Edition:
February 2, 2007
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It was January 9 this year at the end of the last unusually warm day before the current cold spell blew in when I saw them, heads tucked back and massive beaks preceding them like Jouster’s lances.
There were 10, bunched in a group, gliding along like so many sky-ships, north over Treasure Island. They were the first White Pelicans I had seen this winter. I lost sight of them in the twilight – then they reappeared in a single line heading south and down, presumably to settle on the water.
Oh, a wondrous bird is the pelican! His bill holds more than his belican. He can take in his beak Enough food for a week. But I’m darned if I know
how the helican.
Dixon Lanier Merritt (1879-1972)
There are eight species of these big-beaked beauties scattered around the oceans of the earth. Most of them come in shades of white but there are also brown and pink. They are primarily seafood eaters, although I witnessed a startling exception in a video once; more about that later.
Pelicans feed in two ways: Brown pelicans, native to our east, west and southern coasts, dive from the air to capture their prey. The only other pelican to do this is the Peruvian, a close relation to the Brown pelican; the Peruvian ranges down the South American coast from Peru to Chile. All other pelicans tend to forage in swimming groups, scooping up prey as they move along.
Myriad sea birds forage along California’s coast including, among many others, Shearwaters, Sandpipers, Gulls, Brants – and Pelicans. To feed, a Brown pelican glides along just outside the surf line with its beak pointed down. This means it is hunting. Spotting a fish, it banks abruptly and dives steeply toward the water. Underwater videos show the huge beak opening as it breaks the surface engulfing its unfortunate prey and part of the ocean. Surfacing, the big bird drains the water from its pouch and swallows his catch. American White pelicans, the species that visits Canyon Lake, as well as all other pelicans, paddle in groups on the surface chasing schools of fish ahead of them, then scooping them up in their pouches to feed. That is, that’s how they normally feed. Read on.
These foraging methods have stood Genus pelicanus in good stead for a long time. Their remarkable longevity is written in the rocks; paleontologists have traced the origin of these durable birds back 40 million years. It is probable that a consistent food supply and a proven feeding method accounts for their long run.
Even the smallest family member, the Brown pelican, is a formidable presence in the avian food chain. They rarely have to compete with lesser birds for their share of aquatic bounty. But there are exceptions. Seagulls will often alight in the water near a pelican with newly captured seafood in its pouch. When the pelican opens it beak to expel the trapped water before swallowing, the bolder seagulls will quickly reach in and snatch its meal, literally out of its mouth.
Lest one feels too sad for the pelicans that lose their meals to the seagulls, they are not guiltless in this respect. The last time our Lighthouse Restaurant was open for lunch, Dorothy and I were seated at a window table overlooking Holiday Bay. A flotilla of pelicans, liberally mixed with cormorants, was lazing along feeding in typical fashion; cormorants diving beneath the surface, pelicans occasionally dipping their beaks and heads.
As we watched, a cormorant with a fish in its beak surfaced next to a serenely gliding pelican. Without breaking paddle, the pelican turned its head and quickly grabbed the cormorant by the neck and pushed it under water, holding it there as it continued along its way. In a few seconds the stunned cormorant’s fish popped to the surface whereupon the pelican released his captive, scooped up his easy meal, tipped back his head to swallow his prize, and paddled on. The obviously traumatized cormorant left the flotilla immediately.
And that’s not all. In 1664, the Russian Ambassador gave King Charles II of England several Eastern White Pelicans which he released on Duck Island in St. James Park, London. Descendants of these originals still reside on this storied island along with ducks, gulls, swans, geese, pelicans and pigeons. Some rarer visitors are the golden eye, carrion crows, grey wagtail and shovelers (another duck).
Each afternoon park personnel feed the pelicans a diet of fish, relieving them of the task of capturing their own dinners. Visitors who are invited to watch this daily ritual were shocked last October when one of the Duck Island pelicans, ambling along a path, suddenly snapped up an unsuspecting pigeon in its huge maw – and swallowed it (Google up “Pelican eats Pigeon) – so much for an all seafood diet.
And so it is in highly ritualized nature where creatures are driven by instinct and custom that anomalies sometimes appear. The pelicans of Duck Island never had to dip for dinner in the pond; humans did that for them. And it was humans that attracted the pigeons to the island by feeding them; so maybe a pigeon on the path may not have seemed such a bizarre food item to the pelican. Or maybe . . . well, there are lots of maybes.
Maybe the cormorant was lucky all it lost was a fish.
NOTE: One spring day about 10 years ago, Dorothy and I were traveling south on Highway 395 along California’s High Sierra when we stopped near the ruins of an old gold mining camp called Dog Town. We were attracted to a flock of large white birds circling into a growing column above the highway.
As more and more birds flew into the circle from the direction of Mono Lake, the column grew higher and higher until it contained my estimate of about 200 birds. They were white pelicans. I knew that seabirds often stopped at Mono Lake in their travels, some to feed on the brine shrimp and black flies that swarm in its depths and on its surface, some to just rest on their way to somewhere else.
I assumed these pelicans had been resting on the lake. They couldn’t have been feeding. No fish live in Mono Lake’s alkaline water.
When the last of the big birds entered the circling flock, the top of the column broke away west toward the mountains – and, presumably, the Pacific Ocean 180 miles away as the pelican flies. As the last birds reached the same altitude, they trailed away after the leaders and disappeared in the distance. Spectacular!
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