By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
Temperatures near Minneola ranged from 59 to 77 degrees on Jan. 31 through Feb. 3 - hardly arctic weather. And yet on Jan. 31, Stan and Christi McMillen spotted a Ross's Gull on their property in southern Ford County. The birds typically spend most of their lives near the Arctic Ocean. Mike Rader, Wildlife Education Supervisor for the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, said that's why more than 100 visitors from places like Georgia, Texas, and New Mexico flocked to southwest Kansas to see the bird.
"Typically, if you want to see one you need to book a trip to Alaska, Hudson Bay or somewhere in Northern Canada to actually go and try to tick that bird off your life list," he said, "or you chase them when they get down here this far."
The Jan. 31 spotting is only the second recorded instance of the species in Kansas, with the first at Tuttle Creek in January 2009. In the last decade, only 11 of the birds have been documented in the continental United States. Experts are unsure why the gull ended up in Kansas. Unusual weather patterns often play a role.
"With vagrants like that, it's really hard to tell why they end up where they do end up, but there was sort of a polar vortex that was going on prior to this bird showing up so it's certainly possible," Rader said.
Unfortunately, the special appearance in Kansas did not have a happy ending. The bird was found deceased on Wednesday and collected for a necropsy. Several factors could be at play, including high hunting traffic in the area, diet or environmental considerations, or avian influenza.
"From what I've heard about that species, they have a fairly specialized diet where they're at," said Rader. "During the summertime, they'll eat small insects and little fish and things like that. Obviously, there was none of that available out at the playa it was at by Minneola, so it was scavenging snow goose carcasses."
Once the necropsy of the bird is complete, it will likely become a specimen at the Museum of Natural History at the University of Kansas. The Ross's Gull is one of a handful of rare birds to be spotted in Kansas recently. In October 2023, an American Flamingo was spotted in Kansas for just the third time. A northern finch called a brambling was spotted in Abilene a couple winters ago. A slaty-backed gull was photographed at Cheney Reservoir earlier this week for the first-ever recorded observance of that bird in Kansas.