VAGRANT

by Pepper Trail

This photo of a Ross’s gull, a rare bird generally found only in Siberia, Greenland, Canada, and northern Alaska, was taken Saturday [February 1] in southwest Kansas by Carol Morgan, president of the Topeka Audubon Society. Provided by Carol Morgan to The Topeka Capital-Journal, February 6, 2025. The body of the bird was recovered Wednesday evening, said Laura Rose Clawson, chief of public affairs for the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks.

The explorer Ross (James) ventured to the Arctic
            planted a flag on the North Magnetic Pole
and shot a gull, new to science (1824)—
small, delicate, remarkable for the soft pink blush
on its blood-stained breast—
Ross’s Gull
 
A High Arctic bird, mythical or nearly so still
            in this warming century and so its appearance among us
            —Kansas, January 2025—
was a sensation, and the bird-listers ventured from everywhere
aiming to see this last unknown, or nearly
 
Days later, it was dead, this Ross’s Gull
its body in the strange Kansas snow
end of an errant voyage, faulty spin of the magnetic compass
the disorientation of an unfreezing North, perhaps
 
Natural causes, is the thought
starvation (a goose carcass pecked in hunger and bewilderment)
avian flu (across the world, bewilderment a symptom and then death)
or exposure (the Kansas snow perhaps too strange)
and the birders turned back
the expedition a failure, nothing still to be found
only the known, and the dead

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.