The Seagull Thief: Staged or Not?
 Google Earth 3D view of San Francisco Yacht Club. |
 This view is annotated to show roughly where the location from which the camera was stolen, and where it landed in front of the yacht club. |
 This shows roughly the path that the bird flew after it stole the camera. |
 This is the shortest path that the people who owned the camera could have taken to retrieve it. |
A friend of mine sent me the following chat message:
This is cool: http://io9.com/5943316/this-is-what-happens-when-a-seagull-steals-your-videocamera-while-youre-trying-to-film-a-sunset
It's a link to a short story on Gawker's tech-based site io9. The premise is that a couple has a camera set up to film the sun setting. A seagull comes along, steals the camera, flies some distance away, lands, drops the camera, then after deciding it wasn't edible, the bird flies away leaving the camera on a sidewalk. Some time later, the couple performing the filming find the camera.
Even though they don't provide a precise location, thanks to the wonders of the interwebz, I was able to locate where this occurred. They said it occurred around the Golden Gate Bridge. Using that, Google Earth and Bing Maps, I was able to determine that this happened at the San Francisco Yacht Club.
One of the commenters on the io9 article seems dubious about the authenticity of the story. One "Dr Emilio Lizardo" said:
I tend to think it is staged as the odds of the gull not dropping it in the water, leaving it where people can get it, people finding it and it pointing in the direction of the owner(?) running to pick it up are pretty darn long.
When someone said that having a seagull take the camera was well within reason, Dr Lizardo later said:
But did it fly a mile over water and deposit the meal wher it could be easily retrieved?
So was this staged or not? This got me wondering if I could run some basic calculations (being an engineer, after all) to determine if this was within the bounds of reason.
Question #1: Can a western gull carry a GoPro camera? (Or "It's a matter of weight ratios!") I'm going to assume that this is a western gull. The original Youtube video says it was a GoPro camera. It doesn't say which one. I'll assume a basic one (the naked version), which according to the specifications page weighs 5.9 oz with the battery installed. Now, according to Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, the western gull weighs anywhere from 22 to just over 44 oz. Since one of their foods is starfish (which can weigh up to 11 lbs), a western gull carrying a 6 oz camera is very plausible.
Question #2: What is the airspeed velocity of a camera-laden gull? No idea, but since one bird specialist website states that they have an airspeed (unladen, I'm assuming) of 15 - 38 mph, we can use that to help determine if the bird's flight was plausible. Using the seagull's rough flight path on Google Earth, my guess is that the bird flew roughly 250 yards. It picked up the camera (according to the video) at 0:05 and landed at 0:25. This gives an average speed of (250 yards)/(20 seconds) = 12.5 yards/sec. (NOTE: This answers the question Dr. Lizardo asked about, "did it fly a mile". It didn't. Again, my calculations say it flew about 250 yards.) Since there are 3600 seconds in an hour and 1760 yards in a mile, this translates to a speed of (12.5)(3600)/(1760) = 25.5 mph. If that "bird specialist" website is accurate, then 25.5 mph is well within the realm of speeds it could achieve. (Yes, I realize I'm not taking into account either the acceleration after stealing the camera nor the deceleration when it landed. I'm looking at rough numbers, not n-th degree precision here.)
Question #3: Could the video have been doctored? I'm not a video expert. Therefore, I'll say, "I don't know." I will say that the only weird part about the video occurs at the 0:44 mark. At that time, you'll see an instant change in the shading along the wall in the background. My guess is that it took them several minutes to find the camera. Or it may have been that they had to get permission from the yacht club to come onto their porch. Whatever. Anyway, I think they didn't want to bore everyone with the several minutes of nothing happening, so they just cut that part out. Note that there's no change in either the position or angle of the camera. Just an instant change in the background lighting.
Question #4: Could they have run that far in the 30 seconds it took them to find the camera? This was a question on the actual Youtube site for the video. The question posted by "ThorMexico" was:
So you are an eagle and an atlete? How in hell could you follow the damn thing trough the sea with your eyes and then get there in less than 30 secs?
First, as I said, the bird flew roughly 250 yards. But the bird took the long way around. According to my calculations, the people only had to run about 150 yards. Second, it wasn't 30 seconds. The bird stole the camera at the 0:05 and the woman who grabbed it didn't reach it til about the 0:53 mark. That's 48 seconds. That corresponds to a speed of (150 yards)/(48 seconds) = 3.13 yards/sec = 6.4 mph. That's barely above a fast walking speed. But as I pointed out in the previous paragraph, I think they cut out a large slice of time in the video. Which means they actually took a lot longer to get to the camera than is shown in the video. In other words, yes, the distance they travelled in the time they had, even if the video did not have a section cut out, was well within the bounds of human ability.
My final analysis: I see absolutely no evidence that this was staged. Everything you see in the video has evidence that is more than plausible, in my opinion.