(and results)

With about $20 in parts I threw together my rig.

Cheap plastic bowl from Target, a lot of elbow grease since I don’t own an appropriate hole saw. Cheap Chinese fisheye + cheap Nikon>X mount adapter.

The adapter is mounted to the bowl with epoxy putty (not shown) and my X-A3 is affixed to that.

My Gorilla pod is a bit spindly, and I am afraid of my camera dipping into sand. I have a plan.

Shown here loaded with unsalted, unbuttered popcorn, ready for gulls.

Here is the rig attached to a used frying pan. This will keep it low to the ground, and keep the camera (hopefully) out of the sand.

The epoxy putty holding the Nikon>X mount adapter.

Ball head holding the camera in place.

The mounting for the ball head.

There is presently no plan for seagull poo prevention, I will have to deal with it.

I will set the camera to shoot either:
In Intervalometer mode
or
With the moderately crappy Fuji Remote software.
or
Something else I have to brew up, I don’t think it has a cable release (need to look)

Wish me luck. It is 9/29/19, I have a window of time this afternoon, I am trekking to the beach with seagull safe food, my daughter, and the rig to see what I get.

So the bowl configuration was less than ideal. They were mostly at the periphery so no stunning gull shots in the designed orientation (this is why I spent so little $)
Putting the thing on the ground yielded nicer results.

The lens is kind of grody now. Smells like gull.

Careful cleanup

Lessons Learned

Nature is fickle. Individual results may vary.
Gull spit smells awful, I can’t imagine what the other stuff smells like.

I didn’t get the exact result I wanted, but compositing gave me what I wanted.

A nicer camera with a proper shutter release (instead of using an intervalometer) would have saved me time.

The camera survived fine, the lens as well.

There may be merit in an R/C car chasing gulls on the beach, but I don’t think that I need a mechanized tilt axis.

Making a gull pellet food shooter may be simplified by sizing grapes to an appropriate diameter range. The gulls love grapes.

Gulls are wary and will give you about 3 meters clearance.

Gulls are somehow hard to incentivise, I was surrounded by gulls for a 60 meters, but only a few came.

There is an alpha gull that will dominate the show.