Why a Landlocked Desert State Made the Seagull Its Official Bird

Utah’s state bird is the California gull, and the reason traces back to the summer of 1848, when flocks of native gulls descended on the Salt Lake Valley and ate the swarms of insects that were destroying the Mormon pioneers’ second crop. The event is remembered as the “Miracle of the Gulls.” It is one of the founding stories of settler Utah, it put a seabird on the state’s official rolls in a place 700 miles from the nearest coast, and it is carved in bronze on Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City. It is also a story that the pioneers’ own journals tell more quietly than the legend does, and both versions are worth knowing.

Here is what actually happened, what the record supports, and how a wingless insect and a scavenging gull ended up as two of the most Utah characters in a pioneer drama.

The summer the crops nearly failed

The first Latter-day Saint pioneers reached the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. Their real test came the next year. By late spring 1848, the settlers had a young crop of wheat, corn, and vegetables in the ground, planted in a valley they barely understood, with a hard winter behind them and no margin for a lost harvest.

Then the insects came. Descending out of the foothills in vast numbers, they moved across the fields eating everything green. Settlers tried to beat them back with brooms, water ditches, fire, and anything else at hand, and lost ground anyway. Their letters and diaries record the fear plainly: a second failed harvest could have broken the settlement.

What the pioneers called crickets were not crickets. The insect is Anabrus simplex, the Mormon cricket, and it earned that common name from exactly this episode. It is a shield-backed katydid, completely flightless, and in its swarming phase it can travel up to about a mile and a quarter a day on the ground in enormous marching bands. That is what the settlers faced: a slow, relentless, walking tide of insects that could not fly but could not easily be stopped either.

The gulls arrive

In the middle of that crisis, gulls came. They arrived in large flocks off the Great Salt Lake and began eating the insects by the thousands. One pioneer wrote to Brigham Young on June 9, 1848 that “the seagulls have come in large flocks from the lake and sweep the crickets as they go.” Settlers watched the birds gorge, drink, regurgitate, and go back to feeding, and later found lumps of vomited crickets where the gulls had worked.

To a people who had prayed for deliverance and were watching their food supply disappear, the timing read as an answer. Within a generation the episode had a name, the Miracle of the Gulls, and a fixed place in how Utah told its own origin story.

The birds were California gulls, Larus californicus — a medium-sized gull, roughly two feet long, that nests inland across the Great Basin and is a familiar sight over the Great Salt Lake to this day. Anyone who has watched gulls trail a tractor across a plowed Utah field has seen the same behavior that saved the 1848 crop. The birds were not doing anything unusual. They were eating an easy meal.

What the traditional story leaves out

The Miracle of the Gulls is a real event with a large body of belief built on top of it, and Latter-day Saint historians have been the ones doing the careful sorting. Their corrections do not erase the story. They sharpen it.

First, the gulls were already here. Records that predate the pioneers show gulls, including California gulls, living around the Great Salt Lake year-round. The birds did not appear from nowhere; they came from the lake a few miles off, as they still do, drawn by a sudden abundance of food.

Second, the crickets did not eat everything, and the gulls did not fix everything. The 1848 crop was hit by three enemies at once — frost, drought, and the insects — and the gulls only addressed one of them. The pioneers still lost a real portion of that harvest. They did not starve, and the birds genuinely helped avert a total collapse, but “the gulls saved the crop” flattens a messier season into a single clean miracle.

Third, and most striking, the pioneers’ own contemporary records are strangely quiet about the birds. In 1970, historian William Hartley published a close study of the 1848 “cricket war” in the Utah Historical Quarterly and found that many of the settlers who wrote about the cricket plague in their journals, diaries, and life histories did not mention the gulls at all. Modern historians, among them Steven Harper and Casey Griffiths, describe the account as one that was oversimplified and heightened over the decades until it took on legendary shape. The dramatic single-event miracle largely took its familiar form in later retellings, not in the diaries written that summer.

And the crickets kept coming. The gulls returned to feed in the years that followed because the settlers kept fighting insects for years after 1848. This was not a one-time deliverance. It was the first and most famous round of a long agricultural struggle.

None of that makes the birds less important to the people who lived it. The gulls did come, they did eat crickets by the thousands, and the settlers who watched believed they had witnessed help arrive exactly when it was needed. What the historians add is honesty about scale and memory, which is a better foundation for a state symbol than a tidy legend.

From miracle to monument to state bird

The story earned its permanent marker in 1913. On October 1 of that year, the Seagull Monument was unveiled on Temple Square: a granite column topped with two bronze gulls, sculpted by Mahonri Mackintosh Young — an accomplished artist who happened to be a grandson of Brigham Young. It is widely regarded as the first monument in the United States erected in honor of a bird. More than a century later it still stands between the Salt Lake Tabernacle and the Assembly Hall, and it is one of the few public monuments anywhere built to commemorate an act of pest control.

The official designation came later. Utah’s legislature named the California gull the state bird in 1955, more than a century after the summer that made it a symbol. Utahns often call it the “seagull,” and the monument cements the name, but there is no sea within hundreds of miles. The California gull is a bird of the interior West, and Utah adopting it is a small, accurate portrait of the whole state: a hard place that took what the land actually offered and built an identity out of it.

Where to see it

The Seagull Monument stands on Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City, near the Assembly Hall on the south side of the block, and it is free to visit. The California gulls themselves need no monument to find. They wheel over the Great Salt Lake, follow plows across farm fields up and down the valleys, and work the parking lots of the Wasatch Front all summer. The next time a flock lifts off a mowed field in Salt Lake or Utah County, you are watching the descendants of the birds that gave a desert state its unlikeliest emblem.