Baseball games provide the perfect feast for seagulls and somehow, they can sense the game is ending so they can start circling for snacks.
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Scott Shaffer is a biological sciences professor at San Jose State University who studies gulls. He said that the gulls can pick up on the smells and the crowd noise.
"I mean who could not go to a ballpark and not smell popcorn and things like that would attract them in." Shaffer said.
Obviously, the birds can notice people exiting the park from flying above but Shaffer assumes the birds are influenced by other gulls in the area.
"Probably what happens is you get a few individual gulls that come and hang out and as activity starts to pick up it attracts more gulls and that brings in more gulls and that just creates further excitement," he explained.
He has been tracking the seagulls for several years and said there are multiple colonies in the Bay Area, the largest is out at the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco.
"There's colonies at Alcatraz as well that are even closer and I suspect that those gulls are the ones showing up at the ballpark," he said.
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