'The most insightful commentary on encounters with Ross's Gull comes from Fridtjof Nansen, who wrote in his diary for August 3, 1894, "Today my longing has at last been satisfied. I have shot Ross's Gull." Whether Nansen had articulated this longing beforehand, or whether the statement originated with the benefit of hindsight, is unknown. Nevertheless, the bird clearly excited a sensation of longing, yearning and ambition, that was satisfied, at least momentarily, through killing the bird. Despite his remote situation, Nansen wrote at length about his encounter in his diary: "This elusive, strange and rarely seen inhabitant of the mysterious north, a world to which the imagination alone aspires and of which no one knows its coming or 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. And now it came when I was least expecting it, indeed I was only out briefly on a very prosaic errand. As I sat near a hummock my eyes roamed northwards and spotted a bird glide over the big hummocky rise towards the northwest. At first I thought it was a kittiwake, but I soon saw that it resembled more an Arctic skua."

This was more or less repeated in the travel narrative subsequently written by Nansen, which was widely read, although missing the fact that Nansen had been on "a very prosaic errand."' (113)