being said that was different,\u201d Boogert said. \u201cSo it seems that gulls pay attention to the way we say things, which we don\u2019t think has been seen before in any wild species.\u201d<\/p>\n
The experiment was designed to show that you don\u2019t need to lash out at the birds, which are a species of conservation concern in the U.K., to frighten them. The voices of males were used, because men commit the most crimes against wildlife.<\/p>\n
The researchers said that further studies could determine if there\u2019s a different reaction to female voices.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is possible that herring gulls can discriminate between genders and are more scared of one than the other,\u201d the authors wrote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON (AP) \u2014 Sweet talk won\u2019t get you far if you want to scare off a seagull trying…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287588,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[793,79,1306,201,965],"class_list":{"0":"post-287587","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-general-news","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-trending-news","11":"tag-wildlife","12":"tag-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}