The Pelican, Briefly

I used to envy humans for their great anchovy pizzas, and pity them for their lack of wings, but now I just fear them since it seems like you are always cooking up new ways to kill my kind.

Let me explain, I’m a pelican.  More specifically, a brown pelican, Pelecanus occidentalis, as your scientists would say.  I can be found all around the east, west and gulf coasts.  Other species of pelican are found all over the world, except for Antartica.

Have you seen me?  I’m pretty distinctive, with my long bill and webbed feet.  I’ve been told I put on a great show.  With my wide wingspan I love to soar through the air, then dive for fish in shallow waters.  What a major rush!  I have to surface and let the water drain out of my pouch so I can swallow my favorite anchovies.  How do you guys cope just walking around on land?  Boring!

Male pelicans have the life!  Each spring we start building a nest, then puff out our chests, strut our stuff and wait for a suitable female to come along and pick us.  Much simpler than Match.com, no muss, no fuss, no outdated photos.   Me and my partner later take turns standing on our eggs to incubate them for a month or so.

We pelicans have had it pretty good for the last 30 million years or so.  Humans came along with little fanfare 3 or 4 million years ago.  That DDT stuff you cooked up recently almost did my kind in completely during the ‘60s.  How would you like to eat fish contaminated with DDT?  Oh, wait, you and me both were probably unknowingly doing this during that decade, and since then as well.  DDT becomes more concentrated as it moves up the food chain, and its “half-life” in the ocean is 150 years.  Yeah, maybe that crop spraying with DDT was not the best human idea ever – some of the runoff must still be out there.

Just when I was on the brink, when it was proven that DDT caused my eggshells to be too thin to support an embryo, you banned it in 1972.  Thanks, Rachel Carson!  I started coming back strong after that.

Now Ogden Nash, there’s another great human.  A genius.  I thought he did more for pelicans in five lines than you’d think would be humanly possible, so to speak.  Now I’m told that someone named Dixon Merritt, a newspaper editor, is the real author of my favorite limerick.  You can be the judge, I’ll repeat it here for you:

A wonderful bird is a pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week;
But I’m damned if I see how the helican.

You gotta admit, that’s a classic.  I still chuckle whenever I hear it.

So just when I thought all was good again, a new threat emerges: mysterious pelican killings.  What’s that about?

The last several years, hundreds of pelicans have been gruesomely killed in Texas and North Carolina.  Who’s behind it?  Well, in Texas, ninety (you read that right: nine zero) were admittedly killed by a fish farmer who was tired of us sampling his fish.  Hey, what can I say, it was a pretty easy mistake to make.  He didn’t have any signs up warning us off the property!  Lucky stiff got off with probation and a fine.  We pelicans are a protected species and anyone who harms us is violating Federal law.

In North Carolina, along the Outer Banks, there’s no proof, just a lot of carcasses washing ashore, causing suspicions and frustration.  Originally, people finding dead pelicans with broken wings or necks were so shocked they thought that someone must have shot or strangled them.  Autopsies performed recently don’t show that; they categorize the cause of death as “blunt force trauma”.  That covers a wide range of possibilities from contact with electrical wires and towers to entanglements with fishing gear to being hit by a baseball bat.  Somehow human related, in my mind, but please, feel free to prove me wrong.

And now for the good news: a group of volunteers is taking turns walking Topsail Beach, looking for evidence, scanning for birds in distress, taking pictures, hoping to find something that will fill in the pieces of the puzzle in order to solve this mystery.  Called the ‘Seanetters’, they are my new heroes, and the hope of pelicans everywhere.  There’s a $8,500.00 reward being offered for information about these killings and I hope one of you humans earns it soon. 

Have you heard of the use of gill nets by commercial fishermen?  This technique has been banned in many states, although not in North Carolina.  It’s very effective, maybe too effective.  When the fish try to swim through mesh openings, they get stuck and then can’t back out because their gills get caught.  It’s so effective that it can also trap sea turtles, ducks and my kind, too.  They call us “bycatch”.   Another word for “bycatch” would be “dead”.

So I’m here to offer you a truce:  you let me take a few farm fish, limit and monitor the use of gill nets in fishing, and keep your eyes pealed for signs of trouble.  I’ll stick around, keep the great air and aquatic shows coming, and alert you the next time you are about to destroy another habitat, or poison the planet beyond recognition, by actually dying if I have to.  It’s a tough job, but I guess someone has to do it.

Do we have a deal?

Well you’ve been patient with me so I will leave you with a tribute of my own to the late, great Mssrs. Nash and Merritt.   Enjoy!

