Sea Gulls and Crickets

DESCRIPTION: Famine threatens Mormon pioneers in the winter of 1849; spring brings new shoots, but crickets sweep down "like fog on a British coast." The pioneers battle them in vain, but flocks of seagulls arrive and devour the crickets; the harvest is saved
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1952 (recording, L. M. Hilton)
KEYWORDS: rescue farming harvest disaster animal bird bug pioneer settler
FOUND IN: US(Ro)
REFERENCES (4 citations):
Fife/Fife-SaintsOfSageAndSaddle, pp. 322-324, "Sea Gulls and Crickets" (1 text, 1 tune)
Cheney-MormonSongs, pp. 76-78, "The Seagulls and the Crickets" (1 text, 1 tune)
Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest, p. 245, "Sea Gulls and Crickets" (1 text, 1 tune)
ADDITIONAL: Richard M. Dorson, _Buying the Wind: Regional Folklore in the United States_, University of Chicago Press, 1964, pp. 527-530, "The Seagulls and the Crickets" (1 text)
Roud #10833
RECORDINGS:
L. M. Hilton, "Sea Gulls and Crickets" (on Hilton01)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Is the Story True" (story of the Crickets and Gulls)
NOTES [417 words]: Dorson includes an account of this supposedly-historical event. But he also notes that "Extraordinary swarms of birds" is a folklore motif common enough to earn the Thompson classification F989.16.
Cheney notes that crickets are well-documented in Utah, but that the coming of the seagulls mentioned in the song are not documented.
I had thought the story impossible because the Rockies generally aren't gull territory, but the area around the Great Salt Lake is an exception. Herring Gulls winter there, although they are not likely to be found in summer, and California Gulls are there all year. In any case, there are other birds much more likely to go after swarms of crickets. (But I doubt there were any ornithologists among the Mormons to identify the birds they saw.)
Despite all those cautions, Reeve/Parshall, pp. 110-111, say "The 'Miracle of the Gulls' refers to three weeks in June 1848, when flocks of seagulls ate the crickets that were ravaging the Mormons' first crop in Utah. In late May, what are now known as 'Mormon Crickets' -- actually a type of katydid -- began attacking crops in enormous migratory bands.... More than 4,000 Mormons desperately needed to save their harvest, since they had little reserve food.... In June, large numbers of seagulls... began eating the crickets." The entry does admit that not every witness reported the "miracle," and that gulls have been known to eat crickets in years other than 1848.
Bushman, p. 49, report the incident as fact, say that many considered it "a great miracle," and add that "a bitter joke had it [that the crickets] looked like a cross between a spider and a buffalo." They add that "the stately white birds have ever since been considered special friends to the Mormons."
The fact that Bushman refers to the gulls as "stately," and that other song about this incident, "Is the Story True," starts with a reference to a "gentle seagull," would seem to prove that the people involved had never met an actual seagull....
The one thing that seems certain is that the Mormons survived, and that the miracle many thought they had seen was remembered in Mormon folklore.
There is one additional irony: The Great Salt Lake is drying up, partly due to climate change but mostly due to the water the people of Utah are pulling out of the tributary rivers to grow crops. Those waters support the ecosystem which keeps the birds alive. The Mormons, by their faming practices, are killing the birds which (allegedly) saved their farms. - RBW
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