The French Fry Bandits of the Boardwalk

Keep an eye on your food. The gulls of Old Orchard Beach are famous, and they are watching you. The big gray and white birds patrolling the sand and wheeling over the pier are mostly herring gulls, the common large gull of the Maine coast, and they have made an art of the beachfront snatch.

A moment of inattention with an open box of fries or a slice of pizza, and a gull will drop out of the sky, grab it, and be gone before you react. The reputation is so well earned that signs along the boardwalk plainly warn visitors not to feed the seagulls, because a fed gull is a bold gull. You will hear all sorts of colorful figures thrown around for how many of them work this beach, but no one has ever really counted them, so treat the big numbers as legend rather than fact.

What is true is that these birds are opportunists that have learned to live off the crowds. And there is a quieter truth too. Along the wider Gulf of Maine, herring gull numbers have actually been declining in recent decades.

So the fry stealing gull dive bombing your lunch is both a beach nuisance and, in the bigger picture, a bird worth a little respect.