LONDON — On a spring afternoon last year, Neil Fraser was walking down the main shopping street in Aberdeen, a port city in northeastern Scotland, when something strange happened. The bacon-and-chicken sandwich he was halfway through eating suddenly vanished from his hand.

The culprit? A hungry bird he hadn’t seen coming.

“The sea gull flew in from behind me,” Mr. Fraser, a manager at the Old Schoolhouse pub in the city, said by phone on Wednesday. The bird knocked down his hand and, before he realized what was happening, it was all over: “The sandwich and the sea gull were both gone.”

Aggressive gulls trying to snatch people’s food, and at times succeeding, have been a longstanding nuisance in Britain, and various solutions have been proposed over the years, including not feeding the birds, holding a stick or umbrella overhead and installing wires on roofs that they use for nesting. The Old Schoolhouse pub even reportedly offered customers water pistols to deflect the birds.

Now, new research proposes a different approach: staring them down.

A study published in the journal Biology Letters on Wednesday by the Royal Society, the world’s oldest continuous scientific society, suggested that making eye contact might be key to fending off herring gulls, a familiar sight in British seaside towns.