Recently while visiting on spring break, Key West pelicans tucked my heart in their pouches as they usually do. I was amazed by a starkly contrasted visual: a small nine seat plane landed at the local airport, a jet took off, and a pelican, slowly, steadily flapping huge wings, meandered by like a prehistoric pterodactyl in a time warp. Later, a “pod” of eleven pelicans perched in a row on a peaked roof watching the sun set.
I realized I knew squat about these atavistic avian things. Then I learned I didn’t even know what I thought I knew. A familiar limerick wasn’t written by Ogden Nash as I thought; Dixon Lanier Merritt, editor of The Tennessean, wrote:
A wonderful bird is the pelican.
His bill can hold more than his belican.
He can hold in his beak
Enough food for a week,
But I’m damned if I see how the helican.
More versions by more poets exist to befuddle us. I wanted defuddlement. I researched the bird.
There’s a reason pelicans look prehistoric; they appeared a hundred million years ago and “reached the peak of diversity” around 65 million years back. No kidding.
The oldest intact pelican fossil is from thirty million years ago and reveals that our modern version is nearly identical to his ancestor, but smaller. Today we have eight species on all continents but Antarctica. We’ve got our American species, the White American Pelican and the Brown Pelican (which has California cousins). The White Pelican, big bird, big wingspan up to ten feet, weighs up to thirty pounds and has a length up to seventy inches. The bird with white plumage accentuated by black edged wings migrates south from northern breeding areas to lounge on the Gulf Coast and southern Atlantic coast. The smaller Brown Pelican—with silver-brown feathers, white head and chestnut nape, black legs, blue-gray skin on the face, a red to green or black gullar pouch, and yellow eyes—weighs ten to twenty pounds. Our own little native (“little” in the relative sense) is rightfully the Pelican State’s official bird.
Pelican anatomy is practical. Bulky bodies, long necks, short legs, short, square tails, and long beaks look awkward but are accessorized with the stylish pelican throat bag; a stretchy pouch of naked skin hangs from the jaw and holds up to three gallons, two to three times more than its belly can. Such big birds’ flight would seem limited. The bird is clumsy taking flight, simultaneously running on water with pounding feet and flapping wings, but aerodynamics lighten his load: air pockets in the bones connected to respiratory airways that lie under skin of throat, breast, and wings to add buoyancy, and a “fibrous layer” in the breast keeps wings horizontally steady for graceful gliding with heads against shoulders, necks tucked in. He hops aboard thermal updrafts, soaring up to ten thousand plus feet—then flies low, skimming the water surface, wings compressing air to greater density, getting a “ground effect,” an upward draft beneath him, and conserves energy, a vital issue to pelicans who travel daily up to ninety-three miles in single file lines or sometimes in V formation to and from feeding grounds. Some of those anatomical features are also crucial to feeding.
The Brown Pelican is one of only two pelican species to “plunge-dive” from on high headfirst into water to stun fish. In former ignorance I laughed, thinking they were amusingly clumsy with the “splat!” on the water, not realizing it ensures fishes du jour can’t escape. The air sacs soften the impact as bird breast meets water and work as “floaties,” making the bird bounce to the surface like a fishing cork and keeping his body afloat mostly above water surface. Good swimmers with that floatability, pelicans also have four (not the standard three) toes webbed into effective paddles to use when floating and using the pouch as a “dip-net” to scoop fish—if diving is ill-advised due to shallow or murky water.
Pelicans often swim together, encircling and corralling schools of fish into shallow water where they’re easy pickins. Once fish are in the pouch, a pelican points his beak up, opens his mouth to drain water from the sides, leaving just the fish. This can make him lose his catch to a sea gull who snags it from his mouth. Sometimes he hooks a large fish with the hook on the end of his bill, tosses it upward then catches it—but is then again vulnerable to thievery.
Stolen fish or not, pelicans are sociable, spending time with brethren and other sea birds, at least until nesting time. Then things get testy (as in testosterone). Before breeding, their bare facial skin brightens in a blush. The Californian Brown Pelican’s throat turns bright red; the Peruvian Pelican’s pouch is blue. Our Brown Pelican’s mahogany nape turns dark red as feathers turn golden and he becomes territorial. Other pelicans’ courtship begins with a pod of rowdy males chasing a lone female with lots of bullying among the guys.
The courtly Brown Pelican selects a site in a breeding colony, often on an island, and defends it and a nearby perch from interlopers. Casting his eye about, he finds his lady love, makes provocative head bobs, and begins courtship. Male and female flirt via body language, coyly turning and bowing, and emit a croaking of love bark. Once betrothed, he takes her to the chosen site, shows off, dances around her and brings nesting materials to shape into a nest as their bond also takes shape.
Within the colony, others do the same. Eggs are laid, one to four per couple, and hatch on consecutive days. The largest first-born snatches food from younger siblings, who may starve if food is scarce. Mating colors and flirting fade as breeding colony becomes nursery. Male and female incubate the eggs between webbed toes. Both feed chicks, first with upchucked food on the nest floor and then by opening their beaks, allowing offspring to forage in their gullets like human offspring scrounging in the fridge. Chicks play with sticks and watch as parents pantomime how to fly, leaving the nest in about five weeks. They gather in large groups like kids in parking lots, but parents know which ones are theirs. Life goes on.
Life, however, is often thwarted by humans and nature. Remember oil-coated Brown Pelicans struggling after the BP oil spill? This occurred after pelicans finally got off the endangered list as numbers recovered from disastrous use of DDT, which poisoned their food and environment, making eggshells too fragile to protect embryos and shrinking their numbers. Then there’s hunting and entanglement in fishing line.
Man plays, they die, and Nature whips up hurricanes, which interfere with breeding. Once revered, the pelican was believed to feed its young blood from its breast; it became a medieval symbol of Christ’s sacrifice and the Eucharist and appeared on the title page of the first edition of the King James Bible. Our version of reverence is to change the New Orleans NBA team from Hornets to Pelicans and go wild over pelican logos. As for me, I’d rather a walk on a beach while pelicans flap and glide above, wings rising and falling like the tides.
Lucile wants to forget boring biographical stuff and tell you about something a pelican does with its pouch that she finds hard to explain. Besides flapping it like a fan to cool off, he lowers his head to the shoulders with bill open, pulls his head back, and stretches the pouch over neck and throat, making the neck look like a lump protruding from the pouch. “Look, Ma, no neck!”
