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Walk through a mall parking lot, and you might just stumble into sudden fame—with an audience of gulls, that is. But you’re not carrying a sandwich, and there’s no ocean here. Just a field of pavement with seemingly little appeal for any bird, much less one that people associate with boardwalks and beach vacations. 

Colloquially lumped together as “seagulls,” there are actually more than 50 species of gulls worldwide, and while many stick to the coasts, others are just as likely to hang out inland. Some species, including the Ring-billed Gull, have taken to suburbs across the continental United States. And they seem to particularly enjoy parking lots. What gives?

There’s a reason gulls are often called “trash birds,” happy to indulge in everything from scraps of food to the bounty provided by garbage cans and dumpsters—all of which are readily found in parking lots big and small. But not until recently did researchers understand what appears to be a major reason why the birds gravitate to larger parking lots in such numbers. 

In the 2010s, researcher Dan Clark was dealing with fecal contamination in a Massachusetts drinking-water reservoir, presumably caused by a flock of Ring-billed Gulls. The birds roosted on the reservoir at night, but no one knew where they went during the day. Clark tagged several individuals and soon learned that they were killing time in—you guessed it—parking lots.

To figure out why, Clark and his team loitering in the lots. It didn’t take long to discover what the birds were doing there, says Clark, regional director of the Division of Water Supply Protection in the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.

“They’re there for food,” he says. “Period.”

But the gulls weren’t there for just any food. Much to the researchers’ surprise, they found that the birds largely ignored dumpsters and trash cans. Instead, they’d hunker down and wait, sometimes for hours, for someone to feed them. And feed them people did.

Clark’s team identified two types of feeders. There were the “casual feeders”—people who eat lunch in the car and toss out fries to the birds waiting nearby for a tasty morsel. “That was common,” Clark says. “But it didn’t really account for the number of gulls.” That’s where the second type of feeders came in. The so-called “dedicated feeders” would regularly drive to the lot and dump out huge amounts of food, often bread.

This sort of event was news to the researchers. And it didn’t happen in just one or two parking lots. “We saw it in multiple parking lots across a fairly large geographic region [in Massachusetts],” Clark says. He suspects that large gull gatherings in other states can also be attributed to mass feedings like these ones.   

While Clark’s team didn’t observe much dumpster diving, gulls are opportunists, not ones to shy away from available food, even if it’s garbage. But perhaps, Clark posits, the gulls would rather wait than forage if they know that food is eventually coming. “It's a lot easier, a lot more energy conservation, to simply sit in a parking lot, as opposed to actively foraging,” he says.

In any case, gulls are incredibly observant and keenly aware of their surroundings. “It's amazing to watch them at these parking lots,” Clark says. “If anything hits the ground, they know almost immediately.” They also seem to remember the best feeding spots to revisit: The team noticed that many lots had no gulls at all, but the lots that had gulls had gobs of them—and, unsurprisingly, the highest number of dedicated feeders.
 

While food is the main draw, parking lots also offer a key habitat feature that gulls like: wide, open space, similar to their natural habitats of fields, lakes, and open coastal areas. They don’t like things over their heads, or having to fly between obstacles. Sitting in a parking lot is pretty natural for them. “It's essentially like they're loafing on the beach,” Clark says.

Parking lots aren’t the only spot that offer food and space. Gulls visit between (and during) games. They frequent waste management plants and agricultural fields. Herring Gulls and Great-blacked Gulls have a fondness for landfills. (Birders, for their part, have long known these locations to be birding hotspots.)

As generalists, gulls will eat almost anything, from small invertebrates, mammals, and insects to French fries and human fecal waste. That’s partly why feeding gulls is not necessary. When Clark talked with dedicated feeders, he learned that most of them were worried about the gulls during cold winters. Some birds, like hummingbirds, benefit from human assistance in seasons when food sources are scarce. But gulls are just taking advantage of kindness.

“They will take your food,” Clark says, but “they don’t need your help.”