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Ever had a cheeky seagull swoop in and steal a chip when you weren't looking? Well, you won't be the first or the last!

Now scientists at the University of Bristol have found that there's more to these birds than meets the eye...

They're not just chancers - in fact seagulls cleverly adapt their eating schedule to when humans are active and have worked out exactly when and where to strike. So where's that? The school playground at lunchtime of course!

A team of scientists from Bristol's Faculties of Engineering and Life Sciences used different data to record the behaviour of urban gulls at three different settings in the city: a public park, a school and a waste centre.

They fitted GPS tracker backpacks to gulls and also counted how many gulls there were at these different locations.

The team found the birds' foraging patterns closely matched the timing of school breaks and the opening and closing times of the waste centre, but that their activity in the park appeared to link more closely with the availability of natural food sources.

The findings suggest gulls can work out when to adapt their foraging behaviour and fit it around human activities - a skill that helps them thrive in cities.

Lead author of the paper, Dr Anouk Spelt, spoke about the gulls' behaviour at the school. He said: "Our data showed that gulls were not only present in high numbers during lunchtime to feed on leftovers, but also just before the start of the school and during the first break when students had their snack.

"Similarly, at the waste centre the gulls were present in higher numbers on weekdays when the centre was open and trucks were unloading food waste.

"Although everybody has experienced or seen gulls stealing food from people in parks, our gulls mainly went to parks first thing in the morning and this may be because earthworms and insects are present in higher numbers during these early hours."

The team also discovered that some gulls ate at all three settings in the same day - moving from the park to the school, and then the dump.

This highlights how these clever birds are timing their feeding schedule with multiple human activities at once. Ingenious!