The Gull and the Garbage Truck

BirdNote^®
The Gull and the Garbage Truck
Written by Rebecca Heisman

This is BirdNote.

         [Western Gull flock sounds]

Gulls are notorious for snatching french fries from waste bins and flocking to landfills. But one Western Gull’s devotion to trash reached a new level with an epic road trip.

         [Western Gull]

Since 2013, researchers have been tracking Western Gulls nesting on islands off San Francisco. Their GPS data show that on average, foraging gulls will travel about 11 miles away from their colonies.

         [Music begins]

Then in May 2018, a female gull took a trip like no other. She started by flying inland to a Bay Area transfer station. It’s a waste facility where food scraps are loaded onto semis and hauled to a compost center in the Central Valley.

But the tracking data show that after leaving the transfer station, the gull followed Highway 580 east for eighty miles… to that Central Valley composting facility. The only explanation? She was riding a transfer truck!

         [Western Gull]

The gull may have gotten trapped in the truck unintentionally. But it delivered her to 216-acres of gull-orious garbage. And shortly after returning to her colony, she repeated her trek!

It’s the first time scientists have documented such an unusual commute. But as human activity continues to alter Western Gull’s natural habitat, maybe this new approach to dining out will catch on.

         [Western Gull]

For BirdNote, I’m Michael Stein.

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Senior Producer: Mark Bramhill
Producer: Sam Johnson
Managing Producer: Jazzi Johnson
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Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Western Gull flock sounds ML110913 recorded by Thomas G. Sander; Western Gull ML499416001 recorded by Nathan Pieplow; Western Gull, ML3361 recorded by Charles A. Sutherland.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2026 BirdNote February 2026           Narrator: Michael Stein

ID# WEGU-01-2026-02-24     WEGU-01

Reference: 
https://bioone.org/journals/waterbirds/volume-48/issue-1/063.048.0101/The-First-GPS-Observation-of-a-Western-Gull-Larus-occidentalis/10.1675/063.048.0101.short