MARQUETTE — “It’s been headed this way since the world began, when a vicious creature took the jump from monkey to man” – Elvis Costello

As the hectic pursuits of workday living would have it, I found myself sitting in my vehicle in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant, waiting for some kind soul to walk out to me to bring me my order – with fries fresh out of the fryer.

The wait was a little longer than anticipated.

So, I began to spend the time watching a ring-billed gull that stood in the grass a short distance off the edge of the parking lot.

The bird stood motionless for a time with its head cocked, like a robin does when it stands listening for worms.

The gull then moved slowly toward the blacktopped surface of the parking lot, dragging its right leg, hopping forward.

Seeing this, I immediately felt sadness for the bird.

As human beings, most of us sympathize with those suffering or the less fortunate among us whether they are other humans, animals or even plants.

The passenger side front window of a vehicle parked two spaces away opened and a boy sitting in the car tossed a small handful of French fries out of the car onto the pavement.

In an instant, the gull raced over to the fries, picking each one up in its gaping mouth, as though it was racing to outcompete other birds for the quick and easy meal.

There were no other birds around.

As soon as the gull had gulped up all the fries, the flurry of activity stopped abruptly, and the gull walked back to the grass.

This time, there was no hampered gait, no difficulty in moving ahead.

I asked myself, “What just happened?”

I replayed the scene in my head.

A realization then came over me slowly.

Had this gull pretended it was injured in hopes of manipulating the person in the car to throw some food toward it?

Yes. I believe it indeed had.

That was something I had never seen before.

It was quite incredible to witness.

I had to see it again to believe it.

So, I went back to watching.

I kept thinking that I must be mistaken.

After a few seconds, the bird again began to hop and drag its leg, appearing injured.

Just then, the man from the restaurant brought my food to me.

“Thanks, have a good day,” he said.

“Thanks, you too,” I replied, with an as-yet unrealized thought tugging my attention away from the interaction with the man.

As he walked out of sight, the thought took shape.

I was struck by a notion that in this moment I wasn’t too much different than my friend the gull. We were both hungry, waiting in the same parking lot, relying on the kindness of a stranger to give us food.

I slowly backed out of my parking space and drove away, leaving the gull.

As I did this, I was reminded of another occasion, in another parking lot, at another fast-food restaurant more than a hundred miles away.

This also involved a gull and some fresh French fries.

I had just received my order then too and I was backing out of my parking space.

I was planning to eat my fries as I drove so I took the container out of my bag of food and temporarily placed it on the dashboard until I could get out of the parking lot and onto the road.

A gull landed on my windshield and tried to peck at the fries that it couldn’t reach thanks to the resilience and thickness of my windshield.

It got me thinking that there must be a whole world of unintended teaching and learning interactions going on at fast-food restaurants between gulls and humans.

Back at home, I searched online to see if this apparent gull behavior had been observed and noted elsewhere – the feigning of injury by birds to elicit a feeding response from humans.

Indeed, birds have been known to do this.

I watched a video clip of three young crows pretending to be injured, lying on the ground with their wings spread out after having seen a hurt bird being fed by a human.

It’s easy to imagine that human instincts would favor injured birds when feeding, rather than healthy birds more able to gather food on their own.

One English study I read about determined that gulls actually preferred to eat food first touched by humans.

The bird observed most often feigning an injury – in this case, a broken wing – is the kildeer, a plover that uses the technique to lure humans and other would-be egg and chick predators away from its nest.

Speaking of crows, most people are aware of the significant smarts of these birds.

Over the past year or so, I have watched a family of crows in my backyard. I’ve seen that adults teach the young birds how to look for food.

One technique I have seen them employ is marching in a line across the breadth of the yard looking for bugs or other food in the grass. They line up like they are on a grid search and start walking.

Another technique I’ve often witnessed is crows standing beneath a suet feeder waiting for crumbs to be dropped by grackles, woodpeckers, chickadees and nuthatches that peck at the fat and seed mixture.

Have you ever seen a crow perched on a stationary suet feeder, eating like a woodpecker?

I hadn’t, until last week.

Perhaps doing so after watching other birds, one of the crows in our yard has begun landing on the suet and seed feeders to eat, acting in behavior I wouldn’t expect to see from crows.

There is only one of the three or four crows doing this that frequent our yard.

This morning, I saw the bird hanging upside down, like a nuthatch, on our seed-block cage. Again, this is so fascinating to me.

I have also seen animals other than birds behave in a way that indicates they may have been watching humans or other creatures different from themselves.

I was out trout fishing a few years back and I had followed a creek down to a culvert crossing at a gravel road.

On the upstream side, just before the culvert, there was a sea lamprey dam.

From the pool beneath it, the creek moved quickly over some boulders and crashed into the culvert.

I decided to walk up the embankment and cross the road, rather than walk through the dark and perhaps treacherous culvert.

As I was about to cross the road. I stopped to wait for a vehicle approaching the crossing from a hill to my left.

I noticed some movement in the tall grass beside a guardrail off to my right.

At first, I didn’t see anything.

Then, I spotted a river otter with three pups, kind of crouched behind a guardrail post, waiting, and seemingly hiding, while the vehicle rattled down the dusty road.

As soon as the vehicle went by, the adult otter snaked across the road quickly with the pups following. I walked across too and went to the bridge rail on the downstream side of the culvert to see where the otters went.

There they were, swimming and diving in the rapids, with one of the otters on its back. The adult sniffed loudly into the air.

With the otters in the river, I didn’t think it was safe for me to cast. So, I stood and watched them for a few minutes until they were finished playing and they swam farther downstream.

It was clear to me that they were used to crossing the road and used to looking and waiting for cars to pass before they did.

They had taught themselves to do this, either inherently sensing the danger of vehicles, experiencing this in the past or were taught the technique by an adult otter.

Potentially, the otters might also have learned how to watch and wait for cars by observing groups or individual humans doing the same thing.

Nowadays, the idea of watching birds and other animals for educational value is an activity that is not as prominent as it once was.

When I was a kid, whether you were a young chippy trapper, frog or turtle chaser or a garter snake handler, an adult hunter sitting in your deer blind or a mom or dad, grandpa or grandma feeding birds off the front porch or outside your window, you were more than likely a keen observer, student, and many times, even a documentarian of animal behavior.

I’ve learned plenty over the years watching nature and all the creatures it contains.

I am very happy that I have not lost my childhood fascination with being a watcher, learner and discoverer.

It became a way of life for me early on.

Today, it’s a comfortable activity as regular as talking or breathing – even, I guess, in the parking lot of fast-food restaurants.

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Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.