Why would Utah adopt an official bird named for another state? And why would a state known for its deserts choose a seagull? Had residents lost their minds?
In fact, Utah’s state bird recalls an episode when Utahns nearly lost their lives. It happened long before the California gull was adopted on February 14, 1955.
The fact that arid Utah adopted a seagull isn’t so strange if you drop the word “sea.” True, most gulls do live near the sea, so they are, in a sense, “sea gulls.” But some gulls live inland, even if they aren’t called “river gulls” or “land gulls.”
Utah may have had genuine sea gulls during the Ice Age. It certainly had a sea. But as the climate became warmer and drier, the seas of the Great Basin began to dry up. As they shrank, minerals dissolved in the water became more concentrated.
With no rivers to carry freshwater into Utah’s dying sea, it became saltier and saltier. Today it is called Great Salt Lake.
Abundant nesting colonies of California gulls were reported as early as 1850 and 1860 in Utah. But the California gull won the undying gratitude of Utahns even earlier.
A Cricket War
In the mid-19th century, Mormon settlers were beset by a natural disaster they never could have imagined. Hordes of crickets appeared, devouring the crops they had worked so hard to grow!
The “cricket war” erupted in 1848. The Mormon pioneers would have been defeated if not for an unexpected ally.
From Utah’s sunny skies, flocks of gulls descended on the ravenous insects, like feathered angels. In 1892, Orson Whitney wrote,
“When it seemed that nothing could stay the devastation, great flocks of gulls appeared, filling the air with their white wings and plaintive cries, and settled down upon the half-ruined fields . . . All day long they gorged themselves, and when full, disgorged and feasted again, the white gulls upon the black crickets, like hosts of heaven and hell contending, until the pests were vanquished and the people were saved.”
The Gull Monument
On October 1, 1913, a beautiful gull monument was unveiled in Salt Lake City. It had been designed and executed by Mahonri M. Young, a grandson of the venerable Mormon leader, Brigham Young.
People who had witnessed the carnage in 1848 were invited to speak of their experiences.
Scenes leading up to the coming of the crickets and the arrival of the gulls are pictured in bronze tablets on the four sides of the monument’s pedestal. On the fourth tablet is the following inscription:
ERECTED IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF
THE MERCY OF GOD TO THE MORMON PIONEERS
Large colonies of California gulls breed on inland lakes from Canada south to California’s Mono Lake, Wyoming’s Yellowstone Lake, and Utah’s Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake. The gulls winter along the Pacific Coast and inland in Utah, Oregon, and California.
Adult California gulls measures from twenty to twenty-three inches long. They have greenish-yellow feet, a medium gray mantle, and a bill with an orange spot near the tip of the lower mandible. The outer primary wing feathers are black, tipped with white.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism - 
