The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman

recent, more high-tech instance of bird ingenuity popped up in 2018 when a scientist tracking western gulls with geolocators to see where they fed was puzzled to see a gull traveling at sixty miles per hour for a distance of seventy-five miles, crossing the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland and traveling along the interstates before returning by the same route to her nest. It turned out that the gull, a female breeding on the Farallon Islands west of San Francisco Bay, had hitched a ride on a garbage truck bound for an organic composting facility in the Central Valley near Modesto. At first the researcher thought the bird might have gotten trapped in the truck. But then, two days later, the same thing happened. Clearly, this gull was using its head (if not its palate—as one Bay Area news reporter quipped, “It might be the only time a San Francisco resident ever drove to Modesto for dinner”).