[imagesource:tiktok/planetaferoz000]

Those with ornithophobia, turn away now because this seagull gulping down a squirrel whole is beyond a Hitchcock level of terrifying.

In a jaw-dropping video that has gone viral, a huge gull stands brazenly in the middle of a street, slowly swallowing a black squirrel whole, with the creature’s fluffy tail hanging out of the bird’s beak at its last gulp.

We are well aware of these scavenger birds swiping chips away from unsuspecting snackers on promenades and beaches, but by golly, it is not well known that they can eat little rodents with such savage intensity.

The large gulls such as herring gulls and lesser black-backed gulls – two of the species colloquially called seagulls – are omnivorous, and will “eat anything as long as it fits down their throat, and of course, as long as it is moderately nutritious,” said Peter Rock, an avian specialist at the University of Bristol, via The Guardian.

In fact, this is hardly an uncommon sight to Peter, who witnessed another grisly seagull scene once:

“I was up on a tall building in Bristol and there was a lesser black-backed gull who had presumably just killed a rat, and it pulled its head off,” he said.

Large gulls, Rock added, regularly kill pigeons, targeting the weakest. “What they will do is drive them down out of the air and push them into, say, a river … and then they drown them,” he said. “They pluck the feathers away and eat the rest.”

This is major. Who would have thought? But wait, there’s more. Gulls are even known to turn to cannibalism every now and then:

“Say for instance there is a road accident and a gull gets killed, there’s some food. However, that is a rare occurrence,” said Rock.

The birds are highly tuned into food, knowing where every morsel is in a range of around 100 kilometres in any direction from where they are breeding.

“For instance, if there is silage making somewhere they know about it. They know when it is happening because they recognise the machinery and they will come down,” he said, noting that the birds feed on small animals including nesting birds and amphibians that have been chopped up.

If you’re wondering how a gull processes a full-on animal in its stomach, they do have gizzards, which are the mechanical stomach of a bird, sometimes called hen’s teeth, allowing the feed to be ground and mixed internally before the bird spits out the leftovers in a pellet:

“Gulls have gizzards, like many birds, and what they do is they eat furiously and quickly. And if there’s stuff in the way, they eat that as well,” Rock said, adding the material is separated in the gizzard. “All the good stuff goes down into the gut and the rest of it turns into a pellet which they cough up.”

It is normal behaviour, then, for a gull to eat a small animal. So although the video seems barbaric to us, it’s just another day in the life of these highly skilled scavengers, whether that means swooping for ice cream or downing pigeons.

[source:guardian]