Four highway hours down the state from our home the sighting of a Ross's gull, ultra-rare in the U.S. Midwest, showed up on Facebook the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Bursting with the exuberant hope that the prospect of my next life bird instills in me I drove, next day, the distance down to Point Douglas, a community just across the St. Croix River from Prescott, Wisconsin. I arrived right at noon. Skies were vivid blue, the air with a nip of late autumn, and predictably a swarm of birders, most, in this phase of my life, much younger than me, swirled just below the Minnesotan end of the river bridge where, on the base of a sunlit abutment, sat the gull, an immature bird already showing the pink tinge on the breast feathers that many an enthusiast might have expected to see only on an adult Ross's.
Soon after I had focused my scope on it, the gull, probably stressed by the gathering crowd, flapped away and beat across the ripples to the Wisconsin shore to lose itself against a riprap embankment. A man who could have been my daughter's age graciously refound the gull for me where it hunkered by crevices in the stone, greyish-white against more greyish-white background but plain to our studying eyes, once it was in focus and crisply defined in viewing light that could not have been better. I could see facial marks, bill and folded wing along one side. People gazed, chatted, joked and enjoyed standing maskless among like-minded strangers and friends in the fresh air; new arrivals were offered assistance from those present, while the gull gradually roused, eased itself to the waterline below the rocks and gulped a little fish.
To imagine: this dainty gull, all alone with no gull neighbors whatsoever, hatching probably in Siberia or else Arctic coastal North America before, for whatever reason, flapping or coasting all the vast latitudes over to Dakota County on Minnesota's eastern state line! Not too much later for the onlookers the bird lifted into air and flew high, back our way, exhibiting the greyish-blue underwing setting it strikingly apart in terms of color from our commoner gulls, and the short wedge-shaped tail, blackish at the tip, that also marks this species. Many of us rejoiced, as I announced for anyone in sympathy with me another gift from the universe and got ready for the drive back north. All birds I've yet to see before, especially if they're accidental visitors, are sacred gifts in my estimation.
Two days later the gull was reported dead on arrival at the Wildlife Rehab center in Roseville, after being collected, listless and grounded, from the same area of riverbank where we'd all stood watching it. The sighting had been the fourth reported for Ross's gull in Minnesota. News of this death smote significantly at some hearts among followers who had gone and seen the gull and felt uplifted at the thought that here to our heartland had come something like an emissary of its kind, driven by the great Unknown on a quest as far-reaching as the Mississippi flyway. In response a birder named Andy Forbes from Dakota County, MN posted an excerpt on a birding listserv from A Year on the Wing: Four Seasons in a Life with Birds by Tim Dee:
"The yellow-browed warbler I saw … had made a mistake, and it is probable that no amount of nurture on Fair Isle could truly rescue it. Vagrancy is a death sentence. Almost all of the rarities that arrive on the island (and almost all vagrants anywhere) will have the same fate. They are wonderful treasures from far away that we cannot keep and cannot save. There is very little evidence that vagrant birds reorient themselves and correct their journeys. It seems likely that the yellow-browed warbler, having gone southwest where it should have gone southeast, would continue this aberrant direction and fly on west out over an ocean that has no refuges, no green skirts, for thousands of miles. That would be the end of it. It would soon be homeless. I was watching a lost child at death’s door."
I was comforted by that reading and sent the poster a note to say so.
