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Urban Black-Headed Gulls Distinguished Different Human Threats

Adult black-headed gull in breeding plumage swimming
Research · Behaviour

Urban black-headed gulls (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) in Kunming, China, used different flight-initiation distances when people approached them in different ways. Flight-initiation distance is the distance at which a bird takes flight from an approaching potential threat. The study compared walking barehanded, walking with handheld objects and approaching in a boat, and was published online on 7 March 2026.

The experiments were carried out at Cuihu Park in December 2022. The combined dataset contained 762 flight-initiation-distance observations. Of these, 432 were newly collected for barehanded approaches in red or black clothing and for an approach in an open pedal boat; another 330 observations, from the researchers’ earlier study, covered a barehanded person, a person carrying a stick and a person carrying a popgun.

Gulls distinguished among different human approaches

Flight-initiation distance differed significantly among the human-activity modes. The birds therefore did not respond to all approaching people in the same way. In the boat comparison, gulls moved away at a greater distance from a person approaching in an open pedal boat than from a person walking on shore, contrary to the researchers’ prediction that the boat would be tolerated more closely.

The birds assessed the human–tool context

The authors interpret the differences as evidence that black-headed gulls can make fine-scale assessments of human activities and of the combined human–tool context. They also emphasize that local learning history and environmental conditions can shape such responses, so the measured distances should be understood as responses from this urban population rather than as a fixed species-wide threshold.

Sources and image credit

  1. Wei, Y., Liu, Y., Liu, Q., & Liang, W. (2026). Urban gulls distinguish perceived threats: Cognitive responses to human activities and their associated implements. Behavioural Processes, 237, 105366. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2026.105366Primary peer-reviewed field experiment first published online 7 March 2026. The combined dataset comprised 762 flight-initiation-distance observations of urban black-headed gulls in Kunming, comparing barehanded approaches, approaches with tools and an open pedal boat.

Image: Donald Hobern — adult black-headed gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) swimming at Utterslev Mose, Denmark, photographed 16 June 2015; Wikimedia Commons / Flickr; representative species image, not a gull from the Kunming experiment · CC BY 2.0 · Source

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