French tourist Nathalie Rollandin was filming the sunset from the beach when the bird snatched her GoPro video camera and flew out over the water.
Luckily for Ms Rollandin, the gull chose to land twenty seconds later on a walkway before dropping the camera. After a few pecks at it, the bird appears to lose interest in its plunder and flies off into the sunset.
After managing to track down her camera – intact and still recording outside a yacht club – Ms Rollardin posted the bird’s footage on YouTube, describing it as “a San Francisco sunset I will hardly forget”.