The Pelican’s Battle for Survival
By Patricia Gregory. Published in Charleston Magazine
Scientists and wildlife watchers are waiting to see how the eastern brown pelicans of the Cape Romain Wildlife Refuge near McClellanville will fare during the 1990 breeding season. At this writing, there is no way of knowing how many adult birds nesting in this area—hard-hit by Hurricane Hugo during the end of their breeding season—survived.
But if the shore bird’s history of battling serious obstacles to survival is any indication, the brown pelican will make a comeback. Within the past 20 years, the bird has found itself on, and fought itself off, the Endangered Species list. It has fought foul weather, pernicious pests, and insensitive bird watchers. Ironically, its most serious assailant—man—also has been its savior.
George Garris, manager of Cape Romain, is witness to the brown pelican’s persistence. When he first came to the refuge in 1974, the crop-spraying chemical DDT threatened the bird’s existence. The insecticide drained off the farmlands into the ocean and worked its way through the food chain. It reached its most concentrated levels in fish—the staple diet of the brown pelican. DDT devastated its reproduction.
“The chemical kept the egg shells from forming properly,” Garris said. “The birds would actually lay eggs with shells too thin to hatch. They’d just break. Sometimes they would just lay a spot on there.” Sometimes the shells were so fragile that the parents would crush them.
Because brown pelicans lay only three eggs a year, on a staggered basis, extinction was a strong possibility.
Colonies with thousands of offspring became almost barren. When DDT was banned in the United States the shell strength slowly improved. Also aided by federal government protection, by the early 1980s, the brown pelican was removed from the Endangered Species list.
But in 1987 a new threat appeared—fowl ticks. Though the pelicans on Marsh Island nest right alongside other species, especially close to the laughing gull, the ticks only attacked the pelicans. All pelican nesting sites were affected. That year, the Bird Key Stono colony south of Charleston—the second major nesting area in South Carolina—lost about 3,000 nests.
Garris said the ticks attacked both the adults and the young. In most cases, young birds died from exposure when ticks drove the adults to abandon their nests. In 1988, wildlife officials began spraying all brown pelican nests with Rabon 50WP, a product proven effective with poultry. The chemical has proven effective for both the eggs and the young, as well as for ocean life in general. It is administered in liquid form directly into each nest through a sprayer that looks like a fire extinguisher.
Chemicals are not the only dangers pelicans have faced. Well-meaning campers and tourists hoping to “get closer to nature” unwittingly endangered the March Island nests by their very presence.
“When I first came to the Wildlife Refuge,” Garris said, “people used to come out here to camp and fish. That would keep the birds off the nest at night and the young would freeze to death. I came out one morning and found 65 dead young. But a little extra patrolling put an end to that.” He adds that driving by in a boat to take a look will not cause problems as long as the adults are not provoked to leave the nest. And while the adult pelicans usually will not aggressively run off trespassers, Garris warns that he will.
The young are especially vulnerable during the first couple of days. If they are not sheltered by their parents’ protective wings, their bare skin can blister in the summer sun or the young can freeze if the weather should turn too cool. Marsh Island is now strictly off-limits during the nesting season, which lasts anywhere from February through September. This year pelicans started looking for nesting sites in March. Garris expects to see the young flying in August—the number of young will indicate how severely Hugo hurt the pelican population.
On top of competing with people, pests and pesticides, tides and ill weather are a continual and unpredictable threat. Birds arriving at the nesting area late in the season often are left with only sites at the water’s edge. The first high tide is apt to wash their nest away and the young with it. Even the well-placed nests are not immune. Garris recalls one seven-foot tide coupled with cooler temperatures that cost about one-fourth of the Marsh Island colony. In 1985, an eight-and-a-half-foot tide swept the island and destroyed every nest. But the next year the pelicans returned to start anew.
In 1979, Hurricane David nearly washed away the historic nesting grounds on Deveaux Bank at the mouth of the Edisto. Only recently are those grounds rebuilding.
Scientists believe a rebuilding pattern is holding true in the wake of the most recent hurricane. Hugo presented a double threat. Adult birds with their large wing spans were blown off course or killed outright by Hugo’s 150 mph winds. Young birds, meanwhile, were threatened by high waters. Biologist Phil Wilkinson, who headed a three-year shore bird count, reported several hundred fledglings drowned by high tides and the 20-foot surge of seawater driven inland.
Just as individual breeding pairs stagger their egg-laying, so does the species as a whole. New groups of birds begin nesting about once every month through the season. Pelicans still on the nesting grounds in late September last year were completely vulnerable.
There is no clear idea how many adults survived. In addition, Hugo left much of Marsh Island too eroded for nesting and it leveled three out of five islands in the area known as White Banks. Wilkinson hopes the nesting grounds may be at least partially repaired by dumping silt from dredging operations.
With the brown pelican’s innate persistence and refuge workers’ help, nature watchers and scientists can bet that the dark-brown-backed birds will make a comeback.
Do You Know the Brown Bird’s Bio?
The name pelican is actually a misnomer. It originally was taken from the Greek term “pelekys” meaning ax and referred to any type of woodpecker. According to the naturalist James Audubon’s writings, the term was used by Aristotle, one of the earliest scientists. Later, the word was used in St. Jerome’s translation of the Bible. Through the centuries, it lost its original meaning. Sometime after 1400 A.D., English-speaking people dubbed the bird a pelican, though it clearly is not suited for pecking wood. Fish, rather than bugs, are its choice food, usually mullet and menhaden in South Carolina.
A graceful and accurate fisher, the webbed-footed bird spreads its wings about 78 inches and flies low over the ocean waves to scout food. It dives sharply and suddenly into the salty depths, sometimes from as high as 50 feet. According to the Audubon Nature Encyclopedia, the dive is made with such force that “the impact stuns fish as much as six feet below the surface. A series of air sacs in the skin of the pelican’s breast probably serve to protect it from the shock of hitting the water.”
Contrary to popular belief, its pouch is not used as a carrying case but serves instead to separate fish from the water. To transport its food, the brown pelican transfers the fish to its gullet. This is a tricky maneuver requiring the bird to open its bill and expel seawater. Gulls, flying nearby, take advantage of this systematic switch, snatching the fish from the hapless pelican.
If there is a bountiful supply of fish, then the pelican will feed all three of its young. If the supply is low then only the oldest receives nourishment. This hierarchy is established by the pelican’s staggered egg-laying.
The young emerge from the egg without feathers, looking much like little lizards. For the first 24 to 36 hours, their bare skin appears quite red, turning blue then grey-blue with the next few days. After 10 days, they are covered with white down.
Within three weeks, the young have reached the adolescent stage. Brown feathers first appear against the white down like a tuxedo. At two and a half months, they are fully feathered and ready for flight. In their third year, they will return with bright yellow mating plumage on their heads and begin their own nesting.