What motivates seagulls to fly away from the flock?

September 13, 2009 4:12 PM

So, I'm sitting on the beach and a large flock of seagulls more or less simultaneously settle on the sand together, all facing the same direction. Intermittantly, individual birds will take off from the group and fly away. What is the motivation and even better, the decision process, for these rebel birds to depart from the flock at that particular moment?
posted by marcurios to Pets & Animals (10 answers total)

I don't have any experience with birds, but maybe they spotted food and wanted to get to it before the rest of the seagulls?
posted by kylej at 4:28 PM on September 13, 2009

Not rebels, scouts?
posted by orthogonality at 4:36 PM on September 13, 2009

I do have experience with birds (parrots). Birds are anomalous. They tend towards flock mentality while having distinctly individual personalities. Perhaps the wayfarers are more inquisitive than their flock mates.
posted by torquemaniac at 4:38 PM on September 13, 2009 [4 favorites]

And on review per orthogonality - it's possible the "rebels" are sentry birds.
posted by torquemaniac at 4:43 PM on September 13, 2009

I've always thought it obvious that the rebel bird(s) disliked the most recently landed bird and left for personal reasons.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 4:47 PM on September 13, 2009 [9 favorites]

Most of the time, it's all about food in a gull's world. Not territory, not sex, not migration. Food. So, I favor the scout theory. I've been 200 miles off-shore on a pelagic bird trip without a single thing in sight and had the boat crew spread chum on the water to lure birds in. Within minutes, we can have hundreds of gulls and other open water birds emerge from nowhere. How do they know there's food on the water? I'm convinced it's scouts with great eyesight and keen senses of smell.
posted by birdwatcher at 6:08 PM on September 13, 2009

Yeah, I would guess that the decision process for a gull of whether to go out searching, or whether to wait for someone else to do it, depends in large part on how hungry it is. Easier to follow someone else to food, but the one who did the searching gets the advantage of being there first.
posted by sfenders at 6:22 PM on September 13, 2009

Response by poster: ..."I've always thought it obvious that the rebel bird(s) disliked the most recently landed bird and left for personal reasons"...

This is why I would get up and leave a crowded beach or room, but it's an interesting theory as applied to seagulls...
posted by marcurios at 6:22 PM on September 13, 2009

a large flock of seagulls more or less simultaneously settle on the sand together, all facing the same direction.

Come to think of it, I don't know why they'd do that unless they'd found some food there. Or mistakenly thought there was food there, and then they fly away as they get bored and give up. They seem to flock together around dusk sometimes, and I know they congregate for breeding somewhere, but more usually I've seen them spend the day in small groups or alone, as if to keep "constant visual surveillance of all parts of the sea-cost" as Frings et al. described it in what appears to be by far the most-referenced paper on the web when it comes to hungry herring gulls, Auditory and Visual Mechanisms in Food-Finding Behaviour of the Herring Gull.
posted by sfenders at 7:43 PM on September 13, 2009

I don't know the answer to your question, but it reminds me of watching as a large group of Canada geese gathered on a lake, honked loudly while dividing into two groups, one of which suddenly took to the air and headed to the other end of the lake. The other group barely seemed to notice.

I know it's probably anthropomorphizing, but danged if it didn't look like they were discussing their plans.
posted by bunji at 7:57 PM on September 13, 2009