Welsh Dancing Seagull

And you thought Happy Feet was a penguin. Nope! He’s a seagull in New Quay, Wales. This seagull puts Mr. Bojangles to shame, and makes Bruno Mars look like an amateur. Fred Astaire cut a rug with Ginger Rogers, but this little guy doesn’t need or want a dance partner, either.

It’s all for the food. He’s a Welsh busker, tapping out a beat with three-toed feet. A van pulls next to him, and throws out some food. Someone across the street sees what’s going on, and can’t believe their eyes, so naturally they pull out the camera. What happens next must be seen to be believed. It’s a tap dancing seagull! How did he learn such a skill? He may have been born with the talent, but at some point he had to have actually figured out he could do it. Practice makes perfect, as they say.

The world is full of dancing animals, but they mostly occur as trained circus animals and pets. What’s rare is to see such skills in nature. But, wait a minute, there are dancing birds. We even get the phrase “mating dance” from the world of birds, so maybe it’s not so unnatural, after all. Birds of paradise dance; so does the red-capped manakin, black-footed albatross, Western and Clarke’s grebes, Victoria’s rifle-bird, the peacock, the sand-hill crane, and the blue-footed booby are all birds that strut their stuff, like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, just to pick up females of their respective species. You gotta dance to play!

But what we’re seeing here is something completely different. This little guy is doing some weird rapid tapping that we’ve never seen before. It’s funny as all get out. The fact that someone other than the people throwing out the tidbits is recording the phenomenon gives the impression that the little guy is a well-known character in town.

It may have begun something like this: The seagull accidentally or unintentionally tapped his foot multiple times. Maybe he was only shaking off a flea or sand? Someone happened to be walking by, perhaps carrying a sandwich or a basket of fish and chips. Seeing the funny spectacle, the passerby threw out a morsel (hopefully the fish), which the bird instinctively dove for before his buddies, like the other seagull in the video, could reach in time. Thus began a reinforcement schedule, with the seagull learning to associate a funny little soft shoe with food.

He actually does quite well for himself now, I hear. Dancing is good for seagulls. It keeps them out of the town landfill. The day may come when he will have to join an actor’s guild or union, but for now he’s entirely freelance. Let’s give a hand for the seagull, and to the audience that had the foresight to take the video and upload it to our favorite amateur video website. Funny animals and videos, a marriage made in heaven! Or at least a fortuitous combination of good luck. Next time you see an animal doing something funny, however unintentionally, do two things: throw it a bit of food, then take a video of it.