Steller’s Eider. Photograph by Martha de Jong-Lantink.

I taught biology at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, for 48 years and most years included a winter-spring course in field ornithology. I led a great many field trips and my students and I enjoyed numerous memorable experiences with birds, including a sprinkling of truly rare birds, a few of which, to use today’s vernacular, we “chased.” Here are two accounts of those chases and some of what the students taught me, their professor.

In the 1970s and 1980s—until the college got vans or rented buses for class field trips beginning in the 1990s—students needed to carpool for our Saturday field trips. I was concerned for students needing to follow me and possibly making a wrong turn and getting lost. There were no cell phones and GPS did not exist back then. That is why after much thought and no little angst, I skipped taking my class of 19 students to look for the famous Ross’s Gull at Newburyport in the winter of 1975. Saturday crowds and local traffic would have been too much for the class to safely navigate.