Wow, that looked dangerous. Lucky that it didn’t hit him (at least it doesn’t look like)
A customer of mine had a seagull go through the windscreen, hitting him on the side of his head with enough force to break off the earcup of his headset. My only birdstrike was also a gull but luckily it hit the windscreen where it meets the wing root ( C172 ). It was a hot summer day and the guts were really minging 30 minutes later.
I have become more careful over the last few years, after some stories of local fellow aviators colliding with seagulls over here. Even relatively slow helicopters hit them now and again (rotor blade replacement, expensive!). So I slow down and look out, not only for traffic.. Have only had two strikes with smaller birds, not on the canopy. One at 4.000 ft, not during migration season, so that came as a surprise. Birds tend to duck down when you approach them, so the best strategy is to pull up if a collision seems likely. This also decreases the changes of it hitting your windscreen. Interesting is flying in the mountains here. The local large predatory birds done seem to care about you at all and don’t evade. They seem to think they are the boss, and rightfully so maybe!
An unidentified bird hit the middle of my windscreen at around 3500 ft as I was on my way back from my IR skills test. Luckily the TB20 is made from strong stuff, and the screen is angled back, so it bounced off leaving just a streak of poo up the screen. And another on the pilot’s seat – just before the strike I had been trying to reacquire a glider I had lost sight of, so the noise of the collision nearly scared me to death!
I very nearly hit a pelican while in the circuit at Galveston in Texas. It loomed very large in the windscreen. I’m sure my mind was magnifying it, but it did look terrifyingly close (I’m sure a pelican would go straight through the screen of a C172)
Presumably that would have landed you with an enormous bill? 
In my line of work (ATC) we don’t like seagulls at all. In airports very close to the shore (LGMT, LGSK and practically most of the airports in Greece) they tend to sit on the runway, generally when the runway is relatively hotter than the surrounding area. They, as well as crows, may fly over the runway and drop urchins, walnuts etc. in order to break them…
Seagulls, being colored grey and white, are extremely difficult to spot from the Control Tower.
Seagulls are also very slow in realizing that an aircraft is approaching, and when they do realize, they tend to fly away (!) and parallel (!) to its track.
Crows on the other hand are very clever and leave the area soon.
The sounds that the follow me car can play are a combination of Star Trek guns, predator sounds etc. and they are relatively effective.
Of course an aircraft is not cleared to land when the runway is “contaminated” like that, at least that’s what I do.
A bird nearly hit my aircraft a couple of months ago, but I only saw it during the debriefing (GoPro recording). I was flying relatively low.
As a prequel to my qualifying cross country, my instructor suggested we fly down alongside the cliffs of Hoy. He’d been before but presumably in a different season – it was visually akin to the star-trek credits only with seagulls whooshing past instead of stars. A move further away from the cliffs and it all felt much safer.
