Seagulls

[2bnallegory]

Hi all, warm weather is still coming, it has been a cool and wet spring, most uncharacteristic for Utah but all this means is that the grasshoppers are out with plague like proportions. I have a picture, not of grasshoppers although that would have made more sense, but of why the state of Utah has the California seagull as its state bird. It is the story that when the Mormons first settled here there was a plague of either grasshoppers or crickets eating the pioneers crops and the seagull is reported as coming and eating the nasty bugs and thus saving the crops. This is a picture I took while on a walk not far from my house. What you don't see is the massive amounts of grasshoppers in the lawn and climbing up the house. :eek: This is one of the reasons we decided to get chickens, eggs being the other.

[Bachi]

So seagulls find grasshoppers more important than seas!

[2bnallegory]

I believe a steady source of food is a very strong motivator. But lest you think the seagull sadly out of place, we do have an inland sea, the Salt Lake being a congregation point for them but not a source of food as it is too salty to support life beyond brine shrimp.

[KarenB]

The common seagull is found in all 50 states. I'm not sure that any other bird has that distinction. My experience with gulls is that where there is available food, there are gulls. They seem particularly fond of garbage dumps, but eating a plague of grasshoppers is a much more socially acceptable thing to do! :)

[Bachi]

... but eating a plague of grasshoppers is a much more socially acceptable thing to do! :)

and a lot more preferable to having your picnic at the beach invaded. :D

[LaideeMarjorie]

Wow, great photo. It looks like a still from Hitchcock's "The Birds"!!!

I live a few minutes walk from the ocean (well, technically Long Island Sound) and the seagulls down there look like flying turkeys to me. Huge things!

--Marjorie

[Millie]

Wow, that is very cool.