Dan's Feathursday Feature: Ross's Gull

Dan's Feathursday Feature is a regular contribution to the COS blog featuring the thoughts, insights, and photography of Chicago birder Dan Lory on birds of the Chicago region.

Don’t just do something. Sit there.

That’s the title of a book on Zen Buddhism by Sylvia Boorstein. I know, her name does not exactly scream Buddhist monk, but Ms. Boorstein has established her bona fides as someone who knows a thing or two about sitting still. In another of her books—this one a best-seller titled That’s Funny, You Don’t LOOK Buddhist—she explains how Eastern spirituality, with its focus on quiet centering, can enrich the spiritualities of the west.

 It has also enriched my birding, at least the type of birding I enjoy most.

I can’t sit in the lotus position, unless I don’t plan on using my knees and ankles for the next week after. But I like to walk. I walk a lot, and I’ve figured out a way to walk and sit still at the same time, in a manner of speaking. I just keep walking the same park over and over again until the place knows me so well that when I show up it welcomes me, like a seventy-acre zazen cushion. I settle into my regular route. It’s easy to follow now; the park has been kind enough to wear a groove for me exactly where I like to walk. No thinking needed; just walk. I note the previous night’s tracks of the resident coyote. I trip over the same stone that pops up from nowhere every time I pass. I’m slapped in the face by the same mischievous sumac. I climb the same slag heap in the same place. I’m not walking to get anywhere or see anything in particular. I’m just walking the same aimlessly well-scripted course.

But all the “sames” are not really the same each time. The stone that trips me today was under a foot of snow several months ago (still tripped me). The lake that gently licked the shore last week is a raging monster this morning, splattering me with frothy spray as I pass. The sun changes it up, too, playing coolly coy in the winter months, and in-your-face hot during the summer.

Of course, the birds that I encounter on this path offer an endless variety of song and dance. Songbirds, waterfowl, raptors, gulls—they change with the season, or even with the day. In March the bushes that held a dozen American Tree Sparrows yesterday are dripping today with Song Sparrows and Fox Sparrows. It seems the American Tree Sparrows have yielded the field to the spring/summer crowd. On a summer morning the Indigo Bunting greets me as usual in the honey locust, but he seems nervous today. Then I spot the Cooper’s Hawk perched three trees down. Hang low, Mr. Bunting! (I hope that’s not your mate or one of your children in that hawk’s bulging crop.)

It's the same old stroll, but no day is just like the other, and there are always new things to learn. Exactly because the route is so familiar, any change from the normal really stands out. And small things I didn’t notice the first time—or the five hundred-first time—eventually make themselves known to me, just by dint of repetition. The naturalist John Burroughs was right: “To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.”

And every once in a while there are earth-shaking surprises that swoop in out of the blue, literally. I don’t go looking for them, but I am thrilled when they come.

March 11, 2023 was one of those days. It was a gray day, appropriate for the twelfth anniversary of the horrific tsunami that swept away the city of Fukushima. With Lake Michigan on my left, I walked the rocky shore, mindful of how unpredictable any large body of water can be, and grateful that tsunami is not on Chicago’s list of worries.

And then arrived a gull. It swooped in over my left shoulder and flew in low circles in the corner where the park’s south breakwater meets the shore. Occasionally it dropped to the water to snatch something stirred up by the roiling waves. This gull stood out because it was smaller than the local Ring-billed Gulls resting on the breakwater. And instead of the soft gray back of the locals, it sported eye-catching black markings on the upper side of its wings in the shape on an “M.” I knew I was looking at something out of the ordinary, but it took me a while to understand exactly how extraordinary this bird was.

It's a long story, and the telling takes longer than the event itself. Maybe some day over a beer or a cup of tea I’ll bore you with all the details. For now, I’ll channel my inner Joe Friday and give you just the facts: With the help of a field guide and a string of frantic texts from friends in the local birding community who know much more about gulls than I ever will, we confirmed that I was looking at a Ross’s Gull.

It was a long way from home—more than 3,500 miles as the gull flies from its normal range in the Arctic region north of Alaska, stretching west across northern Russia and east to Greenland.

It acted like it belonged here.

As it spread its wings against the gray sky, dipped down to forage in the gray waves, and rested occasionally on the gray cement breakwater, this little white and black visitor transformed the nondescript morning into a scene beyond description. Within an hour, dozens of birders gathered to watch it forage and rest, forage and rest. There was a moment of panic when it flew out over the lake and did not return. Veteran Chicago birders feared a repeat of the last time a Ross’s Gull was seen in Cook County a decade ago. That bird made a brief cameo at a northside park and was spotted by only one birder before disappearing and not being seen again.

Fortunately, this bird decided to stick around for act two. It moved a mile north to the beach at the north end of the park. The birders followed, where they were treated to a close-range display of acrobatic aerial maneuvers and wild wave surfing. Birders were in heaven. Their numbers swelled to over a hundred. Shutters clicked. Fists bumped. Texts and photos flew like Snow Buntings on a winter field.

To appreciate the excitement, consider exactly how rare this was. In any year, if even one Ross’s Gull is seen anywhere in the continental U.S., it’s considered a banner year. You have to go back to 1978 for the last time a Ross’s Gull visited Chicago and stuck around for more than one person to see. 1978! That’s the year the Space Invaders video game came out, and the Cubs still had 38 years to go before ending their 108-year World Series drought.

The rarity of the encounter was not the sole reason for the excitement. The Ross’s Gull is a beautiful bird that is thrilling to watch. Its wings are narrow and long, and it has a bouncy flight that makes the nearby Ring-billed Gulls look lumbering in comparison. When it rests on the water, it doesn’t just float. It sits daintily, as if trying to let as few feathers as possible come in contact with the water. To top it all off, its small head and tiny bill make it just plain cute—more like a dove than a gull. It’s not fair that Alaska’s north slope keeps this bird to itself, and only sends one occasionally to the lower forty-eight as if to show us what we’re missing.

On March 11, the Ross’s Gull hung out at that beach almost until dusk. Three days later it was found again, cruising the shoreline at the same park. Then one day after that it put on a four-hour show near the breakwater where it was first spotted. As of this writing, it has not been seen again.

It takes a while to get back to normal after being visited by a rare creature like the Ross’s Gull. I continue walking the park, as always, but I have to admit that it was not easy to get back in the groove. The normal park now seemed exceptionally normal. For a week I felt that I was not so much walking the park as attacking it, like a man bent on squeezing from it another surprise. All that stuff about “seventy-acre zazen cushion” and “aimlessly well-scripted course” was replaced with “Gimme another shot of rarity-induced adrenalin!”

The regular path and the regular birds of the park brought me back home. The resident pair of American Kestrels cruise the lakeshore, as usual, probably relieved that there are fewer people around now. The Eastern Meadowlarks are back in force, with their thin whistle song and chattering call. Male Red-winged Blackbirds are staking out their territories, and one female has already showed up. And the arrival of the first Grasshopper Sparrow of the year is just a few weeks away. That stone tripped me again yesterday, the sumac slapped me, and the sun rides a bit higher every day. It’s a wonderful space, and I look forward to learning something new today by taking the path I took yesterday.

Let’s be clear. I’m not expecting my regular zen-walks of my favorite park to bring me enlightenment or ecstatic visions of heavenly wonder. In fact, if I’m blessed with good health enough to carry on these walks for another twenty years, I can be certain of one thing only at the end: I’ll be twenty years older. But across those years there will be moments when—like my encounter with the Ross’s Gull—I will feel like I died and went to heaven.

That’s good enough for me.