Remembering "The Bird of the Century," a Half-Century Later

On a Sunday afternoon 50 years ago, a remarkable bird was identified in Massachusetts. Within hours, excited phone calls were radiating out across the country. Within days, the bird was featured on national television news and on the front page of the New York Times. Within a week, thousands of birders had come to see what many were already calling “the bird of the century.”

The bird was an adult Ross’s Gull, and its discovery at Newburyport, Massachusetts, established the first record ever in the Lower 48 states.

Up to that time, Ross’s Gull was an almost mythical bird. A small, delicate gull of the high Arctic, flushed with rosy pink and with a narrow black neck ring in breeding plumage, it was known to nest only along the northeastern coast of Siberia. In Alaska, flocks were known to pass Point Barrow in autumn, and some visited St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, but few people had gone to see them at either place. Famed bird expert Roger Tory Peterson had painted Ross’s Gulls a few times, but he had never dreamed of seeing one, nor had most other birders.

That changed on March 2, 1975, when observers noted a different bird among flocks of Bonaparte’s Gulls on the Merrimack River: It had darker underwings and a longer tail, and at certain angles it seemed to have a tinge of pink. One of the birders, Walter Ellison, ventured that it looked like a Ross’s Gull. Under the prevailing wisdom of the time, that was like suggesting it was a dinosaur or space alien. But expert Paul Miliotis soon realized that Ellison was correct. Racing to a pay phone, Miliotis began calling other birders. The frenzy was on.

In 1975 we had no cell phones, no internet, and nothing like a national rare bird alert. But interest in birding had been growing explosively since the late 1960s, partly owing to the founding of the American Birding Association, and birders were making more connections. I was just out of my teens and living in upstate New York, but within a day of the gull’s discovery, friends from five states had called me with the news. At the first chance, friends and I made the six-hour drive to Newburyport, leaving at midnight to arrive at dawn.

The Ross’s Gull performed beautifully that day. Although it wasn’t a new species for me—I was among the lucky few who had seen one on St. Lawrence Island in summer 1973—it was still a thrill. We watched it move around the area, swooping over the water, walking daintily on the mudflats. But as the hours passed, it struck me that we were witnessing not a bird story, but a human one.

Never before had a single bird in North America had such a human impact. By dawn on the morning after its discovery, the hundreds of birders on the scene included Roger Tory Peterson, who had driven straight up from his home in Connecticut. Scores of people called in sick and skipped work that day, and some reportedly got in trouble later when they were spotted in news footage. On the New York City Rare Bird Alert—a taped message that anyone could access by calling a certain number—Tom Davis recorded a special update about the gull, starting the tape with music from “Echoes” by Pink Floyd. Peter Alden of Massachusetts Audubon was in Tucson when the news broke, and he flew home immediately. Not only did Alden get the best flight photos of the rare visitor (see above), he also personally showed the gull to James Schlesinger, who was a birder as well as the U.S. Secretary of Defense at the time. Joe Taylor, who had the biggest bird list for North America at the time, was birding in Africa when the gull was found, but people called him about it anyway. Joe told me later that he seriously considered flying home to see this one bird.

It was a human story, and the headline was that we birders were legion. As the gull lingered for weeks, birders drove in or flew in from all over the U.S. and Canada. Most of us had been involved in little local pockets of birding activity, but now we discovered that we had counterparts everywhere, and we forged vast numbers of new friendships and connections. Birding would never be the same. This bird’s message was that our community was not just local, but continent-wide.

In the half-century since this sighting, we've come to know more about Ross’s Gull range and movements. During the late 1970s, a few were seen in summer at Churchill, Manitoba, on Hudson Bay. Astonishingly, in 1980, three pairs were found nesting there. For a number of years the species was almost regular at Churchill in summer, although there have been fewer sightings since about 2007. At the same time, winter records south of the Arctic accumulated, with sightings as far south as Delaware, Missouri, Colorado, and even southern California. Records in the Lower 48 states recently have averaged about one per year; an individual near Dodge City at the end of January 2025 provided a second record for Kansas. 

Is this Arctic bird really wandering south more often than it did formerly? It’s impossible to be sure, but I doubt it. In the past, when birders were far fewer and few of us carried cameras, when no one expected to see a Ross’s Gull, the same handful of strays in subtle winter plumage could have remained undetected in the vastness of this continent. Consider: The 1975 bird at Newburyport was not officially reported until March 2nd, but later we learned it had been seen as early as January (and possibly in December 1974), and simply not reported because the observers thought it was implausible. More recently, there have been times when a Ross’s was first passed off as a Little Gull—not nearly as rare—and not correctly identified until photos were examined. So I believe strays could have gone unnoticed before 1975.

When a very rare bird is found today, the word goes out immediately, with details and photos flashing around the world within minutes. Birding is vastly more popular now, so throngs of birders may appear. The occurrence of such rarities often makes headlines in the news media. We may take this for granted now, but it reflects a trend that began just 50 years ago