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• How Do Gulls Know When Giants Games are Ending?

  Posted by Lauren Sommer

  on Jul 15, 2011

  

  Gulls making fast work of AT&T Park leftovers. Credit: Flickr, Malingering.

  In a QUEST radio story on Monday, I cover the Bay Area's California gull population becoming a major concern for the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. Thousands of acres of industrial salt ponds are being restored for shorebirds and other wildlife. And that restoration work is creating a big opportunity for some very aggressive gulls.

  While reporting the story, I stumbled upon a mystery that's well-known to San Francisco Giants fans: Some gulls have an uncanny way of showing up at AT&T Park during the eighth or ninth inning of a ballgame.

  Day game or night game, the gulls bizarrely seem to know when the game is close to ending, pouncing on leftover hot dogs and garlic fries. As Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow said, "if you were a gull, where would you be?"

  There are a lot of popular theories about how the gulls time their arrival so well. Do they recognize the illustrious beard of Giants closer Brian Wilson? Do they know ?Take Me Out to the Ballgame,? a tune that's always sung during the seventh inning stretch?

  I spoke to a few local experts to get their take…

  Dan Murphy, Volunteer with Golden Gate Audubon:

  It's a crime of opportunity. They're very well attuned to our behavior and our trash. When there are large numbers of people in the stands, gulls don't come into the ballpark. But they can sense when things are starting to wind down. A lot of people leave the game before it's over, so they might be clued in by people moving out of the upper deck toward the eighth inning. That makes sense since they seem to settle on the left field side first.

  If a game goes into extra innings, the gulls still seem to know when the ninth inning is. You'll see them sitting on the roof or on the big glove in the outfield, waiting for the game to end. That may still be due to the fans that leave early, but they seem to have a sense of how long games normally go. It's likely that a few birds are always watching and as soon as a few birds go in, others will follow. They're really good at what they do. They find food sources and use them to the max.

  David Shuford, Biologist with PRBO Conservation Science:

  Gulls spend their day cruising around a lot. But once they figure something out, they tend to come back. So even though the ninth inning doesn't happen at the same time each day, once a few gulls pick up on it, you'll soon have a crowd. It's possible that they can recognize the sounds, too, like songs that are played during the game. Gulls are pretty good about sound.

  In general, they're really good at figuring things out. Like when local dumps are closed on the weekends, the gulls seem to know that and don't show up on those days. It's hard to know if they truly know what Saturday is. They may just be cruising by and not see any action, so they don't land. But they seem to recognize the pattern.

  Gulls have an advantage – they're total generalists. They're smart and they're tough. They can eat just about anything too. They go after fish, garbage, and other birds. Some of our work on the Farallon Islands has shown that gulls can actually recognize certain individual people as well.

  Josh Ackerman, Research Wildlife Biologist with USGS:

  They do exactly that same thing at the landfills in the Bay Area. We've done studies on gulls where we've tagged them with transmitters and tracked them daily for two years. California gulls depend on a few of the landfills in the South Bay for food. They arrive exactly when the dumps open and leave right when they close, since the trash piles are covered up when the landfill isn't operating. From our studies, we know that the gulls cover a lot of territory during the day, so it's not a big deal for them to travel to find food.

  George Costa, Senior Vice President of Ballpark Operations at AT&T Park:

  We've seen an uptick. There seem to be more gulls lately. They always time their arrival to an inning or two innings before the game ends. They're creatures of habit. They know where the food is and that crowds mean food. They're never here except for game days, but if there's a game, they crash the party every night.

  It's a series of triggers that tells them it's time. They see the lights and the crowds. There are food smells, like the garlic fries. It's a combination of all those things. You'll see the gulls line up on the left field roof before the game ends. We see the scouts come in and they cue the rest of the gulls.

  It's a nuisance really and the fans don't enjoy it. So we're looking at a variety of possibilities to deal with it, including having a falcon on site. They've used them at other ballparks and they seem to work there. You won't get rid of the gulls completely, but we think it would get rid of about 80 percent. We have to retrain these gulls.

  Tags: baseball, birds, giants, gulls, san francisco bay, San Francisco Giants
  
  
  

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• Gulls Threaten South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Work

  Posted by Lauren Sommer

  on Jul 15, 2011

  

  A California gull tagged by USGS scientists. Credit: Josh Ackerman/USGS

  One of the most ambitious wetland restoration projects in the country is underway in San Francisco Bay. For more than a century, the South Bay shoreline has been home to industrial salt ponds. Now, thousands of acres of those ponds are being restored for shorebirds and wildlife. But that is creating an opportunity for a very problematic bird.

  The Bay Area's gulls are well-known to San Francisco Giants fans. At one recent game, as the Giants staged a late comeback during the ninth inning hundreds of gulls appeared out of the night sky. Like clockwork, they show up just before the game ends.

  "Don't ask me how. They just know," says Mike Krukow, a broadcaster with the Giants. "They come in and it's always with two outs to go in the ninth inning and there they are."

  The attraction, of course, is the food. "It's pizza. They've got garlic fries. They really love the garlic fries by the way," he says.

