Absurdity. That's the one word I can think of that accurately describes the day that a Ross's Gull showed up in Chicago... In March...
It was a fairly normal Saturday, and there were reports of a very dapper adult male Harlequin Duck at Gillson Beach in Wilmette from the day before, so Mom, Peter, and I hopped in the car to go see that. At the time, I was full speed ahead with my "Big 7 Months", also known as my attempt to set a Cook County big year level number in just 7 months before I left for college. (Spoiler, I saw 277 only being around for 7 months, definitely a big year level total). Nonetheless, I needed to bag this bird for the year, and also wanted to try to get some good pics of it.
40 minutes later, we were rolling into the parking lot at the beach at Gillson, ready to see one of the best looking ducks in the entire world. I opened the door, stepped one foot out of the car, and saw a text come in to the Cook County Bird Chat on GroupMe asking about a weird gull. I instantly opened the chat and was blasted by a photo of a clear as day Ross's Gull. Panic ensued, we literally sprinted out to the beach to see if the Harlequin Duck was still around (it was thankfully), snapped one photo, and sprinted back to go race down to the south side as fast as we possibly could.
The one image of the Harlequin Duck I got turned out to be pretty ok. Absolutely stunning bird.
I feel like every birder reading this will understand when I say this was an adrenaline rush of adrenaline rushes. Every time there's a bird worth dropping every element of my life for, my heart starts racing, I get butterflies in my stomach, and if it's a bird like this, I'll start shaking and have a smile on my face I can't wipe off. That's how much these birds mean. Nonetheless, an hour of (white knuckle) driving down the lakefront later, we pulled up to Steelworkers Park where it was sitting, resting on the breakwall. There are presumed to be somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 pairs of these high-arctic birds left in the entire world, not to mention the fact that they're almost completely unseen worldwide in the month of March. somewhere between 30 and 40 individual birds have ever been recorded on eBird for March, making this record even more absurd.
First view of the Ross's Gull, nothing special photo-wise.
After a little while, the bird got bored of sitting on the breakwall, flew out over Indiana waters, and took off to the north. My good friend Alex took off to the north as well, racing to the south pebble beach at Rainbow Beach, about a mile north of the Steelworkers breakwall. Alex was right, and found it picking small fish out of the surf at the pebble beach. The crowd of 40 people became 50, then 60, and the atmosphere was utterly electric. The air was buzzing with palpable excitement.
A few of us all had the same idea to lay down on the rocky beach as it drifted closer and closer to where everyone was standing with the hopes of getting incredible closeups of it sitting. Rather than that happening, it put on an absolute show for everyone, basically doing laps up and down the beach right at the shoreline. Absurd. What a bird.
