The Visitation

For those who care about such matters the event was as electrifying as the descent of a Martian spaceship. Abed recovering from pneumonia, Paul Buckley, senior scientist for the National Park Service in Boston, promptly got up on hearing the news of the sighting and drove straightway to Salisbury, Mass. Four Maryland enthusiasts drove all night to the site. One businessman winged in from Los Angeles. Friends desperately tried to get word to an expert vacationing in Africa to return at once. As the week wore on, cars with an array of license plates from across the nation flocked to Salisbury. Battalions of observers armed with telescopes, cameras dwarfed by huge telephoto lenses, sketch pads and binoculars took up daily vigils. They lined the sea wall along one side of an estuary of the Merrimack River and the state beach opposite, eyes trained on the mud flats below.

The cause of the commotion was the appearance of a single squat, unassuming, pigeon-like bird called a Ross's gull, which is almost never seen south of the Arctic Circle, and never before in the continental U.S. It was indeed present and, as if on cue, put on a show for the hundreds of bird watchers by feeding three times each day with a flock of Bonaparte's gulls (named after Charles Lucien Bonaparte, an ornithologist and a nephew of Napoleon) making their accustomed annual visit.

How did the bird get so far south? Ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson speculates that it migrated across the top of Alaska to the mouth of the Mackenzie River in Canada, became separated from its own kind and took up with a colony of Bonaparte's gulls in their summer breeding ground, then flew south with them last fall. Or perhaps it is the victim of a gull's version of an identity crisis. Says American Birds Editor Robert S. Arbib Jr. dryly: "He thinks he's a Bonaparte."

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