A strange animal is the human

He acts crazily just because he can

He may think some great thoughts

But doesn’t always connect all the dots

From his brain all the way to his hand.

To view a video of a pelican in flight, click here.


For more info on endangered sea birds and Seanet, click here.


For more info on the effects of gill net fishing, and/or to take action, click here.

Are you fracking kidding me?

 

Hi, it’s me again, Wally, your favorite, not-so-friendly alligator mississippiensis and self-appointed liaison for humans to the gator community.  Hey, I got a good joke for you:

Q: Why did the human cross the road?

A: His GPS told him to!

Haw, haw!  I just about laughed myself sick when my buddy told me that one.

Anyway, I’ve been on the road, touring around, seeing the sights.  Thought I would pop up to North Carolina and check out the barbecue.  Now that’s something I can really sink my teeth into (and I have over 80 teeth).  I can settle your debate between Western and Eastern NC barbecue lovers here right now: it is all good!

And there is another controversial topic I am hearing people talking about here: hydraulic fracturing.  “Fracking” is a process to extract natural gas by injecting water, sand and chemicals under high pressure deep underground.  Isn’t science wonderful?  Well, maybe yes, and maybe no.   Exactly what are these chemicals being used and can they somehow poison our water?  There‘s no requirement for full disclosure of what those chemicals are, and many of you human types are nervous.

Here’s a recap of what I’ve been hearing and my own two lizard licks, for what it’s worth.

1)      Oil and gas companies are pushing to use fracking in order to bring cheap, clean energy to the masses.  Oh, my goodness!  If you believe that one, I have some swamp land down in the ‘Glades I’d like to sell to you (I really do have this land, although it is more under water than some of your human mortgages).  The main concern of oil and gas companies is to make a bazillion dollars this year, and next year, and the year after that.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, so why not just admit it?  Making energy cheaper for you can happen but it’s pretty far down on their priority list, like about the length of Three Mile Island far down.

2)      The fracking process is safe, or can be made safe.  Oh, I wouldn’t bet the farm on that one!  More human humor for you there.  Get it, I wouldn’t bet the alligator’s farm on it.  Never mind, sorry, sometimes I just crack myself up.

There’s no lack of reports detailing problems out there.  And it is not just the number of reports, it is the variety of issues.  Spills and water contamination in Colorado and Wyoming.  Asthma rates three times higher than normal for children in Texas who live in counties where there is gas drilling.  Cattle dropping dead in Louisiana after drinking fluid adjacent to a gas drilling rig.  Nasty chemicals like benzene, thought to cause leukemia, seeping into water supplies at drilling sites in New Mexico. 

Fracking has caused earthquakes, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.  Yes, you read that right, fracking causes earthquakes.  Hundreds in Arkansas and other states, mostly small ones.  A 4.0 quake actually shook Youngstown, Ohio recently and was blamed on the pumping of fracking waste water underground.  The Washington Post newspaper seems to think that is just fine, that job creation and carbon savings justify inevitable, unexpected and possibly unattractive consequences, as they put it.  Say what?   I’ll tell you what would also create jobs: if an earthquake levels a city, there will be more work to rebuild it, after burying all the dead bodies.

My personal favorite report, one that could easily be made into a B-grade horror movie:  a Colorado emergency room nurse named Cathy Behr nearly died of organ failure after she handled the clothes of a drilling worker who had been splashed in a fracking fluid spill.  Ms. Behr recovered, without much thanks to the chemical manufacturer who delayed providing her doctors with the makeup of the fluid.  If you can keep your breakfast down after reading some of these reports, you have a stronger stomach than I do, and I’ve eaten an entire deer before. 

3)      Alternative energy processes are a failure and may never be cost effective.  Are you fracking kidding me?  If you believe that, me and my kind will be taking back this country sooner than I thought.  Life then will be just like back in our glory days of the Cretaceous period.

You gotta give it some time and effort, folks.  And more than that, cashola.  Your government gave out $72 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industries from 2002-2008, but less than one-half that amount, only $29 billion, to green energy companies over the same period.  The discrepancy worldwide is even greater.  Which kind of raises another question, why would you still be providing subsidies to the overwhelmingly successful fossil fuels industries?  It wouldn’t be because they spend oodles on political lobbying ($175 million in the U.S. in 2009), would it?   I’m just sayin’.

Fracking, geez, I’d think about hitting the pause button.  Or even the rewind button.  Hey, maybe you can’t live without oil and gas now but, you also just might want to seriously consider the path by which that would be possible in the future.  It really is all going to run out someday, anyway (unless we do go back to the Cretaceous and bury some more dinosaurs, but I think that is just my own personal dream, however).  I know I can live without it right now, but I can’t do without clean water.  Just the thought sends shivers down my six-foot spine.

