Seagulls - North American Seagulls And The Navy.

When I was in the Navy I was stationed in Naval Air station

, Pensacola, FL, the Navy had problems with Seagulls flying on the landing fields and endangering the planes landing and taking off. The Navy tried a number of ways to rid the gulls from the airstrips, that is, shooting off fireworks, firing dummy shoot guns and other loud noises that they thought would scare the seagulls away from the airstrips. The thing is that the gulls were using the airstrips as a tool. The seagulls would catch oysters, clams and hard shellfish creatures and fly over the concrete airstrip and drop the shell fish to crack them open. They would then swoop down to eat the shell fish and there in was the problem, there was a high risk they would be sucked into the jet engines and cause engine failures on takeoff or landings; or the planes would collide with them and cause crashes because of structural damage. This was a major dilemma for the Navy, especially NAS, Pensacola was a first stage training for pilots or inexperienced pilots. The Navy finally came up with a solution to solve the human animal dilemma.

What the Navy did was sub-contract an Ornithologist (Bird Biologist) and he evaluated the situation and came up with an ingenious solution to solve the human and animal problem. It turns out that seagulls will not drop their shell fish from the air to the landing strips if they see other seagulls below them. They wont do this for two reasons, one is that they dont want the other seagull to swoop down and eat their sea shell meal when it breaks open and the other is they dont want to harm or hurt another bird of their species. So what the Ornithologist did was have the Navy paint pictures or murals of seagulls on the runways and the problem was solved.

The seagull is perhaps best known as being a scavenger. It is most often seen in large, noisy flocks congregating wherever food is available. They can almost always be found around fishing boats, picnic grounds, parking lots and garbage dumps. Many people consider the gull to be a nuisance, but they actually perform a very valuable service. They are garbage men (sanitation engineers for the politically correct) with wings. They scavenge up great numbers of dead fish and other sea creatures.

Interesting Factoid: The word Larus is from the Greek word meaning ravenous sea bird.

by: Ben Munger

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