Words on Birds: Local club travels to see rare gull

This winter is the 50th anniversary of the bird that put Newburyport on the birding map.

If you visit the Mass Audubon Joppa Flats Education Center in Newburyport, there is a storyboard about that bird. If you push a button, a national news NBC broadcast by Richard Hunt comes on the screen and describes the fervor over the Ross’ gull that was found in and around Newburyport Harbor in the winter of 1975. Hundreds of birders from all over the country came to see this small, rare gull from Siberia and the Arctic.