FEATURE • Baby Pelicans
BABY PELICANS of the Central Coast WORDS CATHARINE RETTER
world, can fly for up to 24 hours by identifying thermal currents that will help them soar hundreds of kilometres with barely a flap of their 2.4-metre wings. Without thermal currents, pelicans are not really capable of sustained flapping flight. After the flooding of Lake Eyre, in 1974–75, when the chicks of that season grew into young adults they were known to have flown as far as Indonesia, Palau in the western Pacific Ocean, Fiji and New Zealand, well beyond their normal range. Brisbane Water’s colony on the Central Coast is thought to have started in the 1980s, the result of that same pelican population explosion on Lake Eyre. The local colony is now considered to be quite large with about 350 nests. But you still can’t count on seeing pelican chicks before they’re adult size. Pelicans breed on islands and permanent sandbars away from predators such as dogs. The bills and pouches of pelicans that are © DOUG BECKERS
We’ve often heard it asked, “Why don’t you ever see baby pelicans?” And the answer invariably seems to be, “Because they fly great distances to remote breeding grounds”. But here on the Central Coast, that may not be strictly true. Australian pelicans (Pelecanus conspicillatus) are widespread around coastal and inland Australia with permanent colonies more common in coastal regions. The transient breeding colonies inland depend upon flooding rains, with the best known of these on the island waterways of Lake Eyre. When it floods in Lake Eyre, it can attract more than 100,000 visiting pelicans, and some distant urban pelican populations can be suddenly and strangely absent from their usual environments. Those 100,000 pelicans are estimated to breed more than 30,000 chicks in one season. We know that pelicans, despite their average body weight of 5.5 kg, and hefting around the largest bill of any bird in the
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