“They are no longer scared of man at all, and I’m worried that one of these days they’ll make off with a baby,” she said.

Local fisherman say the gulls regularly dive bomb them on their trawlers but they can do nothing as the gulls have been a protected species since 2009.

Instead of culling the birds, the town has used climbers to scale buildings and spray eggs with a mixture of formalin and paraffin to euthanise the chicks and keep the teeming population in check.

However, last year, a council climber was seriously injured after falling off a particularly precarious perch.

A robotic expert at the College de France, the country’s most illustrious university, suggested that Trouville devise a drone to spot seagull nests perched on roofs and buildings. They then swoop over them to spray the eggs with steriliser.

Built by Civic Drone, a company in the Paris area, the device is also protected by a buffer to fend off gull attacks and to keep the birds from being sliced by its sharp blades.

The seaside resort in France has tested an ‘anti-seagull’ drone

“This job takes a lot of time if you do it by hand and the risks of accidents very are high, whereas here it takes two minutes to sterilise the eggs,” Fabien Lanzini of Civic Drone told TF1.

However, the new anti-seagull technique has hit a snag.

France’s League for the Protection of Birds has filed a complaint with French aviation authorities, which has ordered the town to stop using the drone for now.

“A meeting is due in September to get authorisation and I’m convinced this will be a solution going forward,” said Ms Cordier.

France’s problem with “goëlands”, a term to describe larger gulls, still pales into comparison to recent attacks in Britain.

Last month, David Cameron called for a “big conversation” on the issue after gulls killed a Yorkshire Terrier in Newquay, a Chihuahua puppy in Devon and a pet tortoise in Cornwall called Stig.

Mr Cameron told BBC Radio Cornwall: “It is a dangerous one for the prime minister to dive in and come up with an instant answer with the issues of the protection of seagulls, whether there is a need for a cull, what should be done about eggs and nests.

“I think a big conversation needs to happen about this.”

Cornwall pensioner Sue Atkinson was left battered and bloodied after a seagull attack yards from a primary school. She said: “It was like a scene from the film The Birds.”

British MPs recently called for a change in the law to allow the protected status of seagulls to be axed so that their population in urban areas could be better controlled.