Salt Grass Flats - Celebrating Gulf Coast Birds
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The Sibley Guide to Birds contains marvelous illustrations originally drawn by the author using watercolors. This is a great identification guide, not only for adult birds, but juveniles, also. |
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"A wonderful bird is a pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican"*
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Huge
birds, five in a line, skimming silently just above the wave tops. An occasional,
strong wing flap, in unison, and they soar off into the distance. Pelicans
are a special sight to behold. |
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Pelicans
are descendants of an ancient group of cormorant like birds that lived during
the Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago. (That was the period that
was the beginning of the end for dinosaurs.)
They
are in the only group of birds whose webbed feet enclose not just the front
three toes (like ducks) but wrap all the way around and cover the back toe
as well. |
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They
are huge birds with great wing spans and long, slightly hooked at the end,
bills. In flight they curve their long necks back and rest their bills on their
breast or neck.
They are voracious fish eaters, eating "trash
fish" exclusively. Although their diets exclude game fish, being shot by fishermen
fearful of the competition is the largest single cause of death. Agricultural
use of pesticides has decimated the pelican population, especially the coastal,
strictly salt water, Brown Pelican. |
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Pelicans
are easily recognized by a pouch of bare skin suspended from their large bills.
The pouches fill with water (as much as 3 gallons in the White) when the bird
scoops up fish. They then drain the pouch through the corners of their mouths
and swallow the fish.
The birds are so large, if the breeze is fairly
still, they must run across the water to take flight. Cumbersome on land, they
are amazingly graceful when flying and they float comfortably high in the water. |
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Brown
Pelicans (Pelicanus occidentalis) can
be seen all over SaltGrassFlats all year long. They are found up and down the
Gulf Coast and on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. At one time they were so
common along the Louisiana coast they were designated the state bird. |
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DDT,
and later dieldrin, runoff has all but wiped out the Pelican State's pelicans.
The poisons in the runoff flooding the bays and coastal waters are ingested
and absorbed by the filter feeders and 'mud eaters' which are food for small
fish and crustaceans eaten in the bait fish diet of the pelicans.
Concentrating and building up as they move through
the food chain, pesticides cause severe egg shell thinning resulting in reproductive
failure. Most colonies have simply failed to reproduce right out of existence.
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Browns
are large dark brown birds with whitish heads and long, dull colored, slatey
gray bills. The adults sometimes have a yellow cap. They can be as much as
4 to 4 1/2 feet tall with 6 to 9 foot wings.
Their large throat pouches, which they use to
scoop up fish, can hold up to three times as much as their stomachs, just as
Austin described so well. A master fisher, the Browns will make spectacular,
sometimes almost vertical, dives into the water to scoop up fish near the surface. |
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White
Pelicans (Pelicanus erythrorhynchos)
.....inhabit
marshy, inland lakes and winter in coastal lagoons and bays. Whites can be
seen all along the Gulf Coast. |
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They
love the shrimpers when they tie up and cull their catch. A walk along the
pier when the fleet comes in is a riot. The Whites will sit in the water under
the scuppers with water from the deck above pouring on their heads. As far
as they are concerned it is raining fish chowder. |
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White
Pelicans are huge ( 4 1/2 to 6 ft.) white birds with striking black wingtips
and long orangey, salmon colored bills. They can have wingspans of up to 9
feet.
Whites often fish
cooperatively by forming long lines, sometimes a semi-circle. They all
move forward together with a great flap of wings and herd bait fish into shallow
water where they gather them in by the scoop full.
They also like to ride rising thermals to great
heights where they soar in circles, perhaps looking for schools of bait fish
near the surface. |
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* Wrote
Dixon Lanire Merrith in his poem "The Pelican"(1910): A wonderful
bird is the pelican His bill will hold more that his belican. He can take in
his beak Food enough for a week, But I'm danmed if i can see how the helican
Source: QBP Encyclopedia
of Word and Phrase Origins, By Robert Hendrickson, or |
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* "A
wonderful bird is a Pelican, Whose beak can hold more than his belly can. Be
it crabs, clams, or fish, It will hold all you wish. But damned if I see how
the hell he can!"
--Arbogast of
Diedenhofen, or |
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* A wonderful
bird is the pelican,
His mouth can hold more than his belly can,
He can hold in his beak,
Enough food for a week!
I'm damned if I know how the hell he can!
Dixon
Lanier Merritt, a Southern newspaper editor and President of the American
Press Humorists Association,
penned this famous limerick in 1910.
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