Even more irritating when they can water blast you.
"Mine?"
— Seagulls, Finding Nemo
The coast is a popular destination for Vacation Episodes, both in fiction and real life. And why wouldn't it be? Breathing in the fresh sea air, taking a stroll along the boardwalk, having a nice time at the beach, grabbing a snack like ice cream or fish and chips, what's not to love?
Seagulls, obviously. Due to the abundance of food at tourist hotspots such as these, many wild animals have taken to feeding on food waste from visitors, with the more audacious ones being willing to snatch that tasty snack or meal right out of one's hands if need be. Among these animals, seagulls are perhaps the worst offender of all — as humans infringe on their natural habitats on the coastline, gulls have taken to 'preying' on foodstuffs meant for humans to feed themselves and their chicks.
However, due to the disturbance they pose to our urban settlements, popular media often portrays seagulls as perpetually hungry, food-stealing menaces to society that can and will eat anything and everything they can fit down their throats. Expect any hapless victim to express annoyance at these skyway robberies at minimum instead of questioning why seagulls started stealing food from humans in the first place.
Sister Trope of Pesky Pigeons, its more urban counterpart; Gluttonous Pig, as another trope about animals eating a lot; and Extreme Omni-Goat, as another type of animal known for eating anything and everything. Compare Foul Waterfowl, for a more distantly related taxa of birds that are similarly portrayed as menaces to human society.
Sub-Trope of Big Eater and Extreme Omnivore. Compare Bird-Poop Gag for another trope about annoying birds, and Thieving Pet and Thieving Magpie for other tropes about animals stealing. If the seagull isn't just hungry but outright evil or dangerous (though there may be overlaps), see Feathered Fiend.
As anyone who lives on the coastline can tell you, seagulls' status as living trash cans are very much Truth in Television.
Now, if you'd excuse me, I'd like to get back to my fish and chips– (squawk) HEY! GIVE ME BACK MY CHIPS!
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- My Dress-Up Darling: An anime-only scene has Marin's burger getting snatched out of her hand by a seagull while she and Gojo are at the beach.
Fan Works
- Alex's Mobs: This Game Mod adds seagulls, among other creatures, to the Minecraft experience. In the mod, they are portrayed as a Bandit Mook that will steal a food item from the player's inventory if it's in their hot-bar. The advancement for having one's food stolen by a seagull is even named "Mine? Mine? Mine?".
- Peeking Through the Fourth Wall: In Episode 17, the characters note that the line from the fanfic they're MSTing about birds stealing food was meant to be ridiculous, but they've all had food stolen from them by seagulls.
Films — Animated
- Finding Nemo: The seagulls are minor antagonists characterized by their One-Track-Minded Hunger, chanting "Mine?" like a Broken Record as they almost eat Marlin and Dory alive while they are on their quest to find Nemo in Sydney.
Nigel: Oh, would you just shut up?! You rats with wings!
- Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken: Uncle Brill struggles with keeping his corn dog safe from seagulls. Ruby actually gives him a new one in order to distract him with another seagull attack.
Literature
- Animorphs: Every time the team morphs into seagulls if they have a mission on the coast, the morph's instincts ensure they spend most of the trip pointing out abandoned food to each other. Tobias, who's Shapeshifter Mode Locked into a red-tailed hawk and hunts for his food, complains that he's losing street cred just by hanging out with them.
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid: In The Long Haul, when the family takes the bridge to the beach, Greg sees a hungry seagull and throws it a cheese curl, despite Susan warning him that seagulls can get "aggressive". Sure enough, the seagull enters the car through the sunroof for more snacks. After hitting the car roof, it goes into a frenzy and attempts to steal Greg's entire bag of cheese curls, ripping it open and attracting a whole flock into the car, causing so much chaos that the car gets into an accident.
- In the children's book The Lighthouse Keepers Lunch, a lighthouse keeper's wife sends him his lunch every day in a basket on a very long zip line from their cottage, only for some seagulls to steal the lunch every day. The couple then try different ways to prevent this, including sending their cat along with the lunch.
- Torchwood: In "Skypoint", Jack and Gwen are faced with a flock of gulls on a ledge. The resulting commotion is overheard by Brass and Woodwind, with Brass diverting the gulls by throwing a piece of burger roll over the ledge. Jack subsequently overhears Woodwind tell Brass how a gull had taken his ice cream right out of his hand in Tenby and ponders whether that was why Woodwind was such a sociopath.
Live-Action TV
- Impractical Jokers: In the Miami special, one of Joe's challenges was to dress up as a mermaid, fish-tail, topless bod and all, and then flop and roll across the beach from the ocean to get at a plate of donuts. He barely makes it halfway across before he surrenders from exhaustion, and then just as the others give him his donuts, he's set upon by a flock of hungry seagulls.
- Suite Life on Deck: In the episode "Mean Chicks", Cody deprives a seagull of a French fry Zack attempted to feed it, and spends the rest of the episode trying to escape the bird's wrath.
- World's Dumbest...: One of the featured criminals is a seagull that regularly steals chips from a convenience store. The commentators then say that the bird is the smartest criminal ever featured on the show — and considering the sort who typically appear on a show called "World's Dumbest", they're probably right.
Music
- "A Song About Birds
" by Christiaan Van Vuuren describes several birds before completely trashing the Australian white ibis, claiming that "a seagull's a bird that scabs hot chips" before claiming that ibises are the only birds that are "scabbier" than them.
