White Pelicans: Aerial Ballet

John Young

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and, view:
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   White Pelicans are overwintering along the Pacific Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. They are the second largest bird of North America with their 9' wingspans, longer than any of our tallest basketball players! Most people recognize them as the bird with the long, flat orange bill and flexible pouch attached to the lower mandible. At first glance from afar, you might mistake a flock of pelicans for gulls with their flashing white forms, but look again through a pair of binoculars. There is nothing quite like their slow, "ponderous," quiet, dramatic presence high above. They are a rewarding sight with their wings' black edging, their mighty downstrokes, and their graceful leisurely soaring. They are sky dancers flowing as one body in a "unified wheeling"(http://birds.audubon.org/). They make the elitest Swan Lake Corps de Ballet look like a troupe of stumblers. This is a bird both "improbable" or "semi-comical" in its dimensions who, nevertheless, achieves an overall effect of grace and power. We, a stray assortment of birders, saw some 70 of them rising on thermal air columns from the vantage point of Ulistac Natural Area a few miles inland from Don Edwards Baylands Trail National Wildlife Refuge (http://www.fws.gov/refuge/Don_Edwards_San_Francisco_Bay/map.html.) Each of us was silent and transfixed for a few breaths. I live on the Pacific Flyway, hooray! Take a walk anywhere on the SF Baylands Trail system in the South Bay to look at waterbirds of all shapes, colors, sizes, and squawks.