BAR HARBOR—For forty years a stuffed gull that had been the possession of Acadia National Park was missing.

People looked.

People sleuthed.

People tried to imagine where the gull might have been, but the gull could not be found.

This month the Ivory Gull was located. She’d been hiding out in a Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife collection.

“A quick drive to Augusta provided the reunion we were all waiting for: a bird in the hand,” Acadia National Park posted on its social media. “Welcome back to Acadia, Ivory Gull!”

The gull is rare, pure white and mature.

“Nearly eighty-six years ago, seasonal park naturalist Maurice Sullivan received a call from Wendall Gilley reporting a small, pure-white gull sitting on an ice-cake near a wharf in Southwest Harbor. It turned out to be a rare-to-Maine, mature Ivory Gull (Pagophila alba). Sullivan asked for it to be ‘collected’ (shot) and a local fisherman obliged. The specimen was mounted and ‘added to the collection at Acadia National Park.’ Except, sometime over the next 40 years, the gull seemingly flew the coop—and left no trace—until a series of memos were recently discovered suggesting the specimen had been transferred not once, but twice, to different repositories in Maine,” the park wrote.