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Don't stone the crows

#1
confused2 Offline
Crows have been trained to pick up rubbish in a French park:-
http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2018/08/13...butts.html
I'm sure seagulls could do this too, if they felt like it.
More bird training...
Years ago I knew someone with who put bird food on top of a traffic warden's hat (sans traffic warden) - hoping the local pigeons would start to associate all similar hats with food.
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#2
C C Offline
(Aug 13, 2018 07:05 PM)confused2 Wrote: [...] I'm sure seagulls could do this too, if they felt like it. [...]


I was going to suggest that maybe they could be recruited to collect plastic bags from the water, to clean up that problem. But that would apparently be both deliberately inhumane and the wrong choice of avian species.

Seagulls are eating all of our garbage
https://www.popsci.com/seagull-garbage-e...tic-litter

Why Do Seabirds Eat Plastic?
https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/why-do-seab...er-stinks/

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#3
Secular Sanity Offline
The crows around here hate me.  If I forget to close the lid on the garage, they throw a huge party complete with crow confetti.  

Seagulls are getting a bad rap, too, you know.  You’ve always liked the underdog, haven’t you, C2?

Quote:Looe harbour master Tina Hicks said the boy - who is believed to be a holidaymaker - was chasing the bird after it stole a pasty he was eating.

Ms Hicks praised the response of the rescue teams and reminded people to be "vigilant" around seagulls and "not to feed them".
"They're beautiful to look at and photograph if you're here on holiday but they are starting to push their luck a bit," she said.

Boy, 9, falls off pier in seagull chase in Looe

When I was at Yosemite, a raccoon came into our room, and took my son’s Cheetos.  The food prices are outrageous there.  He snuck back in for our fifteen dollar sandwiches, which I was willing to fight for, BTW.  It kept my son occupied during the hike, though.  He spent most of the time looking for a raccoon covered in Cheetos dust.
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#4
confused2 Offline
CC Wrote:I was going to suggest that maybe they [seagulls] could be recruited to collect plastic bags from the water.
I like the thinking, especially as it is followed by clear respect for the birds. There are fish in the sea that hoover up plastic. I don't think you can offer a herring gull anything better than a herring. Happily for seagulls they have a reverse mode in their digestive system that can deal with plastics and other rubbish. I doubt that they would vomit for fun but given a cost-benefit analysis they might go for vomiting into the bag provided in return for a fish pellet. This might not be it but I am fairly sure that if you can train one gull to do a thing it will train the rest for you.
Your thoughts?

Assuming there are (at least) a billion tons of plastic in the sea - it is better to start somewhere than not start at all.
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#5
C C Offline
(Aug 13, 2018 08:34 PM)confused2 Wrote: [...] I doubt that they would vomit for fun but given a cost-benefit analysis they might go for vomiting into the bag provided in return for a fish pellet. This might not be it but I am fairly sure that if you can train one gull to do a thing it will train the rest for you. Your thoughts? Assuming there are (at least) a billion tons of plastic in the sea - it is better to start somewhere than not start at all.


Despite their cleverness, seagulls will probably never be uplifted to full, sapient species status. So probably best to get a move on in enlisting them for ocean litter duty, before the aquatic mammals are either coached into it as they are or genetically enhanced as rival candidates for an ocean cleanup crew. For the latter, a trash collecting vessel might have to be equipped with a conveyor that extends into the water for them to place rubbish deposits in. During that equipment fund-raising delay, seagulls can get the jump on them as the "binmen slash dustmen" of the seas / beaches or whatever "garbage-man" label is locally applicable.

Can't remember if the dogs of Clifford Simak's City kept their streets clean, much less whether or not they did a better job of keeping the bodies of water more pristine than humans. Those bygone, Norman Rockwell days of retro-futurism...

Should we engineer animals to be smart like humans?
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141001...are-coming

If We Could Engineer Animals to Be as Smart as Humans—Should We?
https://singularityhub.com/2018/01/16/sh...our-level/

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#6
confused2 Offline
SS Wrote:The crows around here hate me.  If I forget to close the lid on the garage, they throw a huge party complete with crow confetti.
Maybe birds just like a party. At the end of summer our gulls have all their friends and relations over and spend four or five days and nights squawking and jumping about on the roof. And then they fly away - most of them - but not all.

SS Wrote:You’ve always liked the underdog..
My mother was a teacher - she always said the boys had better sense of fair play than the girls. Whether by nature or nurture I've never been able to handle the concept of playing to win - either the one is the antithesis of the other or I need to look up antithesis in a dictionary.

SS Wrote:Boy, 9, falls off pier in seagull chase in Looe
He fell 26 feet. I think that is long enough to work out "This is going to hurt.". A few weeks ago I fell while climbing on rocks by the sea - my first thought (without rancour) was "I think I've just killed myself.". Clearly not but I am still quite deaf from the bang on the head. In the UK we have a free health service that might fix me up - or it might (quite rightly) say "You ain't worth fixing."

SS Wrote:He [the racoon]snuck back in for our fifteen dollar sandwiches, which I was willing to fight for, BTW.
Hell yes, for a fifteen dollar sandwich I'd take on a family of grizzly bears.
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#7
Secular Sanity Offline
(Aug 15, 2018 12:15 AM)confused2 Wrote: A few weeks ago I fell while climbing on rocks by the sea - my first thought (without rancour) was "I think I've just killed myself.". Clearly not but I am still quite deaf from the bang on the head. In the UK we have a free health service that might fix me up - or it might (quite rightly) say "You ain't worth fixing."

Yikes! I’ve done the same thing before but luckily I didn’t hit my head. I was hiking the lost coast trail and trying to get a closer snapshot of some seals. I thought my elbow was broken. On the way down, though, I was thinking, "Oh, shit! My camera."

It survived, but even though the trail was flat, it was more difficult than the Trinity Alps. Walking in the sand is tough. You find yourself searching for any little patch of grass or rocks just to get some traction.

You better get that looked at as soon as possible, C2. You could have fractured your temporal bone.
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