Grateful Mondays: Mother's Day & Solitude

Did all you moms out there have a nice Mother's Day?

I had a quiet, but lovely and delicious, day. My daughter (who I see more of now than probably all her teenage years between 16 - 18 combined, LOL) brought me a beautiful flower bouquet and some designer strawberries dipped in dark and white chocolate... yummmm. My guy is off on a fishing boat so I had the rest of the day to myself.

I went for a long walk on the beach and little did I know what a treat I was in for!

So I'm rounding the point and I see an odd "thing" floating in the water near some seagulls that I can't quite identify. When you live on the saltwater, you see lots of odd things the tides bring in and out every day, but this "thing" is different in a way I can't put my finger on. It's quite a bit larger than the seagulls which gives me some perspective about its size, and I think I see it move, but I'm not sure if my eyes are playing tricks on me. What kind of flotsom is it, I wonder. Is it part of a tree trunk with a limb still attached?

So I pull my camera out of my day pack to zoom in and lo and behold... it's a pelican!

What on earth?! A pelican? In Washington?!

I have lived on or near the water here for over 20 years. Never in my life have I seen a pelican in these inland water parts much less in Washington, period. When I think of pelicans, I think of places like Florida. I know they also have them in California and it's occurred to me that they might be on the Washington coast as well (although I've never personally seen any). But here on the Puget Sound? Crazy!

Anyway, I thought it was very exciting. I took some shots and as I walked a little further I discovered four more pelicans. There weren't any more than that. Where did they come from? It was a really windy, blustery night on Saturday and I wondered if maybe they'd been blown off course from some migration or something.

I spent over an hour watching and following them. They would float around for awhile, lazily poking their heads in and out of the water and coming back up with something in their floppy gullets. Then they seemed to go into some kind of feeding frenzy, flying up out of the water and floating on the wind currents while sizing up their prospects, and then shooting like spears straight down into the water. It was so cool.

I've tried to figure out what kind of pelicans they are. I'm thinking they might be Brown Pelicans, but so far they don't look exactly like any of the pictures I've seen. Veddy interestink...

I'm probably more excited about this than anyone reading this, LOL, but here are some shots and a couple videos for your viewing pleasure. If you know what kind of pelicans these are and what they were doing here, I would love to hear from you. :)

Four of them (the fifth one is out of view), apparently settling down for the day, preening and getting ready for a nap...

(... and a crane, just for good measure)

Comments

[Cheryl A. Harless]

Hey Danielle, Lucky you! You saw a Brown Pelican - an Endangered Species on the West Coast. They are the only non-white species of Pelican. They range from British Columbia down to Chile. You can read more here: http://www.enature.com/fieldguides/detail.asp?recnum=BD0175

[Danielle]

Thanks, Cheryl. I was thinking they couldn't be anything but brown pelicans, but the pix our local Audubon society had weren't really looking exactly like them. What's also unusual is the map they show indicating their habitats in Washington only include the coast, not the inland waters, so this is proving to be a really unusual sighting. I would so love them to stick around awhile! They will be in steep competition for my affection with our kingfisher population (my favorite bird).

***

UPDATE: I received an email from a bird expert and thought I would post it here...

Dear Danielle,

These are Brown Pelicans, all right. Your photos show a mix of adult and immature birds. Young Brown Pelicans don’t get their adult plumage until they are three years old. American White Pelicans are a bird of Eastern Washington.

The pelican situation in Washington is interesting. Brown Pelicans don’t breed here. The northernmost colonies are in Southern California. As you probably know, Brown Pelicans were badly affected by DDT, and North American populations were down to scarily small numbers. We hardly ever saw them on the Washington coast. But, in recent years since the banning of DDT, this species has made a remarkable comeback. Probably as a result, more and more pelicans are seen up here.

Most of the birds are post-breeding wanderers in the summer to the productive waters of the North Pacific, but we get both adults (possibly ones whose breeding attempts have failed) and young birds at other times of year. Now, in coastal areas like Westport, it’s possible to see Brown Pelicans in just about any month of the year, sometimes in large numbers. As numbers have increased on the outer coast, it also seems like more and more are making their way down into the inland waters of Puget Sound, where they used to be almost unheard of.

It’s certainly possible that the storm blew your birds farther down the Sound. Perhaps before DDT, this was a more common occurrence. It’s nice to have them back.

RL