As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Wednesday 2 October 2019

A pelican in Nova Scotia? Unusual birds blown into Cape Breton by Dorian


Some rare birds have found their way to the Maritimes after Dorian blew them off course.
Alexandra Mae Jones, CTVNews.ca writer
Published Tuesday, September 17, 2019 11:08PM EDT
After a storm as big as Dorian, residents in Cape Breton probably expected to find a few strange things that had been blown in by the winds. But a pelican?
A large brown bird has been spotted strutting around Glace Bay wharf this past week, far from its usual tropical waters. Experts say the bird was probably as surprised to find itself in Atlantic Canada as the residents of Cape Breton were to see it -- it's thought that the bird was blown off course.
The eye-catching bird has become a sensation in the area.
 “There’s been people coming here from as far as East Bay to take photos,” resident Dylan Yates told CTV News Atlantic. “It’s just not something you see every day.”
Jeannie Fraser snapped more than one photo of the bird, saying it was “pretty exciting to see, in spite of the fact that it shouldn’t have been here.”
If the pelican wasn’t actually aiming to set up camp in a Nova Scotia harbor, where was it aiming to go?
David McCorquodale, a biology professor at Cape Breton University and an avid bird watcher, said that the pelican was blown from the coast of the southern U.S., confirming that the storm was at fault for the bird’s massive displacement.
And the pelican wasn’t the only bird whose flight plan went through a drastic change due to storm winds.

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