Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!gatech!prism!vsserv!loligo!sandee
From: sandee@loligo (Daan Sandee)
Newsgroups: rec.birds
Subject: Re: Green Gull?!?
Message-ID: <190@vsserv.scri.fsu.edu>
Date: 12 Sep 89 23:12:33 GMT
References: <1916@ucsd.EDU>
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Distribution: usa
Organization: Supercomputer Institute, Florida State University
Lines: 30

In article <1916@ucsd.EDU> zz96sr@net1.ucsd.edu (Steve Rusk) writes:
>
>
>     You might think I'm crazy, but.......
>     I was camped out near Lee Vining, Calif., about 2 miles from Mono
>Lake.  The guy in the campsite next to me had been fishing and was feeding
>the sea gulls fish entrails from cleaning his fish.
>     Three gulls (California or Western?) were perched on a rock, waiting
>for handouts.  Two of the gulls were pretty normal looking.  The third
>was GREEN!!  About the color of a package of Wrigley's Doublemint gum.
>     The color was uniform -- even the feet.  It was a little darker under
>the wings.
>     The most believable explanation I've heard is that it was done on
>purpose for tracking reasons -- sort of like banding.
>     Anybody heard of this practice?  Honest; I only had one beer!

I have seen a green gull once myself (and it wasn't sitting on top of a
pink elephant either). The color didn't look very synthetic, and then I
noticed that the scum on the water edge was a similar color. So I concluded
it had been bathing in dirty water. I didn't go and investigate, it looked
too disgusting. But it (the dirty scum) might have been algae rather than
chemical. If you can get that kind of algae soup in salt water. I forget,
but I think it was on the Atlantic coast of Florida some years ago.
If your gull was too synthetic a color, though, it may have been through
direct human action, meaning, they colored the gull rather than just
coloring the water.

Daan Sandee
Supercomputer Computations Research Institute
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL            sandee@sun6.scri.fsu.edu