Living on Cape Cod, you get used to sea gulls. They are everywhere, chasing fast food bags down the street; dive bombing your wind shield; and stealing french fries from your plate at the seafood hut on the waterfront. I worked at a place where they dropped mollusks and crustaceans onto the pavement to break them open so that they can eat them. Walking into work at dawn, it seemed as though it was raining clams, crab claws, and even conches. Thank god we were given hardhats before we started work. And you wanted to make sure that you parked on the gravel, off the blacktop, or else your car was substituted for the hard surface to drop the critters on. What a mess!
Just like anything else though, not all sea gulls are bad. National Geographic channel had an episode where they talked about a symbiotic relationship that has been built up between a certain kind of gull and a particular pod of dolphins. This happened in the Bahamas. There is a certain pod of dolphins that live much longer than the fifteen or sixteen years that is the lifespan of a normal dolphin. The University of Miami (Florida) researchers followed one bottle-nosed dolphin for 61 years and it is still going strong. It not understood how it works, but the presence of this certain variety of gull, called a Napoleon gull, in large numbers seem to help the pod find food and the gulls will “sanitize” the area after the pod completes eating by feeding on the scraps of fish and shrimp.
Now a Napoleon gull is smaller than normal varieties of sea gull, but has a pure white body with jet black wings. They strut around as if to say, “Hey, I may be small but I am so much better looking than you, Mr. Common Sea Gull.”
Some feral cats found their way on to the island where the Napoleon gulls breed and were wreaking havoc on the population. The Bahamian authorities trapped the cats, but the gull colony had been decimated – there were only 10 to 15 percent of the gulls left. The health of the pod of cetaceans started to decline and there were now several that began to show their age.
The researchers started looking for another colony of Napoleon gulls, so that they could replenish the Bahamian colony. The only colony that they could find was in Newport, Michigan, on the grounds of the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Plant. I used to work at that site and there are still to this day, nesting Napoleon gulls.
There is a spit of land that juts out into the confluence of Swan Creek and the Detroit River current in Lake Erie. There 180 to 200 nesting pairs of Napoleon gulls (but no dolphins) that live on that stretch of beach.
After DNA testing proved that the birds were, in fact, Napoleon gulls and not just look-alikes, researchers started raiding the nests for viable eggs. They hatched the eggs at an elementary school in Monroe, about fifteen miles away.
The birds were raised in an aviary until they fledged at about 16 weeks. Then all 50 survivors were crated up and put into a van for the trip to the airport in Toledo, Ohio. As the research team was placing the crates onto an airplane, the FBI arrested them all and took them into custody.
The charge?
Transporting gulls across state lines for immortal porpoises!
As I think about it, I’m not even sure that “transporting girls across state lines for immoral purposes” is proper charge anymore. Maybe it’s transporting minors across state lines for lewd and lascivious acts, or something like that.
