Description
Gulls (Laridae) are behaviorally flexible coastal birds that thrive in both natural shorelines and human-dominated habitats, making them useful models for understanding how wildlife responds to urbanization. Because behavior often shifts before population change, time-budget data can reveal how anthropogenic landscapes alter tradeoffs among foraging, vigilance, movement, and sociality. We compared gull behavior between urban and natural sites in Hampton Roads, Virginia using a standardized ethogram and repeated daylight focal observations and scan sampling; behaviors were summarized by habitat and species and evaluated with planned habitat/species comparisons that account for site-level variation. We recorded 1,175 behavioral events (urban = 858; natural = 310): urban sites showed higher standing, flying, alert/vigilance, vocalizing, and conspecific social interactions, whereas natural sites showed proportionally greater foraging and inactivity. Species-level patterns were consistent with behavioral differentiation among taxa (e.g., relatively higher foraging in immature gulls and elevated standing in greater black-backed gulls). These patterns align with urban behavioral ecology findings that disturbance and predictable human-subsidized resources can restructure activity and risk-sensitive behaviors, increasing vigilance and locomotion while shifting foraging dynamics. Next steps will strengthen inference by standardizing effort across habitats, incorporating weather and artificial light covariates, and expanding seasonal coverage to test when and where behavioral shifts are strongest (e.g., breeding vs wintering periods). Overall, our results indicate that urbanization measurably reshapes gull behavioral budgets, supporting ethogram-based monitoring as a scalable tool for detecting rapid behavioral responses to anthropogenic change and informing urban-coastal wildlife management.