Sometimes, we could all use a ride — even the ones among us that fly.
State of play: In a quirky first, a GPS-tracked seagull was discovered hitching a ride on a long-haul garbage truck from a waste transfer station in San Francisco to an outdoor compost facility in the Central Valley, according to a recent study published by The Waterbird Society.
- As foragers, western gulls from the nearby Farallon Islands are known to travel towards San Francisco’s beaches, landfills and recycling centers in search of food — an occurrence happening more often in recent years due climate-induced reductions in ocean prey.
Yes, but: This is the first time researchers observed a seagull using a vehicle for transportation — and twice in one week — to arrive at a predictable food source.
The intrigue: “It was surprising and comical, so much so that we wanted to look closely into this one individual’s behavior to understand how this happened,” Megan Cimino, a researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz and lead author of the study, told Axios…