Human, this tourista stuff is tiring!  I gotta go find a pond or backyard swimming pool to nap in.  Hopefully one without any benzene in it.  Your hospitality is appreciated!  So I will leave you with a final joke:

Q: Why did the human go out for a drink?

A: His smart phone needed more bars.


For more info on fracking and its potential dangers, click here.


For info on how to contact your elected representative to express your opinion, click here.


For info on other ways to get involved, click here.

It's Wally's World

(How the ancient past may be closer than you think…)

No offense, but I’ve eaten a human before.  Yep, the opportunity just jumped up in front of me and I had to try it once.  Tasted like chicken.  Haw, haw, now that’s funny!  A little “human” humor for you.

Let me explain, I guess we haven’t been properly introduced yet.  I’m an alligator, what your scientists would call an alligator mississippiensis.  Eight-hundred pounds, fifteen feet long, lean and dark green, what’s not to love?  You couldn’t pronounce my real name, so you can call me “Wally”.  Haw, haw, another good one!  You guys anthropomorphize everything, right?  The world revolves around you.

Well here is a little secret for you, some sad and lonely news: it actually doesn’t.  Me and my kind have been around here for some 200 million years, give or take a century.  You, ah, not so much.  I give you some 3 to 4 million years since you crawled up out of the muck.  Barely a flash in the pan, a blink of the eye, as far as I am concerned.  Whooped-di-doo.

200 million years!  Think about that for just a second.  If scales and tails could talk, me and my kind could tell you some stories, for sure.  And you may be the current big Kahuna worldwide but, down here in the Everglades, I rule over everything, as far as my eye can see.

Okay, raise your hand if you think humans will survive to 200 million years.  Seriously.  What kind of odds do you think I could get if I put my money down on that happening?  I’m thinking about a bazillion to one.

Oh, I know, you’ve had some successes.  I give you credit.  The Taj Mahal.  Fine cuisine.  Science fiction.  Indoor plumbing.  I get it, you can do good when you want to.

But it hasn’t all been wine and roses, has it?  No.  The Crusades.  The Holocaust.  Rap music.  Mortgage-backed derivative securities.  That list goes on and on.

See, I think you might sometimes be a little too focused on you for your own greater good.  I’ll give you an example I think you can all relate to.  I call it the “Your Mother doesn’t actually work here syndrome”.  You’re in the office kitchen, heating up your lunch or coffee.  Suddenly you decide that, for whatever reason, your food is really done, so you just open the microwave and take it out, then slam it shut.  Back to the cube!

But do you spend the extra second to hit the “Clear” button on the microwave?  Even if you see that the time remaining is still blinking “00:36”, over and over?  Tell the truth: you don’t, do you?  I didn’t think so.  The next guy has to do it.

I’m telling you, it’s all downhill from there for you guys.  I got two words for you: space travel.  Let’s face it, it’s your only chance.  You know it’s true!  Maybe if you set up enough colonies, one of them will figure it out and survive.

Okay, you’ve been patient listening to me, so I have a fun fact for you.  The sex of baby alligators is determined by the temperature in their nest after the female lays her eggs.  If the incubation temperature is 86 degrees or lower, females will be born; if it is 93 degrees or higher, males will be born. (I guess if it is between 86 and 93 degrees, it’s a toss up).  Isn’t that great!  You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Funny thing, though, it has been warming up in our habitats in the last 20 years or so (I know, not even a blink of the eye!)  Maybe you heard about this global warming thing.  That means more male alligators are being born.  Male alligators tend to be more aggressive, more exploratory, than female alligators.

Also, with the warmer temps, some of our habitats have been drying up.  That means we have to move out.  And there is only one way to go: north.  To South Carolina.  To Georgia.  To Alabama.  To Arkansas.  To Oklahoma.  To Tennessee.  Next stop: who knows?  I always did want to see the sewers of New York City.

So perhaps we will meet on the road one of these days.  It’s about time humans and alligators got to know each other better, isn’t it, after all these millions of years?  I have a heavy body and a slow metabolism, but I’m capable of short bursts of extreme speed and have an exceptionally powerful jaw that can easily crunch bones.  If you are within a 30-foot circle of me, fuhgeddaboudit!  Your arm or leg will be my lunch, done just the way I like it.  No microwave needed.

I do like chicken!

This story was originally published in the News & Observer newspaper of Raleigh on January 7, 2012. 


To see a clip of the Gator Boys, as seen on Animal Planet, catching a gator, click here.


To view a clip of an alligator mating dance, click here.