  How gulls time their arrival so well is a little bit of a mystery. But their numbers have grown so high that the ballpark is considering bringing in a falcon to scare them away. But that's not possible everywhere…

  South Bay Shorebirds on the Menu

  At the southern end of the bay near Alviso, a crew from the US Geological Survey is working on a small island in the middle of a former salt pond. It's home to a colony of Forester's terns.

  "Hey, what was the band number on that chick?" asks Garth Herring, one of the scientists on the project. The team measures and bands the small, speckled tern chicks. A few of them get radio transmitters.

  "When that transmitter is attached to a live chick, the transmitter beeps at a very specific rate," says Herring.

  If the chick dies, the beep slows down. But you might wonder ? why do they need to know if a chick is dead?

  "Just to the north of us roughly about a mile, there's one of the largest California gull colonies. They'll come in, grab the chick. And they get back to the gull colony and they regurgitate to their chicks," he says.

  At which point the tern chick ? and transmitter ? is inside the gull ? until it passes through, that is. That's when Herring and his team go looking for it.

  "It's pretty common that we find just a small pile of bones, the radio transmitter and the band that was associated with that Forrester's tern chick," says Herring.

  Herring says they've found that gulls only prey on the terns at certain times of day. "It's timed pretty well with when the local landfill sites are closing down. They're flying back to the colonies and are picking up chicks probably around 6 o'clock on average."

  Last year, 40 percent of the tern chicks they tagged were eaten by gulls. "It certainly does suggest that California gulls do have the potential to have a big impact on these breeding water birds here," he says.

  Gulls Gone Wild

  "They're the big bully," says Cheryl Strong , a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "They're very opportunistic and they do really well with humans."

  California gulls didn't always call San Francisco Bay home. In the 1980s, a small group began nesting on one of the salt ponds. Now, that population has exploded.

  "California gulls are one of the earliest nesting species and they're also probably the most aggressive. So they show up first that they can easily take over an area," says Strong.

  The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project has spent millions restoring pond habitat for Forester's terns, American avocets and the threatened western snowy plover.

  But it's a conservation Catch-22. As more habitat is restored for shorebirds, it also creates more habitat for gulls. And as former salt ponds are flooded during the restoration, the gulls are looking for new places to nest.

  "With 40,000 gulls, there's not a lot of room for other birds," says Strong.

  Strong says the Fish and Wildlife Service is writing a plan to manage the gulls. One option is killing the birds. But gulls can live up to 25 years and with an endless food source at landfills nearby, she says there's only so much they could do.

  "If you're talking about removing birds lethally, it's just not feasible. They are a part of our landscape, like it or not," she says.

  For now, they're trying something else.

  Gull Hazing Underway

  "So up ahead there are some gulls doing some courtship behaviors on the levee which is definitely a bad sign," says Caitlin Robinson-Nilsen of the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory. She's looking at a large flock of gulls on a salt pond near Fremont.

  "This is one of the areas where we definitely don't want them to nest. One of the salt ponds we're standing right next to is a historic nesting site of the western snowy plover."

  So, Robinson-Nilsen's job is to haze the gulls. She uses a whistle and walks down the levee. The gulls aren't happy about it.

  "They'll dive bomb you and hit you in your head. They're very good at pooping you. They have pretty good aim that way."

  Robinson-Nislen says they're hazing gulls twice a day to keep them from nesting next to sensitive shorebirds. So far, it looks like it's working. But with millions of tax dollars being spent on restoring more habitat, biologists expect they'll be doing a lot more gull management in the years ahead.

  Additional Links

  • South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project
  • Help Track the California Gull
  Tags: bay, birds, cargill, featured, fish and widlife, gulls, restoration, salt ponds, shorebirds, south bay
  
  
  

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• Meditation May Enhance the Strength of Neural Networks

  Posted by Darya Pino

  on Jul 15, 2011

  

  Meditation is associated with stronger connections between brain regions. Photo courtesy of R_x - renee barron.

  Meditation is the practice of focusing your mind on a single thought or idea for an extended period of time in order to achieve some benefit. The goals of meditation can vary and include increased focus, increased awareness or ?presence,? better memory, decreased stress and achieving a state of enlightenment. Physiological advantages have also been reported, such as decreased blood pressure and pain reduction.

  Though meditation has been practiced all over the world for thousands of years, the mechanism by which it works is still largely unknown. A recent study published in the journal NeuroImage suggests that mediation may work by strengthening the connections between brain regions, thereby building more robust neural networks.

  The study compared age and gender matched meditators with non-meditators. Researchers used a method called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) that detects the size and direction of white matter tracts in the brain. White matter is made up of long neuronal processes called axons that transmit information from one area of the brain to another. DTI is used to measure the integrity of white matter tracts and is thought to indicate the strength of neural connections.

  Meditators had stronger DTI measures than non-meditators, particularly in the corticospinal tract (axons from the brain to the rest of the body), the superior longitudinal fasciculus (connections between executive brain areas and sensory regions) and the uncinate fasciculus (connects executive brain areas to emotion and memory regions). Meditators also seemed to have less age-related degeneration.

  Though this was not a randomized controlled trial and cannot determine if mediation was the cause of the structural changes, this study opens a new area of research for exploring the role of meditation and brain training in strengthening and preserving the neural connections necessary for memory and other important cognitive tasks.

  Tags: aging, brain, diffusion tensor imaging, meditation, memory, neuroscience
  
  
  

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