8 September 2009

The gulls wheeled and dipped above the bayside trees, traveling in circles, swooping up, dropping down, zig-zagging left and right.

As passerby asked, “What kind of gulls are those and what are they doing?”

They were ring-billed gulls on fall migration from their inland nesting grounds to their coastal winter zone, and they were hawking insects — some kind of flying ants.

I think of gulls as crab and trash eaters so it was fascinating to see them eating flying bugs.  Then I remembered the story of their relatives, the California gulls, in Utah.

The Mormons arrived in Utah in 1847 to establish a religious community near the Great Salt Lake.  Their first crops were nearly ready to harvest in the summer of 1848 when thousands of Mormon crickets (actually a flightless relative of the katydid, Anabrus simplex) swarmed across the countryside.  These insects eat everything in their path – even their fallen comrades – so the Mormons thought their crops would be lost.  But a flock of California gulls arrived and ate the insects.  The Mormons called this the Miracle of the Gulls and named the California gull the state bird of Utah.

Ring-billed gulls haven’t done enough to be named a state bird but I am grateful they eat flying ants.  Now that I know to what to look for, I see them hawking insects every fall in Maine.  The flying ants swarm and the gulls do what comes naturally.  They eat them.

(photo by Chuck Tague)