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  Much simpler than Match.com, no muss, no fuss, no outdated photos.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.