If you’ve ever seen the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the Sea Grant logo, you’ve probably noticed a gull is part of it. Recently, two NOAA partners seized a chance to give a gull a helping hand. The staffers, Mary Munn, a Geographic Information System contractor with the Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve, and Marie Zhuikov, a science communicator with Wisconsin Sea Grant, rescued a ring-billed gull that Munn noticed was walking listlessly near their office building on Barker’s Island in Superior, Wis.
“It looked like it had a broken wing,” Munn said. “It was holding one wing lower than the other, and it didn’t seem to have the energy to be scared of people.”
After losing sight of the gull for a time, Munn easily captured it and placed it in a box, which Zhuikov drove across the harbor and delivered to Wildwoods, a local wildlife rehabilitation organization in Duluth, Minn. When the bird started getting restless during the ride, Zhuikov turned on a classical radio station, which calmed it. The Wildwoods workers didn’t think the gull had any broken bones — instead, they suspected its listlessness might due to a Vitamin B deficiency.
In any event, Munn and Zhuikov did their good deed for the day. This front-page story from the Duluth News Tribunecontains an update about the gull’s status and an intriguing theory about the cause of the vitamin deficiency.
