Diet and Ingestion of Plastic Debris by Herring Gulls Breeding at Brier Island, Nova Scotia

Bowen Stokesbury-Price¹, Michaela Bezanson¹, Jennifer F. Provencher², Carolyn L. Mallory¹, and Mark L. Mallory^1,*

¹Biology, Acadia University, 15 University Drive, Wolfville, NS B4P 2R6, Canada. ²Ecotoxicology and Wildlife Health Division, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Ottawa, ON K1A 0H3, Canada. *Corresponding author.

Northeastern Naturalist, Volume 33, Issue 2 (2026): 208–216

First published early online: 31 May 2026

Abstract
We studied the diet of Larus smithsonianus (American Herring Gull) breeding at Brier Island, NS, Canada, home to a colony of ~3000 breeding pairs, in 2024 by collecting and analyzing regurgitated pellets. Gulls exhibited diverse prey choices, with considerable amounts of mammal, bird, fish, insect, polychaete, and crustacean remains identified, which was consistent with the known foraging locations of birds from this colony identified in past studies. Gulls also had a comparatively low frequency of occurrence of plastic (16%) in pellets, with no other anthropogenic items (e.g., glass, metal) observed, which differed from other studies on gulls around the Gulf of Maine and eastern Canada. As studies increasingly show negative effects of plastic pollution on biota, we suggest that monitoring of gull pellets at Brier Island is a noninvasive, inexpensive, accessible and useful program to track diet and plastic exposure of gulls in the local environment.

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