Video Games
- In Final Fantasy XIV, the Gull minion's description portrays it as a bird out to hunt for both fish and unguarded meals. You obtain it by seeing three gullstorms while ocean fishing as it follows the Endeavor to pilfer its fishers' catches. The corresponding achievement is even called "Mine, Mine, Mine" in reference to Finding Nemo.
- Early on in LEGO City Undercover, Chase McCain is trying to track down a bank robber dressed as a clown to the dockyards. He meets one dock worker, who says that he'll happily help Chase, "As soon as I finish my lunch... which will be never... because A LOUSY SEAGULL STOLE MY SAMWITCH!!" Sure enough, Chase has to track the seagull down and get the sandwich back in order to get the dock worker's help.
Webcomics
- This Awkward Zombie comic takes the Pokémon Wingull and gives it the violent behavior associated with its real-life counterpart, the seagull. The result: a Wingull that will happily blast humans with high-pressure water to steal their food.
- Pixie and Brutus: When Jacko, a formerly stray puppy, is asked what one of his earliest memories is, he tells Pixie and Brutus about the time he fought a seagull over some old French fries.
- Simple Seagull Comics (hosted on Instagram) is about a seagull who steals humans' snacks because when they try to hunt for themselves, they end up nearly drowning or being attacked by their choice of prey (crabs).
- In this X-Men parody comic by Max Wittert, a seagull steals Jean's bag of sandwiches and she flies after the bird with her telekinesis, asking her husband Cyclops and her fellow X-Men to stop the thief.
Web Videos
- Feeding Steven: Exploited in the vlog series Feeding my Pet Seagull to Gain its Trust, where Arryn feeds a local seagull he named Steven from his window, in hopes of gaining its trust.
- GrayStillPlays: Discussed in "When you swallow the earth":
Gray: I have a tendency to hate seagulls because I love pizza and hamburgers but the problem is seagulls also love pizza and hamburgers but they have a tendency to eat my pizza and hamburgers, like, out of my hand while I'm trying to enjoy it on the beach.
- Pirates SMP:
- Alex's Mobs is part of the mod-pack for the series, and the seagulls from the mod will steal any consumable food item from players if they're in the vicinity, including mugs of alcohol. The cast have occasionally taken to killing gulls for stealing their food out of annoyance.
- Acho's stream chat manifests in-universe as a flock of rowdy seagulls which he keeps locked away in a literally gilded cage underground in-game. He has prefaced a warning that no one should enter the "seagull dungeon" with food in their inventory, lest the seagulls steal and chow it down. That being said, he doesn't feed them often either, exacerbating their hunger in doing so.
- Further referenced on Day 125 when Captain Blonde Beard/Martyn berates Apo for failing at a mission due to Alcohol-Induced Idiocy, likely playing on how Apo's stream chat also manifests as a flock of seagulls in-universe.
Captain Blonde Beard: Do you have the memory of a seagull? Can you only remember one thing at a time? Food or beer, and that's all?
Western Animation
- Bob's Burgers: In "Beach, Please!", the kids are cleaning the beach as part of a school program, and Gene finds that a gull is following him around. He figures it's because he's always eating while at Wonder Wharf and the seagulls expect him to have food on him all the time. In the closing moments of the episode, a whole flock of them attack Gene.
- Big City Greens: In "Shark Objects", Alice buys a pretzel at the beach and a seagull tries to steal it. The two fight over it, and the lifeguard handcuffs them together and puts them in beach jail.
- Classic Disney Shorts:
- In the Mickey Mouse short "The Simple Things", Mickey is fishing at the beach and a seagull keeps taking the small fish he's using as bait.
- In "The Whalers", Donald Duck is the lookout on a whaling ship and decides to eat a baloney sandwich. Just as he's about to take a bite, seagulls descend onto him and try to take the sandwich. He manages to take it aside, only to accidentally feed it to a pelican.
- Fanboy and Chum Chum: In "The Frosty Bus", a seagull can be seen stealing bags of chips from the Frosty Mart as a Funny Background Event. Later when attempting to stop Boog, Chum Chum warns Fanboy of that thieving seagull, and the two are commended on their effort but are upset that lulled them away from what's really at hand.
- Exploited in an episode of George Shrinks. To keep seagulls from preying on a mass of baby turtles trying to make it into the sea, George distracts them with a carton of fries.
- Rugrats: In the episode "In the Naval", Angelica takes her Water Sports Cynthia doll into the water to ski while Stu, Drew, and Lou go fishing. When a swordfish swallows Cynthia, she tries to use some graham crackers that Tommy gives her as bait to catch the swordfish. Some seagulls that fly above her take the graham crackers instead.
- Steven Universe:
- In the episode "Onion Trade", when Pearl opens the window to Steven's room, a seagull comes flying out, carrying a slice of pizza.
- In "Monster Buddies", Steven tries to tame a Centipeetle by feeding it chips. As he throws fistfuls of chips for Centipeetle to enjoy, it attracts the attention of a seagull which tries to eat them straight from his hand, biting him in the process. Centipeetle defends Steven by spitting acid at the seagull, driving it away.
- In "Sworn to the Sword", a trio of seagulls come diving at Steven as he tries to eat his biscuit with jam. They're shooed away by Connie, wielding her violin bow like a sword.
Real Life
- In 2024, Cedar Point in Ohio started selling magnetic plushies of a seagull with fries in its mouth meant to sit on one's shoulder, a cute joking reference to how frequently they flock to park goers to their food.
- In 2016, Australian fast food chain Hungry Jack's released a limited-time promotion for French fry cartons with reflective packaging at coastal locations to scare away seagulls. Effects prove to be limited.
