I need to pay for satellite tracking services to know where the birds migrate.

Additional Information

The Ross’s gull (Rhodostethia rosea) is a small bird that nests on the Arctic tundra and spends the rest of the year at sea. Discovered by the famous Arctic explorer J. C. Ross in 1822, it attained a near-mythical status among naturalists due to its exquisite beauty, extreme rarity, and puzzling affinity to some of the world’s least hospitable regions. In 1881, when G. W. De Long’s ship Jeanette sank during a quest to reach the North Pole, the ship’s naturalist R. Newcombe saved three precious skins of Ross’s gulls under his shirt, and carried them for months while the starving crew desperately tried to reach safety. The mystery deepened when Norwegian explorer F. Nansen observed these birds flying north, towards the North Pole, from the Arctic coast of Siberia in August 1983. In 1906, during another dangerous expedition, ornithologist S. Buturlin discovered the bird’s main breeding grounds in boggy lowland tundra of northeastern Siberia (see McGhie & Logunov 2005 for a detailed account of the search). Later a few tiny, transient populations were found in Greenland and Arctic Canada. Birds from one of these small populations have recently been found by remote tracking to winter in the Labrador Sea, where they have almost never been observed visually (Maftei et al. 2015). However, more than a century after Buturlin’s discovery, we still don’t know where the birds from the main population that breeds in Siberia spend the rest of the year; that makes Ross’s gull one of the world’s most enigmatic birds. In most (but not all) years there is a large autumn movement of the gulls along the Arctic coast of Alaska, but these birds, presumably of Siberian origin, fly towards Siberia rather than away from it. Sight records off Alaska, Russian Far East and Hokkaido suggest that they winter somewhere in the North Pacific, probably along the edges of the sea ice, but these records are rare and likely involve stragglers rather than the bulk of the population. An alternative theory based on icebreaker transsect data is that they winter in the area between Greenland, Franz Joseph Land and the North Pole (Böme at all. 1995, McGhie & Logunov 2005). In either case, the birds’ wintering area is exceptionally inhospitable in winter, with limited daylight, constant storms and brutal cold. The extreme conditions might explain why the species’ winter distribution is still unknown, but it is hard to imagine how a bird smaller than a dove can survive them at all.