Brenna notes that 'When the young curator of Bergen Museum, Fridtjof Nansen, arrived in Hamburg in February 1886, he visited the zoological garden, the art museum, and the opera on his first day... The promising student Nansen had been hired as a curator at the museum in 1882, at the age of twenty-one.'

McGhie notes that 'When the Norwegian scientist and Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) first encountered the birds [Ross's Gulls] on his famous Fram expedition, he wrote the following in his diary: "Friday 3 Aug 1894. Latitude 81°5'.... Today at last my longong has been satisfied, I have shot Ross's Gull (Rodosthetia [sic] Rossii), and 3 of them in one day. This elusive, strange and rarely seen inhabitant of the mysterious north, a world to which no one knows is coming and going, is that thing, from the first moment I saw these tracts and my eyes surveyed the lonely plains of ice, I had always hoped to discover."' (101-102)

'Nansen shot and prepared eight specimens of the bird in 1894, when he was on his expedition attempting to drift over the North Pole, frozen into the ice, and then travelling by sled to Franz Joseph Land. Seven of the specimens were prepared as study skins and their bodies preserved in alcohol. The eighth bird, which was headless (he shot its head off accidentally), was also preserved in alcohol. Nansen presented the whole collection to the University of Christiana (Oslo).' (108)

'The most insightful commentary on encounters with Ross's Gull comes from Fridtjof Nansen... As a seaman, Nansen would have been well aware of the usefulness of gulls as guides to land. He and his companion shot many other gulls and birds of different species for food, so the shooting of birds, which stands out to modern readers, was an everyday act of the party.' (113)

'Two particularly fascinating images are included in Collett and Nansen's account of the birds seen on the Fram expedition, a photograph and a color illustration. The photograph... shows two of the three birds shot on August 3, 1894, a doctored version of a photograph included in Nansen's Farthest North... tidied up for mor "scientific" presentation. The second image... wiuld have been prepared with reference to the study skins Nansen had collected. This illustration is singularly interesting as it shows a young Ross's Gull posed, as usual, in profile in the foreground, sitting on an ice floe; another individual flies behind it. The background shows the Fram with the ship's crew on the adjacent ice. This is very unusual: the seemingly "scientific" illustration incorporates an element of adventure by portraying the men of the expedition, locating them in the Arctic and within the same visual narrative as the bird.' (116-119)