The United States plays host to
two kinds of native pelican: the brown and the American white. Both are
web-footed, giant-beaked, throat-pouched and fish-loving – but, otherwise,
distinct as can be. The brown pelican is a graceful pterodactyl-esque seabird
that hugs cresting waves and performs steep, extravagant plunge-dives after
fish:
The American white pelican, a
snowy-feathered giant which may be more than twice the brown's size, is as much
a bird of inland freshwater as the seashore. Ponderous on the wing, it
employs a laidback fishing method instead of aerial acrobatics, paddling and
dabbling with its bill and sometimes whole head submerged. The
birds often fish
communally, trawling bunched together in unison and also cooperating to
herd fish into shallows:
White and brown pelicans overlap
in range, especially this time of year, when the cousins may share wintering
bays and seashores on the US Gulf Coast, Mexico and Central America. And
recently, on the western coast of Florida, an unusually intense encounter
between the two played out in a harbour.
Amanda
Hipps, a graduate student at Florida Atlantic University who
studies the gopher tortoise, photographed the interspecies interaction, which
she watched from a boat in the fishing village of Cortez south of Tampa Bay.
She told me she noticed four white pelicans initially in the vicinity of the
brown, and began taking pictures since the proximity allowed for an
interesting size comparison. (Brown pelicans are plenty big birds, mind you,
but the American white pelican – sometimes weighing more than nine
kilograms [20 lbs.] and spreading black-rimmed wings that may be three metres
[ten feet] across – ranks among the very largest birds in North America.)
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