This french fries-stealing seagull is the star of a new Google ad

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A striking photograph captures the moment a seagull in the UK opened its beak to grab a French fries. The sight of a seagull trying to grab human food is all too familiar to swimmers, but hungry seagulls usually move too fast for people to catch them in the act. Wait a minute, your fries were right next to you. A second later, they are gone.

In this particular case, photographer Hannah Huxford met the seagull stealing fry in Bridlington, a coastal town on the Yorkshire coast. Huxford took the photo at the right time on his iPhone in 2011; it went viral shortly after. A decade later, the fry-stealing seagull appears on billboards across the UK and Ireland as part of an advertising campaign for Google, My Modern Met recently reported.

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The “cheeky” herring gull (Larus argentatus) was bold and fearless as it approached Huxford in Bridlington, while her husband threw “chips” for the seagull to catch, she wrote in a blog post. in 2012.

“He was fascinating to watch and he wasn’t afraid of anyone, he just wanted chips!” Huxford wrote. “I took a lot of photos of him on my iPhone 3G, it was only when I got home to download the photos that I found this great photo of him in half a gulp.”

Local and national media, including the BBC, picked up on the story as quickly as the seagull tore up french fries. Eventually, the media frenzy subsided, but the seagull’s contact with fame wasn’t over yet. On March 22, Huxford posted an Instagram post commemorating the 10th anniversary of the image, and a design company promptly contacted her to license the photo, Huxford told My Modern Met. His photo of the seagull – caption “What are you looking for this summer?” – now appears on Google billboards for 30 days and in the company’s online advertising for the next 12 months, according to the BBC.

Exciting news my photograph of the #gull eating a chip I took ten years ago on an iPhone 3 in Bridlington is now on a national billboard campaign @GoogleUK if you see it let me know #myphoto #myphotography #Bridlington #google pic. twitter. com / AL0dT9J2MQ6 June 2021

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Why are seagulls so interested in human treats like French fries? It’s not just because they’re plentiful and easy to steal. Researchers recently found that food can actually become more attractive to gulls when birds observe humans handle it first, according to a 2020 study published in the Royal Society Open Science journal.

Gulls that live in urban environments associate humans with food, from the junk people leave and the food they consume outdoors. Observing humans as they eat signals to a seagull that there is food available for intake, and the food may be safer or more desirable than food that humans have not touched, the study authors reported.

“Our findings suggest that seagulls are more likely to get close to food they have seen people fall or lay down, so they may associate areas where people are eating with an easy meal,” study co-author Laura Kelley bioscience researcher at the University of Exeter in Cornwall, England, said in a statement.

“This highlights the importance of properly disposing of food waste, as inadvertently feeding seagulls strengthens these associations,” added Kelley.

If you’d rather have the seagulls leave you and your food alone, scientists suggest a simple solution: fix them. Herring gulls approach quickly and snatch treats that appear to be unattended, the researchers reported in 2019 in the journal Biology Letters. But if you stare directly at the birds, they will be more likely to sneak away and look elsewhere for an illicit dinner, Live Science previously reported.

Originally published in Live Science.

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