We have always known gulls are adaptable creatures, but a few weeks ago we saw gulls doing something we had never seen before.

As we walked out of the supermarket, we looked up to see a ring-billed gull sitting in the top of a small ornamental crabapple tree along the border of the parking lot. It picked at the small fruits, gobbling them down quickly while another one hovered overhead trying to get in on the action.

For several days we saw these birds engaging in this, what was to us, a novel behavior.

It’s not surprising that gulls would pick up fruit off the ground (they don’t call them “dump ducks” for nothing) but when we posted on the birding listserve about this, we found that a number of people in Maine have seen ring-billed gulls doing the same thing, and several people even sent us photos.

One friend even did some searching in the literature and found that quite a number of gull species have been at least occasionally seen eating fruits and berries right off a tree. And people have known for years that herring gulls, just like whimbrels (and the now-extinct Eskimo curlew), will stroll around a blueberry field, picking berries and eating them as quickly as Sal and the bears in that old classic children’s book.

There’s no doubt that the omnivorous (some might even say creative) food habits of many species of gull have allowed them to thrive in many parts of the world and in a variety of habitats and conditions. In fact, gulls occur on every continent. They tend to be least numerous in the tropics, but even there you’ll find a few. Laughing gulls, for example, can be found scattered around the Caribbean. There is one gull species, the lava gull, that occurs only on the Galapagos Islands.

Despite the abundance of gulls along our Maine coast today, by the early 1900s they had almost disappeared as a nesting species in the state, occurring only on the more remote outer islands where they were more protected from the depredations of eggers and feather hunters. New laws regulating bird hunting and the efforts of the early Audubon society wardens and sanctuaries eventually resulted in the rebounding of gulls, terns and other seabird populations.

This time of year, we’re often encouraging folks to look to fruit trees for rare irruptive species that move south some winters, presumably due to lack of adequate food supplies in their northerly range.

We still encourage you to do that, it’s just that now, you might also keep an eye out for species you might sooner expect to see down along the rocky shores: gulls.