Is it possible that the Utah legislature designated "The Seagull" as the
state bird? Presumably the choice of state bird is to commemorate gulls
that saved early Euro-American (Mormon?) settlers by eating swarms of
locusts that were ravaging their crops. Somewhere I read that the precise
species is not a matter of recorded history (though some have made an
educated guess that it was mostly likely to have been the California Gull).

David Wright
dwright at u.washington.edu

On Wed, 13 Mar 1996 JLRosso at aol.com wrote:

> This started off innocently enough. It was mentioned to me at work that a
> certain multi-media encyclopedia currently states that the state bird of Utah
> is the Seagull. I was shocked, embarrassed and outraged all at the same time.
> How could such a terrible mistake be made? Very easy, I was told by my
> office-mates. Not everybody knows about birds, I was told. Thats not the
> point, I protested, this information is easy to get. Why didn't they check
> another source? To prove my point I went into another room where various
> collections of encyclopedias are stored. I looked in five different sets of
> encyclopedias (all 1995) and all five said that the seagull is the state bird
> of utah. I went down to the library and found five more sources, including
> the Columbia Concise Encyclopedia and the Random House Encyclopedia and they
> all stated that the seagull is the state bird of utah. My amazement grew.
> I talked to the fact-checker who is correcting this error. She told me that
> she called up Utah and was forwarded to a "wildlife specialist". She asked
> him what the state bird is, and he responded , the Seagull. (!) She asked him
> what kind of seagull and he finally responded that he thought it was the
> California Gull.
[...]